Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500-1700

MEMORIES OF WAR IN
EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
ARMOR AND MILITANT NOSTALGIA IN
MARLOWE, SIDNEY, AND SHAKESPEARE

SUSAN HARLAN
Early Modern Cultural Studies Series

Series Editors

Ivo Kamps
Department of English
University of Mississippi
Mississippi, USA

Jean Howard
Department of English
Columbia University
New York, USA
Aims of the Series
The early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transcultur-
ation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that
set into motion a process of globalization that continues today. The pur-
pose of this series is to bring together a cultural studies approach - which
freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political
boundaries - with early modern texts and artefacts that bear the traces of
transculturalization and globalization in order to deepen our understand-
ing of sites of exchange between and within early modern culture(s). This
process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and this new
series is dedicated to both. Possible topics of interest include, but are not
limited to: texts dealing with mercantilism, travel, exploration, immigra-
tion, foreigners, enabling technologies (such as shipbuilding and naviga-
tional instrumentation), mathematics, science, rhetoric, art, architecture,
intellectual history, religion, race, sexuality, and gender.

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 Susan Harlan

Memories of War
in Early Modern
England
Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe,
Sidney, and Shakespeare
Susan Harlan
Wake Forest University
Winston Salem, USA

Early Modern Cultural Studies Series

ISBN 978-1-137-58849-4 ISBN 978-1-137-58012-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2

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For my family and friends
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book was generously supported by fellowships from
the Folger Library, the New  York Public Library, and the Huntington
Library, and I would like to thank the wonderful librarians and staff at these
institutions. I am particularly indebted to the New York Public Library. I
spent many years reading and writing in the Rose Reading Room, which
remains one of my favorite places on earth. I would also like to thank Wake
Forest University for several generous grants that allowed me to travel to
the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University, the British
Library, the Wallace Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the
Bibliotheque Nationale.
This book began as my dissertation, so it has benefitted from many
generous mentors and readers over the years. More than anyone, John
Archer’s brilliant and thoughtful feedback has shaped my work, and I am
grateful to him for his tireless dedication. He is the soul of intellectual
generosity. I am also grateful to my anonymous reader, whose feedback
was invaluable, and to those who have steered this project at Palgrave
Macmillan, including Brigitte Shull, Ryan Jenkins, Paloma Yannakakis,
and series editors Jean Howard and Ivo Kamps.
I have benefitted from the guidance of Mary Carruthers, Patrick Deer,
Juliet Fleming, Ernest Gilman, John Guillory, Richard Horwich, Natasha
Korda, the late Paul Magnuson, Bella Mirabella, Karen Newman, Mary
Poovey, and Paul Strohm. And much of what follows was first presented
at seminars and conferences, so I am grateful to the participants for their
questions and thoughts. At these gatherings, I have also been privileged
to meet many colleagues who have helped me to develop my ideas,

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

including J.K.  Barret, Patricia Cahill, Peter Stallybrass, Evelyn Tribble,

and Lina Perkins Wilder. From my year at King’s College London, where
my interest in material culture began, I had the great fortune of working
with Gabriel Egan, Madeline Knights, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro,
Abigail Rokison-Woodall, and Ann Thompson. I am also lucky to have had
excellent mentors from further back: David Scott Kastan, James Shapiro,
Lauren LaMay, and Patricia Fels.
Wake Forest University has provided me with wonderful colleagues in
the English department; particular thanks are owed to Olga Valbuena,
Jessica Richard, Dean Franco, Gillian Overing, Melissa Jenkins, Sarah
Hogan, Scott Klein, Omaar Hena, Claudia Kairoff, Jeff Holdridge,
Laura Aull, Gale Sigal, Herman Rapaport, and Philip Kuberski. Beyond
my department, I am thankful for Morna O’Neill, Jay Curley, Chanchal
Dadlani, Penny Sinanoglou, Stephanie Kosack, Monique O’Connell, Jake
Ruddiman, Kate Callaghan, John Oksanish, and Laura Veneskey. My
colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Michelle
Dowd and Jennifer Feather, have also pushed me as a thinker, as have
Niamh O’Leary and Cassie Thomas.
I owe some of the most intellectually stimulating years of my life to
my graduate school compatriots Jonathan Farina, Sara Landreth, Joanna
Scutts, James Brooke-Smith, Kelly Stage, Elizabeth Bearden, Dave
Landreth, Sarah Torretta Klock, Sharon Fulton, Melissa Hillier, Maeve
Adams, Jessie Morgan Owens, James Owens, Alan Page, Sam Anderson,
and Lauren Walsh. I appreciate our many conversations. And I am for-
tunate to have other friends who offered emotional and intellectual sup-
port throughout the process, including Jennifer Raab, Patrick Moran,
Ania Wajnberg, Michael Redlender, Kristina Kaufman, Erika Moravec
Jaeggli, Nelson Jaeggli, Daniel Quiles, Anne Moyer, Amanda Thompson,
Sara Wilson Frajnd, Amos Frajnd, Grace Pickering, Mark Dean, Michael
Klotz, Jason Gladstone, Maria Windell, and Rachel Deagman. My parents,
Brad and Sharon, and my siblings, Katharine, Helen, and Derek, have also
offered a tremendous amount of love and support in this process.
Thanks to Helen Ostovich at Early Theatre for allowing me to reprint
part of one of my essays on Pericles and to the British Library, the Art
Institute of Chicago, the Huntington Library, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum for granting me rights to their
images.
Lastly, I thank my dog Millie, who is the very best writing companion.
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1 “Objects Fit for Tamburlaine”: Self-Arming

in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great,
Robert Vaughan’s Portraits, and
The Almain Armourer’s Album 29

Interlude–Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects,

and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowe’s Dido,
Queen of Carthage 85

2 Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning

and Military Violence in the Elegies,
Lant’s Roll, and Greville’s Life of the
Renowned Sir Philip Sidney 115

Interlude-Scatter’d Men: Mutilated Male Bodies

and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia
in Shakespeare’s Henry V 195

ix
x CONTENTS

3 The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem

of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Coriolanus 215

Coda: “Let’s Do’t After the High Roman Fashion”:

Funeral and Triumph 269

Bibliography 275

Index 301
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 0.1 Jost Amman, “The Armourer” from Stande und

Handwerker, c.1590 14
Fig. 1.1 Robert Vaughan, “Tamburlaine,” Pourtraitures of Nine Modern
Worthies of the World, 1622 52
Fig. 1.2 Jacob Halder, The Almain Armourer’s Album: Henry Herbert,
the 2nd Earl of Pembroke, c.1557–87 56
Fig. 1.3 Jacob Halder, The Almain Armourer’s Album: Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, c.1557–87 57
Fig. 2.1 Plate from Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris, or Lant’s
Roll, drawn by Thomas Lant and engraved by Theodore
de Brij, 1588 152
Fig. 2.2 Plate from Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris, or Lant’s
Roll, drawn by Thomas Lant and engraved by Theodore
de Brij, 1588 154
Fig. 3.1 Andrea Andreani after Andrea Mantegna, plate from
The Triumph of Caesar, 1599 222
Fig. 3.2 Trophy formerly credited to Enea Vico, sixteenth century 225
Fig. 3.3 A Roman trophy, unknown engraver, pub. Anthony Lafrery,
third quarter of the sixteenth century 227

xi
 Introduction

This book is about the relationship between the armored male body and
understandings of the past in early modern England. By “the past,” I
mean to designate a temporal and cognitive space spanning back to ancient
Rome and even to the Greek authorities such as Homer, whose epics in
part constructed militant models for the English and provided an origin
for myth for the nation.1 Violence was central to England’s understand-
ing of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and metaphors of war governed
how this past was understood through text and image. In sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England, war was part of what Michel de Certeau has
called “the practice of everyday life,” and the objects that were required to
engage in combat circulated in surprising spaces and signified in surpris-
ing ways.2 The particular object that concerns me is armor: the sign of the
classical heroic warrior, the chivalric knight, and the fashionable courtier.3
Central to my analysis is an examination of what I term “militant nostal-
gia,” a cultural fascination with materials and technologies of warfare that
were passing away by the sixteenth century. Although generally speaking,
armor could not protect a combatant from a musket shot, elite figures
still wore it as a mark of their social status and as a sign of declining, but
nonetheless operative, chivalric values of the knight. The armored body
operated as no less than a fetish object, a site upon which questions of mas-
culinity, materiality, and memory intersect.4 I examine how the “objects
of war”—as a set of both material objects and the ideological goals of

© The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_1
2 S. HARLAN

war—provide a way of thinking about the promise, and limitations, of trying

to recover the past. This nostalgia operates as a mode of narrative, produc-
ing a set of creative fictions by which early modern England narrated its
national past and present.5
As armor became increasingly useless on the battlefield, it took on
a new capacity to signify symbolically outside of the militaristic. This is
one instance of a broader cultural phenomenon: the liberation of mili-
tary iconography from the context of combat, which allowed it to oper-
ate symbolically in the realm of the civic across a range of materials. This
book triangulates Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and William
Shakespeare; it also triangulates three material objects: armor, trophies,
and spoils. The early modern armored body stands for a series of oppo-
sites and contradictions, including triumph and defeat. I posit that the
notion of “spoiling,” or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of
the vanquished and the rearrangement of these fragmentary materials into
new aesthetic forms, provides a means of understanding the early modern
English subject’s relationship to his literary and cultural past.6 Beat Brenk
notes that classical understandings of spoils of war were related to archi-
tectural spoils: columns, capitals, and other parts of old buildings were
reused for new structures as early as the era of Constantine:

The concept of ‘spolia’ is an entirely modern one, based on a word from

the realm of art historical terminology in architecture. It is derived from the
Latin ‘spolium,’ which means ‘removed hide of an animal’ and, in a more
general sense, ‘a soldier’s booty’ or ‘spoils of war.’ The modern concept
of ‘spolia’ refers to the reused parts of architectural constructions that are
taken from a demolished building—a building, therefore, to remain with
the hunter’s terminology, stripped of its hide.7

Brenk further maintains that this practice was a means of claiming the
building’s capacity to signify symbolically, and thus it was necessarily—and
perhaps primarily—ideological, as well as aesthetic or practical. We might
say that as spoils embody a dialogue between the old and the new, they
are not only objects, but also ideas. Alexander Nagel and Christopher
S. Wood remind us of the pervasiveness of architectural spoils in ancient
Roman city space:

Rome’s obsession with spolia was exceptional. Still, spoliation was more com-
mon in the rest of the continent, indeed in the entire Mediterranean basin,
than is often realized. Many medieval structures incorporated building mate-
rial from their own prior incarnations or from nearby abandoned structures.8
 INTRODUCTION 3

They echo Brenk’s point regarding the resonance between military and
extra-military spoiling, noting that spoiling is not just a practice, but a
metaphor:

Spoilation, the carting off and display of the artifacts of the vanquished as a
form of trophy, is a military metaphor. The metaphor has survived because
the elements of violence and of the reassignment of meaning as the prereq-
uisite of cultural dominance are so often present in the history of European
architecture, well beyond a strictly military context. Military looting is an
apposite metaphor also because it implies an ambiguous attitude of mixed
contempt and admiration on the part of the victors. The vanquished are in
disarray; the fine products of their workmanship, displaced and displayed,
take the measure of triumph. The shields and arms of the vanquished, ren-
dered useless though defeat, mark the neutralization of the enemy.9

I will argue that this military metaphor governed myriad forms of liter-
ary and theatrical production in early modern England. As I will demon-
strate, writers of the period claimed and reconstituted the fragmentary
spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined struggle between
masculine militarized bodies.10 This notion of spoiling resurfaces through-
out early modern English texts as a metaphor for artistic production,
cultural appropriation, and humanist transmission.11 All three of these
militant objects are fundamentally nostalgic and demonstrate a tendency
to look to past militant models, customs, practices, and technologies at
a cultural moment of significant technological advancements in combat.
Susan Stewart reminds us that,

Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing

that of necessity is unauthentic because it does not take part in lived experi-
ence. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like
any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed
except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens
to reproduce itself as a felt lack.12

The early modern English subject’s violent past is one of texts and
images. Sidney in his first work of literary criticism in English, Sidney’s
own Apology for Poetry, writes of the battlefield as a space where militant
values are transmitted by way of older texts: he claims that “poetry is
the companion of camps” and reminds his reader that Alexander left his
tutor Aristotle behind, but took “dead Homer” into battle with him.13
In  Shakespeare’s 1599 Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen rattles on
4 S. HARLAN

about the contemporary soldier’s knowledge in “the disciplines of the

pristine wars of the Romans,” (3.2.151) registering his concern about the
problems that attend the transmission of military models. Both Sidney and
Fluellen are talking about inherited texts and about reading, either read-
ing on the battlefield or recalling a past scene of reading while engaged
in a siege. These are just two of many examples that suggest that com-
bat was understood to be a central space in which cultural artifacts were
consumed and reworked in the English Renaissance. But it is also a site
where loss is registered in the acknowledgment of disjunctions between
tradition and the contemporary moment. Humanist transmission relied
on metaphors and understandings of military violence; it was bound up in
the idea that the past was both inaccessible and accessible, lost and found,
near and far. Inherited texts were founts of references, lessons, quotations,
and allusions that were both integral to the whole and also available as raw
materials for new cultural productions.14 Humanism was thus defined by
the active claiming and manipulation of materials from earlier texts, or the
spoiling of these materials in a manner that was figuratively militaristic.
Spoiling is also an exercise in cultural and personal memory, and in early
modern England, it relied on understandings of memory that were opera-
tive both within the theater—the Globe Theater was certainly influenced
by the idea of the “memory theater”—and beyond its walls. As Frances
Yates noted in her seminal work The Art of Memory, memory from ancient
Greece to the Renaissance was inextricable from the violent and the cor-
poreal: the poet Simonides of Ceos was able to identify the crushed and
mangled bodies at Scopas’ banquet because he could remember where the
guests had been seated, before he had departed and the roof had come
crashing down. Yates reminds us that, “The Simonides story, with its grue-
some evocation of the faces of people sitting in their places at the banquet
just before their awful end, may suggest that the human images were an
integral part of the art of memory which Greece transmitted to Rome.”15
In recomposing the scene, Simonides had to reckon with human bod-
ies that had been broken apart. As Mary Carruthers has noted, the basic
principle of memoria in the Middle Ages was an “art of composition”—one
gathered up and collected matter, as one did in reading, as well: “The very
concept of reading in Latin is based on the notion of ‘gathering,’ Latin
legere, ‘to read’ having its root meaning ‘to collect up, to gather by picking,
plucking, and the like.’”16 Further, “memories were thought to be carried
in intense images”—the visual was central to remembering.17 In the case of
spoils of war, parts were placed in relationship to wholes, thus complicating
the definitions of both.
 INTRODUCTION 5

Trophies comprise parts, creating new wholes that invoked past military
conflicts and the fragmented and mutilated bodies for which they stand.
In ancient Rome, the trophy was a unique spoil of war because it was a
reconstituted form. Having claimed the arms and armor of the defeated,
the victor recomposed these divided bodies into hauntingly anthropomor-
phic, anamorphic, and altered forms. The destroyed armorial bodies of
the vanquished thus provided the raw materials for new aesthetic objects.
Trophies were erected on the field of battle and in public places; they
were also hung on trees or pillars. Often, they were dedicated to the gods.
They celebrated man’s divine-like military prowess and simultaneously
reminded him of his inferiority to the divine. These objects were complex
symbols of both victory and loss, for they commemorated the defeat and
destruction of one’s enemy as well as the loss of one’s own men. In its
many forms, the trophy was an ideologically charged object that embod-
ied an encounter between the old and the new. In Shakespeare and the
Remains of Richard III, Philip Schwyzer asks, “What distinguishes the
relic from the trophy or the souvenir?” and proposes that,

A relic can be thought of as an object imprinted so strongly by an event that

it carries the potent essence of that moment forward in time—an object for
which the crucifixion of Christ or the stabbing of Henry VI is not only a part
of its history but of its material essence for all time to come.18

In this sense, relics certainly resonate with trophies as imprinted objects

that travel through time. Schwyzer argues that trophies and relics are

… both examples of objects whose strong association with a particular past

sets them apart from daily life. They are screened from the present, as it were,
under glass, and generally owe their survival (and in some cases destruction)
to that separation. Yet most objects from the past survive not because they are
preserved as such, but because they continue to be useful in the present day.19

I would add that the trophy differs from the relic insofar as the struc-
ture, human or architectural, from which it was taken may remain—may
not, in fact, be entirely destroyed or used up. It is simply elsewhere, pos-
sibly a ruin one can see. This is not necessarily the case with the body of
the saint, which might be gone: buried, burned, or otherwise. The trophy
was also a less extraordinary object than the relic in early modern Europe;
it belonged to the iconography of daily life. And this uncanny ability to
shift between the registers of past and present—and the quotidian and the
extraordinary—imbues it with the power to thrill and disturb.
6 S. HARLAN

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “to trophy” as both
“To transform into a trophy,” as well as “To bestow a trophy upon, to
celebrate with a trophy, adorn with a trophy.” Ben Jonson draws on the
definition of transformation in Cynthia’s Revels: “And so, swolne Niobe…
was trophaed into stone,” and Thomas Heywood writes in The Second
Part of the Fair Maid of the West, “If it prove as I have fashioned it, I shall
be trophide ever,” which underscores the trophy’s potential to remain
unchanged over time. As a spoil of war, the object is both original and
copy: its composite parts are linked to their former context and simulta-
neously removed from it. The trophy (G. tropaium; L. tropaeum) is ety-
mologically linked to the term “trope,” so the material trophy does with
objects what the trope does with language: something unexpected and jar-
ring, a “turn.” Like poetry and drama, war is an allusive human endeavor,
and it was understood as such in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Armor also asks us to think about the body. As Leonard Barkan reminds
us, the Renaissance human body is a “system” that bears a relationship to
other systems:

Once man is viewed in the concrete terms of his fleshy house, he is inevita-
bly subdivided into a number of parts, for, though the system of his body
is closed and finite, it is clearly composed of a large number of separate ele-
ments. This concrete multiplicity becomes the vehicle for either concrete
or abstract multiplicity in the world around him. Thus the human body
as a metaphoric vehicle has considerable range, whether in philosophy or
literature, since it is capable of subdividing its referent into a great number
of parts, while at the same time controlling the total range by means of the
body’s essential unity.20

The metaphoric capacity of the human body is informed by its para-

doxical status as both a whole and a set of parts. Spoiling draws attention
to the fragility of the human body and to its capacity to be damaged. Such
damage is registered by early modern authors as synecdochal. In The Body
in Parts, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio maintain that, “Insofar as parts
were imagined as dominant vehicles for the articulation of culture, the
early modern period could be conceptualized as an age of synecdoche.”21
There are countless examples of dismembered human bodies in English
Renaissance texts, but I will focus on those instances that represent the
dismemberment of the body obliquely through objects of war. Armor
creates a prosthetic body, a second body intended to protect the first.
But as Carolyn Springer notes in Armour and Masculinity in the Italian
 INTRODUCTION 7

Renaissance, “All armour is simultaneously an affirmation of power and

an admission of vulnerability.”22 To arm oneself is to acknowledge the
threat of violence, as well as the impossibility of generating an impenetra-
ble body. Klaus Theweleit also draws our attention to the contradictions
that define the armored body:

In war, the man appears not only naked, but stripped of skin; he seems to
lose his body armor, so that everything enters directly into the interior of his
body, or flows directly from it. He is out of control and seems permitted to
be so. But at the same time, he is all armor, speeding bullet, steel enclosure.
He wears a coat of steel that seems to take the place of his missing skin…he
is controlled in the extreme.23

The armored man is naked and covered, vulnerable and protected, out
of control and controlled, static and moving, impenetrable and penetrated,
incontinent and contained. As a study in contradictions, he represents the
tensions of war itself. He is a specter, a fiction—he only “appears” and
“seems,” a term Theweleit repeats three times in this short passage. The
skin of this man, which doubles his “steel” body armor, fails to contain
him as the armor fails to contain him: anything may “flow” in or out of
this body. This is a vision of the masculine body in crisis.
But as the customary dress of the elite combatant, armor also partici-
pates in military structures intended to provide social stability. In Act 1 of
Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595), Richard’s identification of Bolingbroke
as “plated in habiliments of war” suggests that such habiliments constitute
a recognizable sartorial system. Bolingbroke has armed himself, a ritual
practice of the male combatant stretching back to Achilles.24 Richard asks:

Marshal, ask yonder knight in arms,

Both who he is, and why he cometh hither
Thus plated in habiliments of war;
And formally, according to our law,
Depose him in the justice of his cause. (1.3.26–30)

The term “habiliments” refers to all attire or dress that is appropri-

ate to an office or an occasion. It also designates the personal appliances,
munitions, and implements of war that render one fit and able for violent
conflict—as well as one’s mental equipment, qualifications, or abilities—and
is related etymologically to “habits,” which designates both one’s dress
and one’s customary, or habitual, practice.25 Clothing and practice are
8 S. HARLAN

linked in early modern English military culture. Certainly, dress dictates

habit. Habit also dictates dress, and “habiliments” is a tantalizingly vague
term. Richard does not specify Bolingbroke’s particular clothing. In the
place of any details, he substitutes a mode of dress that is associated with
the undertaking of “war.” Bolingbroke’s clothing thus announces his
intent to engage in military violence. Richard’s term “yonder” seems to
indicate that Bolingbroke is imagined as far from himself, but in spite of—
or perhaps because of—this distance, Richard apprehends his dress before
other more subjective qualities. Bolingbroke’s status as “plated” indicates
that he is fortified and impenetrable, a militant masculine body poised
to enter into combat and its attendant values. But this moment is also
about the past and about communal memory: both the theatrical audi-
ence’s memory, or historical knowledge, of Richard’s ultimate defeat by
Bolingbroke, and Richard’s own memory of what militancy and the threat
of war look like.26 As such, it is a moment of recognition for Richard: in
recognizing Bolingbroke as “plated in habiliments of war,” he reminds the
audience of their own knowledge of the plays’ inevitable outcome, which
is “history” itself: the past as these militant plays understand it.
It is not my goal to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of
armor in Europe from the medieval to the early modern period, for others
have meticulously documented this history.27 These scholars have mapped
out developments in the craft of the armorer and considered the role that
armor played in the development of military strategy. Some of these schol-
ars have examined military history and the evolution of English military
values and practices from codes of chivalry to the eventual establishment
of a standing army.28 Others have taken the literary and dramatic represen-
tations of war, violence, and combat as their focus, such as Patricia Cahill,
Jennifer Feather, Paul Jorgensen, Jennifer Low, Ros King, Alan Shepard,
Nick de Somogyi, and Nina Taunton. Military historians have noted that
the English lagged behind their Continental counterparts in the design of
armor, but they made advancements in the sixteenth century, even as the
use of gunpowder increasingly rendered such advancements almost exclu-
sively aesthetic. But if anything, the diminishment of armor’s usefulness
in combat gave rise to an even greater symbolic cultural function, and it
continued to appear with surprising frequency on the stages of the public
theaters and in aristocratic portraits of the period as a significant object.29
At court and on the battlefield, the elite combatant’s performance of mas-
culine, militant subjectivity relied on an outdated, but not outmoded,
object.30 To invoke the past was to be fully a man of the moment.31
 INTRODUCTION 9

This book brings together two fields of study—militarism and material

culture—and establishes a dialogue between them. My analysis also places
particular emphasis on the early modern theater and on theatricality more
broadly conceived.32 By “theatrical,” I refer not only early modern English
drama, but also performances and spectacles that occurred outside of
the playhouses such as royal progresses and pageants and the funeral of
Sir Philip Sidney.33 Marlowe is an initiating figure for the early modern
English theater; his work is roughly co-terminus with Sidney’s theatrical
1587 funeral. Marlowe died in 1593, the year of the publication of one of
the memorial volumes commemorating Sidney’s death, The Phoenix Nest;
the so-called Astrophel volume appeared in 1595, and much of Sidney’s
own work was published in the mid- to late 1590s, as well. Greville’s Life
of Sidney did not appear until 1652, although it draws on accounts of
his death that circulated soon after his death. The Life thus post-dates
Shakespeare’s Roman plays by almost 50 years. In my final chapter on
Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, I argue that these
plays look back to Marlowe’s celebration of the armored military subject
and to the mournful militarism of Sidney’s funeral and the texts it gen-
erated. In other words, I consider not only what Arjun Appadurai has
called the “social life of things” or “the social history of things,” but also
how objects register the death and demise of subjects and cultures—how
objects can be both living and “dead” metaphors.34 Scholarship in the
field of material culture and object-oriented ontology has questioned
the cultural assumption that subjects are distinct from, and superior to,
objects. In her study of “vibrant matter,” Jane Bennett rejects the binary
opposition between dull, inert matter (or things), and vibrant life forms
(such as humans). She writes of the agency objects may possess: “By ‘vital-
ity,’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities storms, metals—
not only to impede or block the will and designs of human but also to act
as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of
their own.”35 Trophies negotiate the relationship between subjects and
objects, the living and the dead.
In Chap. 1, I analyze scenes of arming and disarming in both plays.
In Part 1, Tamburlaine characterizes his “complete armour” as an
“adjunct” (Part 1, 1.2.41) and designates what constitutes “objects fit for
Tamburlaine” (Part 1, 5.2.413). I pose several questions: first, how do
objects such as armor become integral or essential—both to a character
and to a play as whole—rather than ancillary or “adjunct?” And, secondly,
how is an object rendered “fit” for a character and how, in turn, does it
10 S. HARLAN

dictate fitness? I argue that Tamburlaine’s customary donning of his armor

in Part 1 establishes him as a member of a legitimate and legitimating
cultural tradition of armed figures, as does Vaughan’s portrait, which was
published in 1622. This traditional and nostalgic act of self-arming also
an act of fragmentation that suggests his military self is not cohesive, but
hybrid, or constructed out of its composite parts. I further maintain that
a discourse of acquisition and rejection governs Marlowe’s treatment of
elite military dress and that this discourse engages with other modes of
acquisition, or spoiling, in the plays, including the spoiling of Zenocrate
and her absorption into the masculine militant sphere as a trophy. When
Tamburlaine arms himself, he narrates the significance of his military dress,
an undertaking that suggests that language helps to establish ownership
over the objects of war. Armor resurfaces in Part 2 in the extra-military
realms of banqueting and mourning, suggesting the inescapability of the
war system. I also examine Tamburlaine’s militant corporeality in relation-
ship to Lancaster’s and Mortimer Junior’s presentation of their shields to
the king in Edward II, a moment of figurative self-arming that foreshad-
ows violent encounters later in the play.
In my first interlude, “Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects,
and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage,” I
turn my attention to the post-war moment: a space in which memory of
the Trojan War, both individual and communal, has implications for the
future. The future in this play is twofold—it involves not only Aeneas’
founding of Rome, but also early modern England’s perceived connection
to this ancient city. I will argue that although Dido, Queen of Carthage
certainly mocks its classical sources, its characters are nonetheless haunted
by the war, and that this haunting is emblematic of the challenges the play
stages of remembering the past and looking to the future. Material things,
including militant objects, are both gifted and stolen, pointing to a larger
concern with the play’s relationship to its epic source text—from which it
cites directly, sometimes in Latin—and to the foundational female, sexual
spoils of the epic tradition: Helen of Troy and Dido. Ultimately, Dido’s
mourning for the lost and disarmed Aeneas and her own object-laden
suicide-funeral engage questions of militant nostalgia that are also central
to the textual tributes to Sir Philip Sidney I examine in the next chapter.
In Chap. 2, I shift my focus to a series of elegiac texts that narrate
the wounding and death of Sir Philip Sidney. I argue that these textual
tributes rely on militant nostalgia to control the activities of mourning
and memorializing and that they function as forms of textual trophy.
 INTRODUCTION 11

First, I analyze how the elegists establish Sidney’s armored body as a

contested object and ultimately fixate on him as a spoil, the viewing of
which in turn produces other scenes of spoiling. Then, I examine Thomas
Lant’s 1588 scroll depicting Sidney’s funeral procession with an eye to
two processional discourses: the Roman triumph and the Roman scroll
or volumina. I propose that Lant’s scroll is a form of visual and textual
trophy, or spoil, from England’s perceived Roman past that in turn pres-
ents Sidney as a spoil for his mourners. This engagement with the past,
or recourse to cultural memory, also controls potentially excessive grief,
a trope of elegy and one that is particularly marked in elegies concern-
ing a hero’s death in battle. Lastly, I turn to Greville’s 1652 Life of the
Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. Central to my analysis is the role that Sidney’s
armor plays in Greville’s description of his death and how this representa-
tion relates to the presentation of Sidney by his biographer, as well as to
the goals of early modern life-writing more generally. Greville’s fascination
with Sidney’s armor and his removal of his cuisses demonstrates not only
an engagement with militant nostalgia, but also an anxiety about what the
biographer can know.
In a second interlude entitled “‘Scatter’d Men’: Mutilated Male Bodies
and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare’s Henry
V,” I turn my attention to the treatment of the dismembered soldier’s body
in one of Shakespeare’s most war-oriented English history plays. In its pre-
occupation with rhetorically spoiling bodies, Henry V looks forward to the
anxieties concerning spoiling of armored body in the Plutarchan Roman
plays, the subject of my last chapter. I will argue that the play’s imagined
and invoked broken bodies play an integral role in the two conflicting nar-
ratives of militant nostalgia in Act 4: Williams’ horrific vision of a recom-
posed, soldierly ghost of the Day of Judgment and the king’s St. Crispin’s
Day speech, in which he imagines a soldierly host at future feasts that
celebrate the victory. Both of these moments look to the future—or the
theatrical present—and to the modes of militant nostalgia that Agincourt
will produce, but they envision this militant nostalgia in vastly different
terms. The soldier’s body in Henry V is the body-as-synecdoche, and it
raises questions about whether the battle can indeed produce trophies that
will operate as material memories of conquest and victory.36
In Chap. 3, I examine representations of the armored Roman military
subject’s body in these three Plutarchan Roman plays alongside illustra-
tions of military trophies that circulated in early modern Europe in order to
assert that the plays underscore the difficulty—indeed, the impossibility—
12 S. HARLAN

of adequately presenting this Roman subject to his early modern English

audience. I maintain that Shakespeare inherits a partial and objectified
Roman subject linked to trophies and armor, and that this figure negoti-
ates the playgoer’s relationship to his glorious, unattainable Roman past.
By examining crucial moments of arming and spoiling in these plays—
including Julius Caesar’s bloody and horrific murder, Cleopatra’s arming
of Antony before the battle of Actium, and Coriolanus’ inability to disarm
himself and re-enter post-war society—I demonstrate how Shakespeare
explores the problems inherent in England’s “fashioning” of its Roman
past through fashion. Armor was common on the early modern English
stage, and this commonness both bolstered and threatened its status as
fetish object and as the material embodiment of militant nostalgia. During
the early modern period, found archeological objects promised access to
ancient Rome and its values, but these plays dramatize the limitations of
such attempts to reclaim the past by claiming objects.
Finally, in a coda entitled “‘Let’s Do’t After the High Roman Fashion’:
Funeral and Triumph,” I suggest that funereal, not triumphal, spoiling
becomes the dominant metaphor for the early modern English theater’s
cultural work of transmission in these Roman plays. I also argue that the
capacity of this ceremony to spoil the subject assures its power as a mode
of representation vis-à-vis militant nostalgia. Shakespeare’s replacement of
triumph with funeral in Antony and Cleopatra preserves spoiling in a subtle,
performative manner, for Antony’s “solemn show,” (5.2.421) or anticipated
funeral, displaces his triumphal victory: one mode of social theater replaces
another. The play treats a concern we also see in the other chapters: how the
elite military subject’s fragmented and fraught materiality becomes a means
of engaging with cultural memory and understandings of the past.
In all the texts that I consider, memorializing the militant subject is
bound up in memorializing lost militant practices, models, and customs.
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602), the play’s martial subject
matter is introduced by an armored prologue who seems to be a reani-
mated object. He begins by drawing attention to the objects—or “instru-
ments”—required to wage war:

In Troy there lies the scene. From isles of Greece

The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
Have to the port of Athens sent their ships
Fraught with the ministers and instruments
Of cruel war. (Prologue, 1–5)
 INTRODUCTION 13

He then situates himself among these martial “instruments,” which include

“warlike fraughtage” (13) “brave pavilions,” (15) and “massy staples” (17):

And hither I am come,

A Prologue armed, but not in confidence
Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited
In like conditions as our argument,
To tell you, fair beholders, that our play
Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,
Beginning in the middle, starting thence away
To what may be digested in a play. (Prologue, 22–29)

This prologue engages with several of my chief concerns: military vio-

lence, materiality, and temporality.37 The first line—“In Troy there lies
the scene”—underscores the playhouse audience’s geographical and spa-
tial distance from the play’s “argument,” but the prologue’s attention to
his armor foregrounds this clothing as powerfully present. By drawing
attention to the connectedness between his armor’s twin functions—to
“arm” him against unspecified military aggression and to “suit” him “[in]
like conditions as our argument”—he suggests the interrelatedness of
the battlefield and the theater (an age-old trope) and offers access to the
play itself. Although the prologue lacks “confidence/Of author’s pen or
actor’s voice…” he possesses another mode of confidence, or certainty,
offered by his protective dress, and his speech is simultaneously offen-
sive and defensive. The prologue is suited, and has suited himself, to the
play; his clothing is decorous. But his clothing is also powerfully alien and
already relegated to the past, as is the “Troy” of Troilus and Cressida. His
armor stands apart from “author’s pen and actor’s voice”—it exists apart
from these representational modes. This armored prologue prepares his
audience for the performance of past wars. This theatrical labor has its
corollary in the tremendous labor required to prepare the male body for
war. In the “The Armourer” from Jost Anman’s Stande und Handweker
(1590) the armorer works to create a suit of armor like the one that stands
to his left (Fig. 0.1).
This armor is an eerie pseudo-human presence in the image, an uncanny
double of the armorer himself, who is maker and not soldier. The armor is
an object in the process of becoming. It is the product of a tradition and
a craft. And like the armored prologue to Troilus and Cressida, it holds a
violent past, and a violent future, in the present. It is waiting for a human
form.
14 S. HARLAN

Fig. 0.1 Jost Amman, “The Armourer” from Stande und Handwerker, c.1590

NOTES
1. In 1969, Peter Burke identified the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries in Europe with “a heightened sense of the past” (47) and main-
tained that, “During the Renaissance men became more and more con-
scious that all sorts of things—buildings, clothes, words, laws—changed
over time” (39). See Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1969). As Ivo Kamps has argued, multiple ideas about
the past can coexist: “Historiography’s status as a mode of inquiry in
 INTRODUCTION 15

renaissance culture is … confounded by the continued cultural currency of

older ideas about the past, even when these could have been supplanted
by the emergence of newer and more sophisticated conceptions of history.
Taken together, this shows that renaissance historiography, unconstrained
by singleness of purpose of method (and catering to a seemingly impervi-
ous readership), developed eclectically, allowing individual historians to
pick and choose from a wide variety of sources to produce versions of
England’s past commensurate with the political, religious cultural, and
commercial requirements of the day.” See Kamps, Historiography and
Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 31.
2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). War was an omnipresent
part of early modern English culture and society, terms that are often used
interchangeably. For a discussion of the many meanings of the word “cul-
ture,” see Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early
Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), Chapter 1.
3. Regarding the study of “material culture” and clothing in particular,
Burke has noted that, “The whole vast area of material culture is a poten-
tial subject for ideological analysis. Clothes, for example, form a symbolic
system. In a given community, within which meanings are shared, there
are certain rules governing what can be worn, by whom, on what occa-
sions, so that the clothes worn by an individual transmit various messages
to members of the community.” See Burke, Popular Culture in Early
Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978), 81. Early modern
England has been the focus of many excellent studies of clothing, cos-
tumes, and stage properties, including those by Peter Stallybrass, Ann
Rosalind Jones, Andrew Sofer, Natasha Korda, Jonathan Gil Harris, and
Jean MacIntyre, yet few critics have considered literary and theatrical rep-
resentations of armor and how this attire constructed, and deconstructed,
military identity. Jones and Stallybrass’ work on clothing and memory has
been particularly influential for my understanding of how the sartorial
negotiates a relationship to the past. See Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I
am also influenced by Roland Barthes’ understanding of fashion as
“entirely a system of signs.” See Barthes, The Fashion System, trans.
Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Oakland, CA: The University of
California Press, 1990), 244. On the relationship between the terms
“fashion,” “dress,” and “adornment,” as well as a survey of theory of
fashion, see Tim Edwards, Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics
(New York and London: Routledge, 2011), Chapters 1 and 2.
16 S. HARLAN

4. I understand militant masculinity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

England as “anxious,” to borrow Mark Breitenberg’s term. He argues
that, “… the phrase ‘anxious masculinity’ is redundant. Masculine subjec-
tivity constructed and sustained by a patriarchal culture—infused with
patriarchal assumptions about power, privilege, sexual desire, the body—
inevitably engenders varying degrees of anxiety in its male members” (1).
Working from Freud, he notes of anxiety that, “Anxiety is … both cause
and effect: it is the effect of dangers the subject may not be aware of, but
it also anticipates those dangers in advance, whether real or not” (5). See
Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996). Of course, early modern masculinity
is informed by violence and its values, as Alexandra Shepard notes: “Male
honour was closely bound up with such assertions of territorial authority
and dominance; violence was as intrinsic to the policing of territorial
boundaries as it was central to maintaining social hierarchies.” See Shepard,
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 150. See also Todd W.  Reeser, Moderating
Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 2006) on moderate masculinity, which “… has
implications well beyond the realm of masculinity per se, serving as a con-
stituting element of other related forms of subjectivity,” as well as the
relationship between such an understanding of masculinity and otherness
or alterity (21). And Maurizio Calbi reminds us of the ease with which
anxiety “turns into violence” on the early modern English stage. See
Calbi, Approximate Bodies: Aspects of the Figuration of Masculinity, Power
and the Uncanny in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (Milan: Oedipus,
2001), 65. And of course, masculinity is bound up in clothing in early
modern England. As Christian M. Billing notes, “Apparel took on increas-
ingly significance in Tudor and early Stuart periods, at first with regards to
the maintenance of taxonomies of class but subsequently those of gender.”
See Billing, Masculinity, Corporeality and the English Stage 1580–1635
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), p. 86.
5. In my understanding of nationalism, I am most influenced by Benedict
Anderson’s understanding of nations as “imagined communities.” See
Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006). Ernest
Gellner maintains that “… nations are artefacts of men’s convictions and
loyalties.” See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press), 7. Liah Greenfeld argues that England under Queen
Elizabeth I “was a nation because its people were symbolically elevated to
the position of an elite, and this elevation created a new type of collectivity
and social structure unlike any other, and a novel, and at that time unique,
identity.” See Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
 INTRODUCTION 17

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 66. For a survey of theo-

ries of nationalism, see Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology,
History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
6. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, editors of the 1991 collection
Staging the Reanissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobena
Drama, credit Stephen Greenblatt with “challenging the familiar
Burkhardtian notion of the Renaissance as the founding moment of indi-
vidual autonomy” and remind us that, “… identity—gendered, sexed,
classes, racialized—has been increasingly seen by critics as an historical
production rather than as an essential given.” See Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobena Drama, ed. David Scott
Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York and London: Routledge, 1991),
5. Louis Montrose defined the early modern English subject in relation-
ship to structures of power: “… my invocation of the term ‘Subject’ is
meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand,
it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action,
endowing them with subjectivity and the capacity for agency; and, on the
other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within—it subjects
them to—social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and con-
tingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension and control.” See
Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of
the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996), 16. More recently, Cynthia Marshall has argued that, “That a new
idea or awareness of the self emerged in the Renaissance has become a
simple statement to make but a complex one to qualify. In the past 20
years, new historicist and cultural materialist literary critics have repeatedly
asserted that the human subject as known today—variously labeled as ‘lib-
eral,’ ‘humanist,’ or ‘bourgeois’—began to emerge during the early seven-
teenth century. Although the breadth of these claims have recently been
quite appropriately questioned, it is indisputable that developments in
several areas complicated and extended the ways in which people in early
modern Europe thought about their own existence” (13). Marshall’s
work pushes back against Greenblatt’s seminal Renaissance Self-Fashioning
(1980), which she argues “effectively recuperated the humanist narrative
of the birth of individualism in the Renaissance, giving new impetus to a
paradigm equating subjectivity with power and control” (2). See Marshall,
The Shattering of the Self (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002). As Ivo Kamps puts it, “Cultural materialists, fem-
inist materialist and new historicists unequivocably reject the myth of the
subject as ‘The Individual’, the ‘freely self-creating and world-creating
Individual of so-called burgeois humansism’ (Montrose, 21); they also
agree that the subject is—to use Althusser’s term agan—interpellated, by
18 S. HARLAN

a complex network of social, economic, ideological forces which, in its

totality, extends beyond the subject’s intellectual grasp or command.” See
Kamps, “Introduction,” Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps
(London and New York: Verso, 1995), 7. On the historical conditioning
of the term “self,” see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), Part
II.  On the Renaissance birth of the individual, see Jacob Burckhardt’s
1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1999). I am also influenced by Jonathan Sawday’s work on how
the early modern human body fragmented by dissection challenges
Burckhardt’s argument: he attends to how “… the very violence of dissec-
tive culture was a factor in the production of some of the more familiar
structures of great beauty and vitality which we associate with the term
‘Renaissance’: epic and lyric poetry, drama, art, and, above all, architecture
… To deploy a phrase such as the ‘culture of dissection’ is to suggest a
network of practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding this pro-
duction of fragmented bodies, which sits uneasily alongside our image
(derived from Burckhardt) of the European Renaissance as the age of the
construction of individuality—a unified sense of selfhood.” See Sawday,
The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the human body in Renaissance
England (Routledge: London and New York: 1995), 2.
7. Beat Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics Versus
Ideology,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 103–09, 103.
8. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S.  Wood, Anachronistic Renaissance
(New York: Zone Books, 2010), 181. Indeed, architectural spolia were
sometimes textual. As Robert Coates-Stephens outlines, ancient inscriptions
were sometimes reused in early medieval buildings. See Coates-Stephens,
“Epigraphy as Spolia—The Reuse of Inscriptions in Early Medieval
Buildings,” Papers of the British School at Rome 70 (2002): 275–96, 277.
9. Nagel and Wood, 179. In order to understand the complex ways that
spolia signify, one must consider both acquisition and display. As Vincent
J. Cleary notes of the practice of spoiling in the Aeneid, for example, “For
an understanding of Vergil’s poem … it is less important for the reader to
observe the practice of taking the spolia than it is to note the disposition
or use the victor makes of these arms” (15). See Cleary, “To the Victor
Belong the ‘Spoila’: A Study in Vergilian Imagery,” Vergilius (1959-) 28
(1982): 15–29.
10. Military violence informs cultural understandings of what defined the
Renaissance. As Jennifer Feather argues of combat, “The by now familiar
narrative of the Renaissance as a period of vast change, radically distinct
from the medieval past and bearing more in common with its modern suc-
cessors that with its premodern predecessors, relies upon a disavowal of
 INTRODUCTION 19

the place of combat in the intellectual advancements—particularly the cre-

ation of the humanist subject and the modern nation—of the sixteenth
century. Close attention to depictions of combat in early modern texts not
only reveals the continuity between early modern and premodern culture
but also highlights the centrality of bodily damage to modern ideas of
agency.” See Feather, Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English
Literature: The Pen and the Sword (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2
11. In my understanding of humanism in relationship to subjectivity, I am
influenced by Denise Albanese, who notes, “The ideological valence of
humanist philology, its assertion that classical texts are repositories of
social value. Humanist reading and writing are crucial evaluative activities,
crucial as well to forming the early modern (male, European) subject.
When a humanist scholar reproduces, imitates, annotates, or merely stud-
ies Roman rhetoricians and Greek poets, he in effect identifies with them,
to assume their virtues as a function of their language, and so models his
subjectivity in relation to theirs.” See Albanese, “Making it new: human-
ism, colonialism, and the gendered body in early modern culture,”
Feminist readings of early modern culture: Emerging subjects, ed. Valerie
Traub, M.  Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–43, 30. And in my attention to
the darker side of humanism, I am influenced by Stephanie Jed’s work on
rape, writing, and humanism. Her now-familiar study sought to “recon-
nect the idealization of humanistic ‘freedom’ to the violence up on which
it depends” (131). See Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the
Birth of Humanism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1989). For a discussion of “what the terms ‘history’ and ‘historiog-
raphy’ might have meant to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers
and writers,” (28) particularly in relationship to humanism, see Kamps,
Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), Chapter 1. As he notes, “The advent of human-
ism in late medieval England complicated matters … Lacking internal
consistency on questions of historiographical method and purpose,
humanism not only introduced various new ways of thinking about the
past, it also made available to English historians more than one model for
writing about it” (30).
12. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993), 23.
13. Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd and
R.W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 105.
14. Regarding fragmented bodies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and what she terms
“speaking subjectivity” or “the trope of the voice,” Lynn Enterline writes,
“That a poem fascinated with the fracturing of bodies should have been
20 S. HARLAN

passed down through the middle ages and into the Renaissance, thanks to
Lactantius, predominantly in fragments, a reordered collection of pieces
torn away from their original arrangement, is one of the ironies of literary
history that continues to echo and ramify.” See Enterline, The Rhetoric of
the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 1.
15. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 27. Yates’ work has been foundational to understandings of early
modern memory, including her claim that, “The emotionally striking
images of classical memory, transformed by the devout Middle Ages into
corporeal similitudes, in the Renaissance are transformed again into magi-
cally powerful images” (161). I am also influenced by William Engel’s
work on how the classical Art of Memory influenced Renaissance drama-
tist and essayists. He attends to “unprecedented proliferation of memory
systems rich in visual allegories” related to the rise of print and to “the
different kinds of iconographic and non-phonetic communication that
came to be associated, typically, with Renaissance Memory Theatres.” See
Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27. On the Art of Memory in
relationship to death and mortality in the Renaissance, see Chapter 1:
“Construing the Trace of Memory: Giotto to Broadsides” of Engel,
Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early
Modern England (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
16. The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed.
Mary Carruthers and Jan M.  Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5. Carruthers has observed that “medieval
culture was fundamentally memorial.” See Carruthers, The Book of
Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 8.
17. The Medieval Craft of Memory, 11.
18. Philip Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 103.
19. Schwyzer, 103 and 105. See also Frances Teague on how Richard’s arms
and armor convey the passage of time in scenes devoted to the night before
the battle in Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1991), 20–1. And Alexandra Walsham notes that, “A
relic is ontologically different from a representation or image: it is not a
mere symbol or indicator of divine presence, it is an actual physical embodi-
ment of it, each particle encapsulating the essence of the departed person,
pars pro toto, in its entirety.” Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and
Remains,” Past and Present, 206.5 (2010), 9–36, 10.
20. Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the
World (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1975), 4. As Mary Douglas
 INTRODUCTION 21

reminds us, the body is really two bodies: it is both social and physical. See
Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York:
Pantheon, 1970), particularly pp.  65–81. For more on early modern
understandings of the body, see Gail Kern Paster’s seminal work The Body
Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern
England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
21. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed.
David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London: Routledge, 1997),
Introduction, xiv.
22. Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 5.
23. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), p. 192.
24. I use the terms “militant subject” or “armored militant subject” in lieu of
“soldier” to designate an elite caste involved in military conflicts or wars.
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the term “soldier” gener-
ally referred to a foot soldier of low rank (often a mercenary or paid com-
batant), and such figures did not wear armor. Armor was reserved for
aristocratic fighters and operated as a chief signifier of their status.
(However, there are instances in the drama of the period of elite, armored
figures referring to themselves as “soldiers.”) As one’s position on horse-
back designated him as quite literally above the masses, so too did his
armor signify his superiority. Conversely, the “soldier” was outfitted in a
different “habit”—generally a coat, as in Act 1 of Richard II when Richard
speaks of confiscating Gaunt’s lands in order to purchase “coats/To deck
our soldiers for these Irish wars” (R2 1.4.60–1). There are numerous ref-
erences to soldiers’ clothing in Shakespeare’s history plays.
25. My interest in etymology in this book is influenced by Raymond Williams’
historical semantics. Williams maintained that, “… the problem of mean-
ing can never be wholly dissolved into context. It is true that no word ever
finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process
of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) sys-
tematic properties of language itself. Yet it can still be useful to pick out
certain words, of an especially problematical kind, and to consider, for the
moment, their own internal developments and structures.” See Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 22–23. Leo Spitzer wrote that, “of all linguistic
branches, it is in semantics that the changes due to cultural development
can best be seen at work, for ‘meaning’ is the most sensitive barometer of
cultural climate.” See Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1948), 2. I use the terms “clothing,” “clothes,” “dress,”
“apparel,” and “attire” interchangeably. “Clothing” and “clothes”
referred to attire made of fabric in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
22 S. HARLAN

these terms also designated livery. “Clothing” could also refer to the labor
of making and selling cloth. “Clothes” was originally the plural form of
“cloth” and, from the ninth to the nineteenth century, designated any
form of covering on the body.
26. As Alison Landsberg outlines in her work on “prosthetic memory,” or
“Taking on memories of events through which one did not live,” (3)
memories form communal identity: “In the broadest possible sense,
memory in its various forms has always been about negotiating a rela-
tionship to the past. More specifically, in … Europe in the Middle Ages
and in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century, mem-
ory was invoked as a strategy for consolidating important new group
identities. Furthermore, certain elements that enable identity forma-
tion through memory appeared in both these periods, such as reliance
on affects and experiential practices in fostering memory.” See
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 4. Like Landsberg, Marianne Hirsch focuses
on how memories of violence are transmitted over time. Her term
“‘postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’
bears to the personal, collective, and cultural traumas of those who
came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the
stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these
experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to
seem to constitute memories in their own right.” See Hirsch, The
Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5.
27. See Sydney Anglo, ed., Chivalry in the Renaissance (Rochester, NY:
Boydell Press, 1990) and The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Claude Blair, European Armour,
c.1660-c.1700 (London: Batsford Books, 1972); Alan Borg, Arms and
Armour in Britain (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960);
Charles Boutell, Arms and Armour in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
(Combined Books, 1996); A.R. Dufty, European Armour in the Tower of
London (London: H.M.S.O., 1968) and European Swords and Daggers in
the Tower of London (London: H.M.S.O., 1975); David Edge, Arms and
Armour of the Medieval Knight (Hills, MN: Crescent, 1993) and The
Wallace Collection: European Arms and Armour (London: The Trustees
of the Wallace Collection, 1992); Charles Ffoulkes, The Armourer and his
Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century (London: Methuen, 1912);
O.F.G.  Hogg, Clubs to Cannon: Warfare and Weapons Before the
Introduction of Gunpowder (London: Duckworth, 1968); Alfred Hutton,
The Sword and the Centuries (London: Grant and Richards, 1901); Pierre
 INTRODUCTION 23

Lacombe, Arms and Armour in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Also a
Descriptive Notice of Modern Weapons, trans. Charles Boutell (London:
Reeves and Turner, 1874); Sir James Mann, “The Exhibition of Greenwich
Armour at the Tower of London,” The Burlington Magazine 93
(December 1951): 378–83, and An Outline of Arms and Armour in
England from the Early Middle Ages to the Civil War (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969); R.E.  Oakeshott, The Archaeology of
Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry
(London: Luttenworth Press, 1960); Sir Charles Oman, A History of the
Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1937); and Hans
Talhoffer, Medieval Combat: A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Manual of
Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat (Newbury, UK: Greenhill
Books, 2006).
28. See Matthew Bennett, “Why Chivalry? Military ‘Professionalism’ in the
Twelfth Century: The Origins and Expressions of a Socio-Military Ethos,”
in The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed.
and intro. D.J.B. Trim (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003); Lindsay Boynton,
The Elizabethan Militia, 1558–1638 (New York: Routledge & K.  Paul,
1967); Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones
(New York: Blackwell, 1984); C.G.  Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) and “Military Developments of the
Renaissance,” in A Guide to the Sources of British Military History, ed.
Robin Higham (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1971); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe
(New York: I.B.  Tauris, 1995); Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare
1511–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2001); J.J. Goring, “The military obli-
gations of the English people, 1511–1558,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis
(London: University of London, 1955) and “Social change and military
decline in mid-Tudor England,” History 60 (1975): 185–97; Paul
E.J.  Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor
England, 1544–1604 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Maurice
Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Wallace
T.  MacCaffrey, Elizabeth: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992); Luke MacMahon, “Chivalry, Military
Professionalism and the Early Tudor Army in Renaissance Europe: A
Reassessment,” in The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military
Professionalism, ed. and intro. D.J.B.  Trim (Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2003); John S.  Nolan, “The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,”
Journal of Military History 58 (1994): 391–420; Geoffrey Parker, The
Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–
1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Roberts,
The Military Revolution, 1550–1650: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered
24 S. HARLAN

Before Queen’s University at Belfast (Belfast: Marjorie Boyd, 1956);

Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965); Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science; the
Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965);
and R.B.  Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the
Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
29. Armor was an important part of an early modern longing for a lost chival-
ric past, and aspects of this longing took on a distinctly theatrical, or per-
formative, aspect. Jean Howard lists jousts among other modern of early
modern theatrical practices: “Many highly theatrical practices—including
royal processions, executions, exorcisms, charivaris, chivalric jousts—
served as occasions to display, acquire, and exercise power within a fluid
social field.” See Howard, The Stage and Social Conflict in Early Modern
England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 4.
30. For more on the aristocratic combatant and questions of social status in
relationship to constructions of masculine militancy, see Ros King, “‘The
Disciplines of War’: Elizabethan War Manuals and Shakespeare’s Tragicomic
Vision” and Ruth Morse, “Some Social Costs of War” in Shakespeare and
War, ed. Ros King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen (New York: Palgrave, 2008).
Military service was central to elite masculinity in the sixteenth century, but
it was also threatened by contemporary military technologies, political
mandates, and conscription practices, as Roger B. Manning details: “The
conflict between social hierarchies and military hierarchies was at the heart
of the collision between the archaic values of a revived code of chivalry and
the need to compel warfare to serve political and strategic ends …” (7). He
further notes, that, “Warfare, like sports, possesses its own sets of rules,
which encodes values that reveal various martial cultures arising in different
times and places. By the end of the Middle Ages two concepts of warfare
had emerged in Europe: one was an agonistic kind of war fought according
to the rules of chivalry by noblemen and gentlemen who regarded their
enemies as worthy opponents … A newer kind of instrumental war, or ‘war
to the death’, in which the enemy was an evil force or an obstacle to be
destroyed, was ushered in by commoners who spurned the values of the
feudal aristocracy and whom amateur swordsmen regarded as mercenaries”
(5). See Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
31. In my approach to material culture, I am influenced by Bill Brown’s influ-
ential articulation of “thing theory,” as outlined in the Autumn 2001 issue
of Critical Inquiry, where he attended to the “specific unspecificity that
‘things’ denote”: “If thing theory sounds like an oxymoron, then, it may
not be because things reside in some balmy elsewhere beyond theory but
because they lie both at hand and somewhere outside the theoretical field,
 INTRODUCTION 25

beyond a certain limit, as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the

entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility
the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the
order of objects” (Critical Inquiry, 4–5). Brown called for an investiga-
tion into the “identity of objects” as well as that of subjects, noting that:
“The criticism of the past decade has been profoundly successful in show-
ing how literary texts exhibit multiple modes of fashioning the identity of
subjects (national subjects, gendered subjects, hybrid subjects), but the
identity of objects has hardly been voiced as a question.” See Brown, A
Sense of Things (Chicago and London, 2003), 17 and Critical Inquiry:
Things, ed. Bill Brown (Autumn, 2001). See also Miguel Tamen, Friends
of Interpretable Objects (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004) on
how objects are made to “speak” through interpretation and Jonathan
Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011) on eighteenth-century “it narratives” and how objects can declare
independence of their owners.
32. In his influential work The Place of the Stage, Steven Mullaney considered
early modern London’s many “vehicles” of performance: “Inside the cer-
emonial city, ritual and spectacle were organized around central figures of
authority and power, emblems of cultural coherence and community. The
figures we encounter outside the city walls are liminal ones, figures of the
threshold rather than the center of society. Marginal ritual and spectacle
placed such figures in the context proper to them, on the limen or thresh-
old of the community. The dramaturgy of the margins was a liminal breed
of cultural performance, a performance of the threshold, by which the
horizon of community was made visible, the limits of definition, contain-
ment, and control made manifest. The vehicles for such a performance
ranged from hospitals and brothels to madhouses, scaffolds of execution,
prisons, and lazar-houses.” See Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License,
Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1988), 31.
33. The idea of spectacle is important in the texts I examine. As Richard
Halpern reminds us, “Much of the significant work of new historicism has
concentrated on the institutions of monarchy and the court—a reasonable
strategy given the centrality of the monarch to both political power and
cultural production. This orientation naturally enough leads to a focus on
those mechanisms of power which radiate out from political sovereignty:
censorship, punishment, surveillance, and above all spectacle. The power
of sovereignty works primarily by making itself visible; it promulgates and
extends itself through public progresses, entertainments, and propaganda,
on the one hand, and overt force or threats of force, on the other.” See
Halpern, The Politics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance
26 S. HARLAN

Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 1991), 3. In his seminal 1967 work The Society of the
Spectacle, Guy Debord attended to the relationship between power, spec-
tacle, and the commodity, reminding us that, “The world the spectacle
holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the com-
modity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus
shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one
another and from the sum total of what they produce.” See Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 2006), 26.
34. As he outlines, “The social history of things and their cultural biography
are not entirely separate matters, for it is the social history of things, over
large periods of time and at large social levels, that constrains the form,
meaning, and structure of more short-term, specific, and intimate trajec-
tories. It is also the case, though it is typically harder to document or
predict, that many small shifts in the cultural biography of things may,
over time, lead to shifts in the social history of things.” See Appadurai,
“Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 36.
35. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and
London: Duke UP, 2010), Preface, viii. One of Bennett’s examples is, in
fact, metal. Of Aeschylus’ presentation of Prometheus’ chains that are
secured by Hephaistos in Prometheus Bound, she writes: “It is hard indeed
to keep one’s mind wrapped around a materiality that is not reducible to
an extension in space, difficult to dwell with the notion of an incorporeal-
ity or a differential of intensities. This is because to live, humans need to
interpret the world reductively as a series of fixed objects, a need reflected
in the rhetorical role assigned to the word material. As noun or adjective
material denotes some stable or rock-bottom reality, something adaman-
tine” (58). She further notes that, “metal is always metallurgical, always an
alloy of the endeavours of many bodies, always something worked on by
geological, biological, and often human agencies” (60). This argument is
influenced by Bruno Latour’s concept of an “actant,” or a source of action
that can be either human or nonhuman See Latour, Politics of Nature:
How To Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004).
36. Synecdoche and bodily mutilation are often in dialogue with one another
in the texts I examine. In his analysis of synecdoche, Raphael Lyne attends
to Ophelia’s speech about the disheveled Hamlet in 2.1 of that play [“My
lord, as I was sewing in my closet …” (2.1.74)] as an “attempt to assem-
ble a whole out of parts” (60). He also examines Hamlet’s presentation
 INTRODUCTION 27

of the portraits of Old Hamlet and Claudius to Gertrude in Act 3—“Look

here upon this picture …” (3.1.53)—as a means of assembling fragments
across time: “The whole man he is able to assemble, remember, and still
witness, is impossibly real for him, but not so for her” (61). See Lyne,
Shakespeare, Rhetoric Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), Chapter 2.
37. See Brian Walsh on “the era’s changing notion of temporality, both in
historiographic and theatrical terms …” (58). He maintains that, “… the
enactment of the past is defined by the temporality of the theatrical event”
(57) and that, “The temporality of theatre has provocative implications for
historical consciousness when the past is dramatized. To perform history
is to consume time in pursuit of the past, rather than to stop the flow of
time forward or momentarily suspend its passing. Conceptually, to repre-
sent history in this scheme does not involve a reversal of diachronic time,
wherein historiography would go back in order to recover the past and
then inscribe it in some permanently legible form. Rather, it becomes a
synchronic form of thought, where the past emerges with the present”
(62). See Walsh, “Theatrical Temporality and Historical Consciousness in
The Famous Victories of Henry V,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 57–73. See
also Debord, who maintained that, “The spectacle, being the reigning
social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an
abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false
consciousness of time” (114).
 CHAPTER 1

“Objects Fit for Tamburlaine”: Self-Arming

in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Robert
Vaughan’s Portraits, and The Almain
Armourer’s Album

ARMS AND THE MAN
I begin with Tamburlaine, the quintessential warrior, and the question
of how customs—particularly the military subject’s customary self-arming
before battle—govern and structure representations of war. In 1.2 of
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 (performed late 1587 or 1588),
Tamburlaine dresses himself for war and exclaims, “This complete armour
and this curtle-axe/Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine …” than
his shepherd’s “weeds” (Part 1, 1.2.41–43).1 Editors have generally
assumed that Tamburlaine strips off his shepherd’s cloak at this moment
to reveal his armor beneath, and most have included stage directions that
support this reading. I would like to contest this assumption and to revise
our sense of the scene, positing instead that by donning his armor onstage,
Tamburlaine draws attention to the role that this customary clothing plays
in both plays’ military engagements, situates himself in an inherited tradi-
tion of self-arming figures from the Bible to epic to romance, and engages
with questions of contemporary militarism. Armor anticipates the elite
military subject’s participation in war and renders him fit to participate in
violent conflict. At war’s end, it must be cast aside. Armor figures promi-
nently in both plays as a site of contestation and violence. It is traditional
and novel, common and unique, beautiful and troubling, fortifying and
vulnerable. Those who handle it do so according to certain customs, and

29
© The Author(s) 2016
S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_2
30 S. HARLAN

these customs are emblematic of a militant nostalgia that pervades the

play’s treatment of violence, aesthetics, and masculinity.
Military “custom” is an elusive concept in Marlowe’s plays, which
have often been read as engaged with the heterodox and the novel, not
the inherited and the traditional.2 “Custom” refers to a habitual or usual
practice, a common way of acting, a fashion, or habit. Like “habits” and
“habiliments,” “customs” and “costumes” are etymologically related: cus-
tom dictates certain modes of personal attire, and these modes of attire
participate in, and shore up, customary practices. Ann Hollander argues
that “fashion” was an invention of the late Middle Ages that

… lifted clothing out of its earlier condition as first-order, unselfconscious

symbolic art, and made it into an imaginative and self-reflective visual
medium. Fashion has allowed clothing to detach itself from the task of being
the stable (and often stabilizing) visual projection of social custom and com-
mon belief, and allowed it to become a wayward representational art, some-
thing entirely fictional like painting or movies.3

As a “projection” of custom and a mode of representation, clothing

provides a means of examining the customs that govern war and those that
govern the early modern English theater more broadly. Armor is the cus-
tomary clothing of an elite military combatant; it is also a crucial prop in
Tamburlaine’s—and the play’s—understanding of war.4 Marlowe’s plays
treat in great detail what I refer to as “the objects of war”: both the mate-
rial objects that define the militarized self and the objects, in the sense of
objectives, of war. Of course, Tamburlaine’s scene of self-arming negoti-
ates a crucial relationship between the customs that govern the dramatic
representation of the Other and those that govern the representation of
the medieval English knight and the early modern English military leader,
asking the audience to consider what the armored subject looks like and
what his appearance signifies.5 His body also raises questions about how
the customs of militant masculinity both assure alliance with a group and
assert exemplary subjectivity. E.P.  Thompson defines “custom” as “sui
generis—an ambiance, a mentalite, … a whole vocabulary, a discourse of
legitimation and expectation.”6 In donning his military dress, Tamburlaine
both fulfills certain expectations and sets up others.
The unapologetic violence of the Tamburlaine plays has long offended,
perplexed, and divided scholars.7 From the publication of Harry Levin’s
seminal study The Overreacher in 1952, critics have often read Marlowe’s
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 31

central characters as uncommonly ambitious and transgressive.8 He also

attended to the play’s moral universe, asserting that Part 2 contains a
moral which exposes as fraudulent the image of romantic success depicted
in Part 1. Una Ellis-Fermor’s work anticipated that of Levin, for she
printed Desportes’ sonnet “Icare” as an epigraph to her 1927 monograph
Christopher Marlowe, thus establishing the connection between Marlowe’s
plays and the myth of excessive and unregulated ambition.9 More recently,
Raphael Falco (2000) has examined Tamburlaine’s “charismatic author-
ity” and questioned some of the assumptions that have attended this line
of critical inquiry. Falco notes that, from Max Weber onwards, “We speak
of charisma as a kind of heightened personal attractiveness, a desirable
attribute. Moreover … we regard charisma as a zenith of individuality, a
subjectivity so exceptional it stands utterly alone.”10 Falco himself argues
that this understanding of charisma “gives too optimistic an impression
of the relation between individuality and charismatic domination.”11 This
charismatic authority and domination relies heavily on the material world
of the play.12
Tamburlaine’s customary donning of his armor in Part 1 establishes him
as a member of a legitimate and legitimating cultural tradition of armed
figures.13 His armored body harkens back to past militant models and sets
up the audience’s expectations for future theatrical exploits. The prom-
ise of these exploits is ethically fraught and bound up in Tamburlaine’s
militant nostalgia—his desire to appropriate past militant models for his
own ends. In Marlowe’s chief source for the plays, George Whetstone’s
1586 The English Myrror, Tamburlaine is deemed “the ire of God, and
the destruction of the world.”14 In The Mirror for Magistrates, first pub-
lished in 1559 and reprinted seven times between 1559 and 1587, the
depiction of a great ruler—with all his faults—was both a lesson and an
admonishment to the audience.15 Certainly, Tamburlaine is in many ways
an anti-hero, but in donning his militant dress, he also claims an existing
discourse of militarism that he absorbs into his own identity, rendering
himself recognizable as a hero. He spoils his armor as he spoils so many
other things in these plays, both objects and subjects. This act of spoiling
also operates as a figure for the play’s own dramatic spoiling, or appropria-
tion and reconstitution, of modes of tragedy, and comedy. A discourse of
acquisition and rejection governs Marlowe’s treatment of military dress in
these plays, and this discourse engages with other modes of acquisition, or
spoiling, in the play.16 As in all things, Tamburlaine claims his military dress
by way of a linguistic performance. When he self-arms, he also narrates the
32 S. HARLAN

significance of his armor, an undertaking that suggests the importance of

language in establishing ownership of the objects of war. Military dress is
consistently characterized as astonishingly beautiful in the Tamburlaine
plays; it is also an object of desire that paradoxically presents and conceals
the violence for which it prepares the subject. It is important to note that
for all of Marlowe’s engagement with war and militarism, the plays do
not place a high premium on the representation of battles. Much of the
plays’ violence unfolds in scenes of torture and humiliation, as well as in
epic encounters between solitary antagonists. But military dress becomes
the means by which Marlowe engages with the problems that attend the
representation of military violence and the representation of the past.17
By examining Robert Vaughan’s 1622 The Pourtraitures at Large of Nine
Moderne Worthies of the World, in which the armored Tamburlaine makes
an appearance, and The Almain Armourer’s Album, a sumptuous early
modern English catalogue of military dress designed for the aristocracy, I
will demonstrate how the armed body of the elite combatant is a fraught
aesthetic object: an object of desire. I will also explore how armor engages
with another form of desire—battlefield nostalgia—in compelling ways.
Armor not only anticipates combat; it also plays a role in mourning and
banqueting. In Part 1, armorial helmets play a crucial role in the humiliat-
ing banquet for Bajazeth. In Part 2, Tamburlaine and his followers mourn
Zenocrate’s death by erecting a memorial pillar. They also discuss their
post-war banqueting activities in great detail. By examining the role of
armor in mourning and feasting, I will establish how armor negotiates
relationships between present and absent violence, between ruler and
ruled, and—most importantly—between present and past.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Tamburlaine’s ceaseless conquest of lands begins with a conquest of cloth-
ing. His rejection of his shepherd’s robes and his self-arming as a “deed”
constitute a dramatic contract with his playhouse audience and, ultimately,
an act of aggression that positions him in a liminal space between foreign
Other and familiar English chivalric knight.18 In 1.2 of Part 1, Tamburlaine
enters with Zenocrate, Techelles, Usumcasane, Magnetes, Agydas, as well
as a several lords and soldiers. The scene opens with Zenocrate’s plea
to Tamburlaine that he “pity [her] distressed plight” (Part 1, 1.2.7).
Tamburlaine’s followers carry the spoils of their conquest of Damascus,
and Zenocrate begs that Tamburlaine not claim her as another spoil
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 33

“by lawless rapine” (Part 1, 1.2.10). Tamburlaine’s self-arming is in part a

performance for her; she is his chief onstage audience. Two actions occur
in this scene: first, he casts aside his shepherd’s clothing, and then he dons
his armor. When Tamburlaine strips off his shepherd’s “weeds,” he claims
his identity as a “lord”:

I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove,

And yet a shepherd by my parentage.
But, lady, this fair face and heavenly hue
Must grace his bed that conquers Asia
And means to be a terror to the world,
Measuring the limits of his empery
By east and west as Phoebus doth his course.
Lie here ye weeds that I disdain to wear! (Part 1, 1.2.34–41)

By casting off his shepherd’s clothing, Tamburlaine creates a divided

self, and the presence of both his shepherd’s “weeds” and his armor
onstage is emblematic of this dual subjectivity. He begins his speech in the
first person and then shifts to the third person when he invokes “his bed
that conquers Asia” and “the limits of his empery.” This change in pro-
nouns suggests a shift in Tamburlaine’s perception of himself: he moves
from speaking of himself as himself to speaking of himself as an observer,
an outsider. Peter Donaldson notes that Tamburlaine wants to be looked
at.19 Here, Tamburlaine becomes the object of his own gaze and of that
of his audience. Further, in rejecting his “parentage,” he stages his own
rebirth, his own mythic self-creation by way of military “deeds” that dis-
place his unsuitable civilian “weeds.” His robes are not described in any
detail: they are simply “weeds,” a general name for clothing that is distinc-
tive of one’s profession, state of life, or sex. Orsino draws on the latter
meaning of the term when he says to the cross-dressed Viola at the end of
Twelfth Night: “Give me thy hand,/And let me see thee in thy women’s
weeds” (TN 5.1.264–5). Tamburlaine draws primarily on the first mean-
ing, for he rejects the profession of the shepherd in favor of that of the
military leader, the life of the pastoral swain in favor of that of the knight.20
His shepherd’s “weeds” are deemed unsuited to his new military self and
to the play itself. As Charles Carlton has noted, “the origins of kingship,
the first form of hierarchical leadership, lie in war.”21 Tamburlaine’s
rejection of his clothing allows him to take on a new identity: that of lord.
His assertion that “I am a lord …” is in the present tense, but the “proof”
34 S. HARLAN

of this identity has yet to be provided—his “deeds shall prove” this to be

true (emphasis mine). Future conquest will, in a sense, return him to his
moment of origin, or his parentage, and allow for the generation of a new
self.22 In Act 1 of Part 2, Callapine says to Almeda, “Ah, were I now but
half so eloquent/To paint in words what I’ll perform in deeds,/I know
thou wouldst depart from hence with me” (Part 2, 1.3.9–11). Identity is
performed in these plays as the result of “deeds.”23 Tamburlaine returns
to the role of “deeds” in his military identity when he addresses the King
of Jerusalem in Act 4 of Part 2:

Villains, these terrors and these tyrannies

(If tyrannies war’s justice ye repute)
I execute, enjoined me from above,
To scourge the pride of such as heaven abhors;
Nor am I made arch-monarch of the world,
Crowned and invested by the hand of Jove,
For deeds of bounty or nobility. (Part 2, 4.1.145–51)

Here, he defines his “deeds” in the negative and asserts his identity
as “scourge.”24 His status as “arch-monarch of the world” is made pos-
sible by deeds that are, it seems, too terrible to invoke directly. They are
characterized only by what they are not: bounteous and noble. Armor,
like deeds, is associated with “proof,” which refers to both the hardness
or impenetrability of steel armor and its ability to prove, or legitimate,
identity.25 A “proof mark” on an early modern suit of armor, or the
dint of a bullet, indicated its strength. In Part 2 of Tamburlaine the
Great, Tamburlaine says to Celebinus, “Well, done, my boy, thou shalt
have a shield and lance,/Armour of proof, horse, helm, and curtle-axe
…” (Part 2, 1.4.43–44). Here, his son’s “armour of proof” assures his
familial identity (he is his father’s son) and his military readiness or
fitness.
Tamburlaine’s onstage arming is the first military “deed” of the play,
and he narrates the significance of this action to Zenocrate.26 The potential
fruits of erotic conquest are displaced by geographical conquest, and the
potential of the latter form of conquest is located squarely in his dress.
In claiming ownership of his masculine military dress, Tamburlaine claims
ownership of his military self and of all that this self will claim in the
future. He situates his own body—not that of Zenocrate—as the body
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 35

from which future greatness will spring, fully formed and dressed for suc-
cess. His “complete” armored self is also recompense for her “loss”:

This complete armour and this curtle-axe

Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine,
And, madam, whatsoever you esteem
Of this success and loss unvalued,
Both may invest you empress of the East.
And these that seem but silly country swains
May have the leading of so great an host
As with their weight shall make the mountains quake,
Even as when windy exhalations
Fighting for passage tilt within the earth. (Part 1, 1.2.42–51)

His reference to “this” armor and curtle-axe suggests that the clothing
is both a part of himself and apart from himself. If one of his followers
holds the armor while he disrobes, Tamburlaine’s speech directs the theat-
rical audience’s attention to this object as he claims it. His use of the future
tense suggests that his clothing constitutes a contract with his onstage
audience and theatrical audiences; the armor is also, of course, emblem-
atic of his honorable intentions toward Zenocrate and his adherence to
the codes of chivalry, which as in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
operates as an intervening militant tradition that is both nostalgic and
fashionable. These dual contracts, both marital and theatrical, are rooted
in Tamburlaine’s armored body. His clothing provides a visual corollary
to his predictive mode, and his promised “value” as a military subject and
a potential husband is, like Zenocrate’s briefly acknowledged loss, beyond
estimation. Techelles’ response also looks toward the future:

As princely lions when they rouse themselves,

Stretching out their paws and threat’ning herds of beasts,
So in his armour looketh Tamburlaine.
Methinks I see kings kneeling at his feet
And he, with frowning brows and fiery looks,
Spurning their crowns from off their captive heads. (Part 1, 1.2.52–57)

For Techelles, Tamburlaine’s armor renders him “princely” and also capa-
ble of claiming the very symbol of monarchy: the crown. This connection
between crowns and armor resurfaces later in Part 1. For now, Techelles’
36 S. HARLAN

lines wishfully naturalize Tamburlaine’s armored body; he is a “lion,” not a

military leader. Conversely, Tamburlaine draws attention to the active trans-
formation—indeed, the “deed” of dressing—that must occur in order for
him to lead “so great an host.” Tamburlaine’s self-arming is the means by
which he actively constructs his “complete” military self on stage out of its
parts. Like Achilles, Aeneas, and St. Paul before him, the military subject
must don one piece of “adjunct” armor at a time. This process draws atten-
tion to the constructed nature of the leader’s militarized body and the social
and cultural values this body represents. In Act 2 of Part 1, Tamburlaine
outlines for Cosroe how the mutual relation of the body’s constituent parts
determines its militarized form and character:

Nature that framed us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring planet’s course. (Part 1, 2.7.18–23)

Here, the body not only participates in war, but it is itself a site of war.27
The “elements” that “frame” the human are militarized, and the soul, not
the body, may “measure” the universe. This is a form of “regiment,” of
conquest.
His alliance to Achilles is also bolstered by what Tanya Pollard has
deemed him cutaneous invulnerability; this is another reason that his
armor is “adjunct.” She reminds us that,

For many early writers, the skin offered a powerful symbol for the security
of the body and self. In both medical texts and works of imaginative lit-
erature—especially plays, intimately bound up with the real bodies of their
actors and audiences—writers confronted the body’s vulnerability through
exploring the nature of the skin. Over the course of the period, the notion
of healthy permeability gradually gave way to fantasies of the body as an
impenetrable fortress, sealed off from the world through a protective and
vigilantly guarded cover.28

Pollard characterizes Tamburlaine as “perhaps the most exuberantly

invulnerable stage hero”: “Because his ‘charmed Skin’ lies at the heart
of his mythology, his enemies cannot imagine anything more triumphant
than piercing it.”29 The “soldier’s fantasy” is “personal immunity from
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 37

the violence of war.”30 Like Achilles, Tamburlaine is, in a sense, doubly

armored.
It is difficult to say what this armor may have looked like on stage.
We know that theater companies inherited their clothing from the extra-
theatrical world. Igor Kopytoff argues that as specific objects “move
through different hands, contexts, and uses, [they accumulate] a specific
biography, or set of biographies.”31 He refers to this as a “cultural biogra-
phy of things.” Tamburlaine’s “complete” armor possesses certain physi-
cal characteristics and a particular history, both of which inform how, and
what, it signifies on stage. It possesses two related biographies, both as an
actual early modern material object and as a prop that is imbued with dra-
matic significance. We also know that costumes and properties were often
recycled from performance to performance in the early modern English
public theaters. Marvin Carlson argues that this practice of reusing props
causes them to be “ghosted” by their previous stage incarnations,32 and
Jonathan Miller notes that the recycling of properties imbues them with
an “afterlife.”33 For Carlson, the stage prop looks backwards; for Miller,
it looks to the future and to its later incarnations. It is conceivable that
Tamburlaine’s armor may have been recognizable from other perfor-
mances, in which case his appropriation of this object casts him not only
in a broad Western cultural tradition of self-arming military figures but
also in a more localized and recent theatrical tradition.
Unfortunately, there are few extant theater records for transactions
for armor and even fewer that indicate what this military clothing may
have looked like on stage. Tamburlaine’s “complete armour” may have
been contemporary; it may also have been outmoded. Paul Kocher notes
that, “the armies and tactics described in Tamburlaine are, except in
a few superficial details, neither oriental nor early fifteenth century as
historical realism would require.”34 There is every reason to believe that
“historical realism” may not have been a priority in dressing the actors.
Certainly, Tamburlaine’s “curtle-axe” is not contemporary to sixteenth-
century England. He later describes this weapon as “the keenest curtle-
axe/That e’er made passage through Persian arms” (Part 1, 2.3.55–56).
As both Peter Stallybrass and Stephen Orgel have noted, the theater’s
chief means of acquiring clothing was through the inheritance of sec-
ond-hand garments.35 Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones further note
that, “The theatre itself had become a collector and renter of armor,
transforming the insignia of martial prowess into money-making display.
But the theatrical stagings often suggested that armor was outmoded.”36
38 S. HARLAN

Tamburlaine’s armor and “curtle-axe” are what Jonathan Gil Harris

refers to as “polytemporal” objects:

Many ‘Renaissance’ objects were not of the Renaissance as such but sur-
vivals from an older time: think, for example, of the medieval monastic
garments that, post-Reformation, were recycled for display in the public
playhouses; or of London’s old Roman walls, still visible in Shakespeare’s
lifetime alongside subsequent additions and renovations. Such polytemporal
objects—of the English Renaissance, yet not of it—might be characterized
as untimely matter.37

For Harris, the term “‘time’ can … refer to an understanding of the

temporal relations among past, present, and future.”38 Armor is not of
one time. It is an object that is relegated to the past and simultaneously
profoundly present. All armor was to some extent outmoded by the 1580s
and 1590s—it was a material manifestation of militant nostalgia, a mode
of dress that linked one to the past.
Henslowe’s records mention only one transaction for armor:

Lent vnto John thare the 30th of septmber 1602

To paye vnto the armerer for targattes
In full payment the some of … xxs.39

A “target” is a light round shield or buckler; a shield was convention-

ally considered part of a suit of armor, as were certain weapons.40 As these
shields are being acquired from “the armerer,” they may be new, but this
was certainly not always the case. “The Enventary tacken of all the prop-
erties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598” lists the
following:

Item, j wooden hatchett; j leather hatchete. […]

Item, j copper targate, & xvij foyles.
Item, iiij wooden targates; j greve armer.41

These entries suggest that “fake” armor may have been used on stage,
for the “hatchett” and “targates” are made of wood, as was much funeral
armor in the extra-theatrical world.42 It is not certain what other materi-
als might have been used to create this mock armor, but papier-mâché
or “cuir-bouilli” are possibilities.43 But some stage armor was certainly
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 39

real. “The Enventory of all the aparell of the Lord Admeralles men, taken
the 13th of Marche 1598” also lists an entry for “Item, j greve armer,”44
which refers to a piece of armor for the leg below the knee. This order for
a particular piece of armor may indicate that the acquisition of whole suits
may not have been a priority or that the theater companies simply needed
to acquire particular pieces to complete inherited suits of armor.
Leah S. Marcus notes that the 1590 edition “included a portrait of the
plays’ great hero at the beginning of Part II (sig. F2V). Such portraits in
play texts are unusual at this period; this one helps to bind the text to its
earlier performances by depicting a late-middle-aged, very English-looking
warrior in armour, much as the ageing hero of Part II may have appeared
on stage.”45 She maintains that, “The book of Tamburlaine gives a kind
of permanence to its otherwise evanescent stage hero, his monumental
exploits, and his gloriously dangerous power of performative speech.”46
The armored portrait also suggests that Tamburlaine’s military dress was a
chief means by which he was rendered familiar to his theatrical—and read-
erly—audience. His armor brings him into the contemporary moment of
performance and into the fold of English national military identity.47 If the
portrait does in fact reflect his armor as it was staged in Part II, it may have
been similar in Part I. The portrait certainly looks forward to Vaughan’s
later representation of Tamburlaine in full armor.
Although it is not clear what Tamburlaine’s armor looked like on stage,
he says that it is “complete.” In Act 1 of Part 2, another “complete” armor
is invoked, for Orcanes refers to “Our warlike host in complete armour
rest” (Part 2, 1.1.8). A “complete” armor is composed of parts. Its whole-
ness is constructed. Tamburlaine’s armor is “complete” in the sense of
whole and also finished or achieved, the sartorial culmination of his ambi-
tion. A whole suit of armor has composite parts; this fact raises compelling
questions about the staging of military dress on the early modern English
stage. In Henry Peacham’s 1595 drawing, which is likely of a performance
of Titus Andronicus, Titus appears to be outfitted in a Roman breastplate.
It is likely that in some performances, as in the Titus drawing, a part of a
suit of armor—such as a breastplate—signified the whole suit. The armor
in the Titus drawing is “Roman,” but there is no reason to believe that the
same practice was not applied to suits of armor such as Tamburlaine’s, as
well. Titus’ breastplate functions as a synecdoche that suggests the pres-
ence of a whole armor as well as the personal or cultural values that the
clothing represents. Tamburlaine’s armor likewise signifies, or embodies,
40 S. HARLAN

such values. Keir Elam uses the example of armor to illustrate how this
“secondary” meaning is constructed in the theater:

... the theatrical sign inevitably acquires secondary meanings for the audi-
ence, relating it to the social moral and ideological values operative in the
community of which performers and spectators are part. It may be, for
example, that in addition to the denoted class “armour” a martial costume
comes to signify for a particular audience “valour” or “manliness”.48

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the value of armor was increas-
ingly symbolic—or “secondary”—as the use of gunpowder had rendered
suits of armor virtually useless. In other words, a type of clothing that
had originally been intended for protection of the self was being used for
projection, or performance, of the self. Robbed of its practical value, armor
could only signify ceremonially and theatrically.49 After arming himself,
Tamburlaine observes ironically of the Persian king that, “Noble and mild
this Persian seems to be,/If outward habit judge the inward man” (Part
1, 1.2.162–3). The question of how, and what, the “outward habit” may
reveal about “the inward man” is a crucial concern in these plays. As I
mentioned in the introduction, “habit” refers to both clothing and prac-
tice and suggests their interconnectedness.
When Tamburlaine refers to his armour and curtle-axe as “adjuncts
more beseeming Tamburlaine,” (Part 1, 1.2.43) he establishes a complex
and ambivalent relationship between subject and object, character and
clothing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “adjunct” as “something
joined or connected with another, and subordinate to it in position, func-
tion, character, or essence; either as auxiliary to it, or essentially depend-
ing upon it.” In Shakespeare’s King John (c.1596), Hubert draws on the
meaning of “adjunct” as dependent or connected when he exclaims, “…
what you bid me undertake/Though that my death were adjunct to my
act,/By heaven, I would do it” (John 3.3.59–61). But an adjunct is also
inseparable from that to which it is connected, as Berowne notes in Love’s
Labour’s Lost (c.1594) when he explains that, “Learning is but an adjunct to
ourself,/And where we are, our learning likewise is” (LLL 4.3.314–15). This
second meaning underscores an intimacy between “ourself” and “adjunct.”
By dressing himself, Tamburlaine acknowledges his armor as “adjunct” in
several senses: he connects the pieces of armor to one another, he joins
his armor to himself, and he acknowledges his dependence—both real and
symbolic—on it. His military dress is necessary to his self-construction.
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 41

Rhetorically, an “adjunct” is an enlargement used to amplify a discourse

or augment its force. Certainly, Tamburlaine’s armor amplifies his martial
speech and self. An “adjunct” is thus both in excess of a thing-as-it-is
and simultaneously less than, or subordinate to, it. Tamburlaine’s armor is
also possibly annexed or stolen, another meaning of “adjunct.” It has no
history, no past—it simply appears onstage. If it is presented in 1.2 as yet
another treasure from Damascus, it is the play’s first military spoil and one
that enables the acquisition of other spoils. The spoiled armor would also
suggest that identity, too, may be claimed by military violence.
War has “adjuncts” other than armor in the plays. In Part 2, Tamburlaine
says to Celebinus:

But now my boys, leave off, and list to me,

That mean to teach you rudiments of war:
I’ll have you learn to sleep upon the ground,
March in your armour through watery fens,
Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold,
Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war. (Part 2, 3.2.53–58)

These adjuncts are described as “right,” or correct. They are, in a sense,

beseeming war, which is the term Tamburlaine uses in reference to his
adjunct clothing: his armor and curtle-axe are “adjunct more beseeming
Tamburlaine” than his robes. To “beseem” is to suit in appearance, to
become or befit; an object that “beseems” a subject operates in accor-
dance with the appearance or character of that subject. The idea of mili-
tary fitness resurfaces later in Part 1. In 5.2, Tamburlaine refers to other
“objects fit for Tamburlaine.” I argued earlier that these plays negotiate a
relationship between the material objects of war and the objects, or goals,
of war. In Act 5, Tamburlaine summarizes his accomplishments:

The Turk and his great empress, as it seems,

Have desperately dispatched their slavish lives;
With them Arabia too hath left his life—
All sights of power to grace my victory.
And such are objects fit for Tamburlaine. (Part 1, 5.2.408–12)

Here, the “objects fit for Tamburlaine” are both his military goals and
the objects of his all-consuming gaze: what he refers to as his “sights of
power.” David Thurn notes that Tamburlaine creates “sights of power”
in order to establish sovereignty.50 These “objects,” or goals, are “fit for
42 S. HARLAN

Tamburlaine” as his armor is “more beseeming Tamburlaine” (Part 1,

1.2.42). He repeats the term “fit” in Act 3: “For ‘will’ and ‘shall’ best
fitteth Tamburlaine,/Whose smiling starts give him assured hope/Of
martial triumph, ere he meet his foes” (Part 1, 3.3.41–3). “Fit” objects are
also, of course, dead subjects. This is how Kyd employs the term “fit” in
The Spanish Tragedy (c.1582–92): in 4.1, when Balthazar asks Hieronimo
to write a “show,” Hieronimo offers the punning response, “Why then
I’ll fit you” (ST 4.1.70). Hieronimo seems to offer Balthazar a fitting
entertainment, but he also alludes to his violent plan for revenge. Like
a fit play, a fit weapon might be used to render one’s enemy “fit.” In
this scene, Hieronimo holds a book, his weapon of choice. In the cases
of both Tamburlaine and Hieronimo, violence is inherent in the process
of rendering fit. For Tamburlaine, his fit clothing not only assures his
military fitness but also foreshadows his death. When he declares these
objects as “fit” for himself, he performs an act of appropriation: he claims
these goals as he claims his armor, which is another such “object fit for
Tamburlaine” because it is (one assumes) the correct size and because
it “beseems” him. His armor is both fitting and adjunct, an emblem of
violence that Tamburlaine—and, in turn, his theatrical audience—views
with ambivalence.
Marlowe explores how objects dictate dramatic and military suitability
elsewhere in the plays, as well. The prologue to Part 1 rejects the “con-
ceits” of comedy in favor of certain objects of war:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortunes as you please. (Part 1, Prologue, 1–8)

I have argued that Tamburlaine’s self-arming sets up the playhouse

audience’s expectation of the performance of military violence or “deeds”
by casting Tamburlaine in a tradition of self-arming figures. The prologue
operates in a related manner, for it is here that Marlowe takes on, or puts
on, the past—in generic terms. He situates himself in relationship to the
tradition, or set of dramatic “conceits,” or conventions, that govern the
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 43

dramatization of militarism and the figure of the elite military subject.51

By establishing an implicit interest in the “conceits” of war, the prologue
engages with what “fits” or “beseems” the representation of war, which
is here imagined as “the stately tent of war.” Prologues occupy a unique
position in a play that allows them to comment on the drama from a lim-
inal space. As Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann note of prologues:

... it is precisely because dramatic prologues were asked to—among other

things—introduce and request that they took up a position before and appar-
ently ‘outside’ the world of the play. From this crucial position, prologues
were able to function as interactive, liminal, boundary-breaking entities that
negotiated charged thresholds between and among, variously, playwrights,
actors, characters, audience members, playworlds, and the world outside the
playhouse … The privileged and liminal position that prologues enjoyed—
their place before the dramatic spectacle—produced one of their greatest
attractions for those interested in how these plays were designed to appeal
to, and mean for, their audiences.52

Prologues mediate a series of complex relationships.53 In the prologue

to Part 1, Marlowe invokes past plays—or “conceits”—in order to reject
them. The prologue first foregrounds what one will not see and hear. War
requires the rejection of feminized comedy: the “rhyming mother wits”
are replaced by the violence of high tragedy, and “clownage” is placed in
opposition to “war.” The prologue’s sobering announcement that there
will be no comedy is borne out in Richard Jones’ preface “To the gentle-
men readers: and others that take pleasure in reading histories,” in which
he asserts that,

I have (purposely) omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures,
digressing (and in my poor opinion) far unmeet for the matter, which I
thought, might seem more tedious unto the wise, than any way else to
be regarded, though (haply) they have been of some vain conceited fon-
dlings greatly gaped at, what times they were showed upon the stage in their
graced deformities.54

For Wilson, “fond and frivolous gestures” are not suited to the play’s
military “matter.” Bevington cites F.P. Wilson’s argument that the play’s
comedy had to be excised because of the prologue’s explicit rejection of
such “conceits,” but he also acknowledges that, “An alternative possibil-
ity is that the ambitious young Marlowe devised or rewrote the prologue
44 S. HARLAN

especially for the printed edition, deliberately catering to those who would
welcome a sneer at lowbrow conventions.”55 At any rate, the play’s com-
edy is missing, and this omission allows the prologue to “lead” his audi-
ence to “the stately tent of war.”
This “stately tent of war” is a temporary space and an emblem of the
play’s martial subject matter.56 It is, in a sense, the very space into which
Jones refuses to admit the play’s comedic conceits. The tent is also the
play’s first object of war, and like Tamburlaine’s armor, it is an object of
promise.57 The prologue’s use of the future tense—“We’ll lead you …”—
looks forward to the performance of Tamburlaine’s military exploits and
suggests that the theatrical audience will participate in the violence of con-
quest. The audience will be directed to a particular end; they will be led
to “the stately tent of war,” which may or may not have been present on
stage. This tent also stands in opposition to other, non-martial tents in the
plays. In Part 2, Tamburlaine invokes a tent in which subjects “carouse”:

Hast thou not seen my horsemen charge the foe,

Shot through the arms, cut overthwart the hands,
Dying their lances with their streaming blood,
And yet at night carouse within my tent
Filling their empty veins with airy wine
That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood,
And wilt thou shun the field for fear of wounds? (Part 2, 3.2.103–09)

From the early fifteenth century, “tent” also referred to a roll of soft,
absorbent material used to keep open, or cleanse, a wound. Tamburlaine
draws on this resonance between tents and wounds here: one “shuns the
field”—or seeks out the tent—as an alternative to the wounds of the battle-
field. One tent replaces another. In Act 4 of Part 2, Olympia describes her
own “tent” as an encompassing structure cut off from the external world:

Distressed Olympia, whose weeping eyes

Since thy arrival here beheld no sun,
But closed within the compass of a tent
Hath stained thy cheeks and made thee look like death. (Part 2, 4.2.1–4).

Like the “airy wine/That … turns to crimson blood” to which

Tamburlaine alludes, her “stained” cheeks are wounds of sorts. Both
Tamburlaine and Olympia invoke the absorbent potential of the tent: in
Tamburlaine’s case, the carousing soldiers’ wine-filled veins will bleed, and
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 45

in Olympia’s case, the tent hides her “weeping” eyes and stained cheeks.
When Tamburlaine and his followers construct a memorial to Zenocrate
in Part 2, he says that her picture “shalt be set upon my royal tent …”
(Part 2, 3.2.37). By placing her picture on his “royal tent,” Tamburlaine
belatedly claims Zenocrate as part of the military realm of the play.
The prologue controls the audience’s reaction: even his appeal to
“applaud his fortunes as you please” constitutes an order as much as a
request. In her study of how violence relates to “the early modern impulse
to undo or negate the emergent self,” Cynthia Marshall maintains that,

Understanding violent entertainment to emerge, express, or reflect the cul-

ture within which it appears, cultural historians neglect the dimension of
how and why viewers and readers (presumably) enjoyed it. Entertaining an
audience is part of any text’s goal, but it is for semiotic rather than intention-
alist reasons that we need to consider this issue: the site at which texts take
on meaning is that of the reader or viewer. And this dimension is accordingly
crucial to discerning how and why violent entertainments signified.58

The prologue’s promise to “lead” his audience is fundamentally coer-

cive.59 His speech is a manifesto, a challenge, a mandate, a dare.60 The audi-
ence will be led through a dramatic experience as captives are led across
the stage in triumph. This forward movement mirrors and foreshadows
the plays’ relentless forward movement and Tamburlaine’s ceaseless desire
for conquest. As Tamburlaine’s armor prepares, and indeed compels, him
to participate in military violence, so does the prologue “arm” the audi-
ence for the play itself.
Both language and objects operate coercively in the plays, and military
control is frequently imagined as rhetorical control. Part 1 opens with
Mycetes’ acknowledgment of linguistic failure: “Brother Cosroe, I find
myself aggrieved/Yet insufficient to express the same,/For it requires a
great and thund’ring speech” (Part 1, 1.1.1–3). Mycetes cannot muster
a “thund’ring speech” commensurate to Tamburlaine’s “threat’ning”
terms. In deferring to Cosroe, Mycetes establishes himself as the play’s first
defeated subject, and this defeat occurs on the playing fields of language.
In Part 2 of the play, Tamburlaine reiterates the connection between lan-
guage and violence when he says, “My speech of war, and this my wound
you see/Teach you, my boys, to bear courageous minds/Fit for the fol-
lowers of great Tamburlaine” (Part 2, 3.2.142–4). This “speech of war” is
both speech that gives rise to war and speech that “fits” war.
46 S. HARLAN

PRESENTING SHIELDS AS ARMING IN EDWARD II

To contextualize the treatment of Tamburlaine’s military dress, I turn to
another Marlovian instance of dramatic characters narrating the signifi-
cance of objects of war. In Edward II, Mortimer Junior’s and Lancaster’s
display of their shields is likewise accompanied by narrative. Tournament
shields are divorced from violent military exploits and function as symbols,
not weapons. These heraldic devices, the sign of the knight, present a mili-
tary iconography and vocabulary that has been pacified and subsumed into
the realm of the performative. In this scene, the presentation of shields is
a form of arming: Lancaster and Mortimer Junior symbolically arm them-
selves. But defense is tantamount to provocation, for this symbolic arming
will have very real consequences later in the play. By displaying the shields
and reading their mottos to the monarch, Mortimer Junior and Lancaster
deflect immediate violence and offer a warning, but the shields’ mottos
nonetheless function as a form of prolepsis, for they promise future vio-
lence. This symbolic self-arming provokes Edward and signals, or enables,
a future attack on Gaveston. In Tamburlaine’s scene of self-arming, he
promises his theatrical audience military violence by constructing and pre-
senting his militarized body. Conversely, Lancaster and Mortimer Junior
present not their bodies but, as Edward notes, their “minds.”
I follow Bevington and James Shapiro in thinking that these shields
were likely displayed on stage in 2.2,61 for Edward responds:

Proud Mortimer! Ungentle Lancaster!

Is this the love you bear your sovereign?
Is this the fruit your reconciliation bears?
Can you in words make show of amity
And in your shield display your rancorous minds? (E2, 2.2.29–33, emphasis
mine)62

Edward’s theatrical language of “show” and “display” underscores the

connectedness of militarism and performance in the play: the soldier-as-actor
trope resurfaces throughout, as many critics have noted. The shields are
both weapons and props: they are used to communicate with the monarch.
Ultimately, Edward deems Mortimer Junior and Lancaster “proud” and
“ungentle” for this performance (E2, 2.2.29). Like Tamburlaine’s armor,
the shields are contested sites of meaning. Mortimer Junior and Lancaster
mean to indirectly express their disapproval of Gaveston’s power at court.
The shields are instruments of warning and instruction, but in order to
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 47

fulfill their admonishing function, these shields must be interpreted—much

as Tamburlaine interprets his own military dress for his onstage and offstage
audiences—and this act of interpretation is aggressive. Mortimer Junior and
Lancaster repurpose their defensive shields as linguistic weapons.
Mortimer Junior’s shield naturalizes the monarch as “lofty cedar”
invaded by a parasite:

A lofty cedar tree fair flourishing,

On whose top branches kingly eagles perch,
And by the bark a canker creeps me up
And gets unto the highest bough of all;
The motto: AEque tandem. (E2, 2.2.16–20)

As Charles R. Forker notes in his edition of the play, the motto—“equal

finally” or “equal in height”—refers to Gaveston’s dangerous acquisition
of power and influence.63 It is in the interplay between text and image
that the shield’s meaning resides. The motto remains untranslated in the
play, and many audience members would not have understood the Latin
phrase. The image, however, performs a kind of translation of the motto,
suggesting that the visual enjoys a privileged position in this scene’s treat-
ment of these objects of war. Mortimer Junior’s lines remind us that the
visual must be narrated—and that the comprehension of these mottos is
likewise dependent on their visual counterparts. Thus the motto “AEque
tandem” also hints at an equality of word and image. This scene pres-
ents a struggle for dominance between political rivals, but in the dynamic
between word and image, neither emerges as dominant.
Edward offers no immediate reaction to Mortimer Junior’s description
of his shield. Mortimer Junior characterizes his “device” (E2, 2.2.11) as
“A homely one, my lord, not worth the telling” (E2, 2.2.13). His protes-
tation of the shield’s insignificance suggests precisely the opposite. The
shield represents a dangerous equality, a commensurability that is deeply
problematic. Tamburlaine’s self-arming is likewise a moment of one sub-
ject rendering himself equal to another, for he asserts his own position
in a long, illustrious line of warriors. Mortimer Junior’s use of the term
“telling” suggests that in order for his shield to be properly apprehended,
it must be described; its significance must be elucidated by a figure who
understands, and can translate, the iconography of impresa. Mottos are
both particular and general, for although one’s motto is unique to oneself,
a motto is also emblematic of one’s status as a member of a group that
48 S. HARLAN

shares certain cultural values. Mortimer Junior speaks of his motto dismis-
sively, but in doing so he only underscores its value as a warning to a weak
monarch. Lancaster speaks of his own shield as “obscure,” suggesting that
the shield’s meaning is difficult to comprehend or does not immediately
reveal itself. Lancaster’s shield is a sort of militarized memento mori:

My lord, mine’s more obscure than Mortimer’s:

Pliny reports there is a flying fish
Which all the other fishes deadly hate,
And therefore, being pursued, it takes the air;
No sooner is it up, but there’s a fowl
That seizeth it; this fish, my lord, I bear;
The motto this: Undique mors est. (E2, 2.2.22–28)

Lancaster’s admonishing “motto” that “Death is all around us” differs

from Mortimer’s, which is more narrative in character. Lancaster’s is part
observation, part prediction. Tamburlaine imagines himself as Death when
he addresses the doomed virgins of Damascus in Part 1: “Your fearful
minds are thick and misty then,/For there sits Death, there sits imperious
Death,/Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge” (Part 1, 5.2.47–49). In
another fantastical vision of Tamburlaine as Death, a Messenger describes
Tamburlaine’s armor as black and monolithic:

But if these threats move not submission,

Black are his colours, black pavilion,
His pear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes,
And jetty feathers menace death and hell. (Part 1, 4.1.58–61)

Tamburlaine’s militarized body is the material embodiment of

Lancaster’s warning “Undique mors est.” Although Lancaster appeals
to the “report” or authority of Pliny, this material is not to be found in
Pliny but rather in Sir John Hawkins’s Second Voyage (1565) and later in
Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589). His invocation of Pliny
obscures the actual situation of which he speaks; by quoting (or misquot-
ing) his source, he is able to address the king’s relationship with Gaveston
obliquely. Quotation is a form of repetition; it is a return to an earlier text.
If the shield is on stage in this scene, Lancaster correctly reads, but misat-
tributes, its text. If the shield is not on stage, he very possibly invents not
only the attribution but also the text itself. Regardless, this return to an
earlier text—this turn to the past—is undertaken in order to influence the
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 49

future. Self-arming allows for violence: a defensive act paradoxically assures

the subject’s participation in military conflict.
Edward’s anger at this “display” underscores the problematic relation-
ship between the “mind” and the objects of war. Both mind and shield
contain or communicate information that is “private,” for he asks, “What
call you this but private libelling/Against the Earl of Cornwall and my
brother?” (E2, 2.2.34–5). His assertion that the shields “display” his sub-
jects’ “rancorous minds” (E2, 2.2.32–3) suggests that display is public
and open, but the term “private libelling” suggests a more closed, circum-
scribed exchange. The question of whether the shields do indeed reveal
the “minds” of Mortimer Junior and Lancaster is at the very heart of this
scene. Edward responds by issuing his own warning, which borders on a
threat:

They love me not that hate my Gaveston.

I am that cedar (shake me not too much!)
And you the eagles; soar ye ne’er so high,
I have the jesses that will pull you down,
And AEque tandem shall that canker cry
Unto the proudest peer of Britainy.
Though thou compar’st him to a flying fish,
And threat’nest death whether he rise or fall,
‘Tis not the hugest monster of the sea
Nor foulest harpy that shall swallow him. (E2, 2.2.38–47)

Edward ironically accepts the images of Gaveston as canker and flying

fish, but he rejects the predictions that Lancaster and Mortimer Junior
issue. He rejects the shields as illegitimate. Like Tamburlaine’s scene of
self-arming, this is a scene about display, and Marlowe engages with the
legitimacy—and the legitimating capacity—of these objects of war. For
Edward, his subjects’ shields question whether he is a worthy king, and
his refusal to heed their warning precipitates his end. His subjects read
these shields for him, but he misreads them as he misreads his own situ-
ation. The revisionist reading he offers in his response is insufficient, for
its truthfulness is not assured by its status as motto. He cannot prove the
veracity of his own prediction, for it is not to be found on any shield. For
Tamburlaine, his armor assures—or proves—that he is a worthy military
leader. Unlike Edward, he successfully claims the objects, and the lan-
guage, of war and imbues these objects with the power to signify apart
from himself.
50 S. HARLAN

Perhaps surprisingly, shields do not figure prominently in the Tamburlaine

plays. When Tamburlaine self-arms in 1.2, he selects a “curtle-axe” as his
weapon of choice and promises that he and his followers will “bear empires
on our spears” (Part 1, 1.2.64), but he does not mention shields. Although
armor is protective, or defensive, Tamburlaine overwhelmingly imagines his
armor as rendering him capable of offensive undertakings, and he resem-
bles Achilles in his almost mythic inability to be wounded. Achilles’ famous
armor is supplementary, for his body is already impenetrable, save his vulner-
able heel. In Part 2, Tamburlaine wounds himself after Zenocrate’s death,
claiming that, “Now look I like a soldier …” (Part 2, 3.2.117). In this
moment, he reasserts his status as a militarized subject by assuming once
again the appearance of a “soldier.” Several acts later, Tamburlaine refers
to his “martial flesh” (Part 2, 4.1.105). Paradoxically, it is by wounding
himself that he proves his own impenetrability, his status as armored even
when not armored. This scene also proves his sons’ martial worthiness, for
Tamburlaine asks Celebinus, Calyphas, and Amyras to “search my wound”
(Part 2, 3.2.26), and Celebinus and Amyras demand wounds of their own
in turn. This is, of course, one of many moments in which Calyphas absents
himself from martial deeds, and his language—he deems his father’s wound
“a pitiful sight” (Part 2, 3.2.131)—stands in stark opposition to that of his
father. But his pacifism shores up the family’s militaristic identity: by recoil-
ing from his father’s “martial flesh,” he underscores its status as a compel-
ling, and repellent, aesthetic object.

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR: THE ARMORED SUBJECT

AS AESTHETIC OBJECT

I have argued that Tamburlaine actively constructs his military self by

engaging with a discourse of appearance-as-deed and that his armored body
inspires both revulsion and desire. Armor figures prominently elsewhere in
the plays, both as an object that appears on stage and as an object that is
reported or discussed. Overwhelmingly, Marlowe’s military subjects judge
one another by appearance. In this section, I will argue that the beauty of
the armor in the Tamburlaine plays displaces the military function of such
clothing and renders military figures aesthetic objects, things of beauty to
be gazed upon and admired.64 In order to contextualize the plays’ treatment
of sumptuous military dress, I will examine the pictorial representations
of Tamburlaine in Robert Vaughan’s The Pourtraitures at Large of Nine
Moderne Worthies of the World and The Almain Armourer’s Album.
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 51

The fact that this illustration is several decades later than the plays suggests
that the armored Tamburlaine was still a figure of some fascination. The
image illustrates how the armored body negotiates a fraught relationship
between the unique and the uniform, the solitary and the serial.65
Tamburlaine appears first in Vaughan’s Pourtraitures (Fig. 1.1).
He is followed by eight other English and foreign figures in full military
dress, including Mohammed, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Henry V,
among others. Tamburlaine stands with his face in profile, his left hand on
his hip, his plumed helmet positioned, to the right, on the ground beside
him. His enormous shield occupies much of the lower left-hand side of
the engraving, and Tamburlaine’s armored body is flanked by his helmet
and shield. The caption reads: “Tamerlane Emperour of Tartarie called
the wrath of God and terrour of the World, He overthrew and tooke prisoner
BAIAZET Great Emperour of the Turks, shutting him up in an Iron Cage:
His Army consisting of 1000000 men. He also Conquered Mesopotamia,
Babilon, with the Kingdome of Persia. He died 1402.” The other “worthy”
figures in this series are also dressed in full or partial armor, and all stand in
essentially the same position, turned to the right or to the left. The shield
is the chief accessory of each figure, and each is emblazoned with the
heraldic symbols that identify and legitimate the subjects. This emphasis
on shields contrasts with the seeming absence of shields in Tamburlaine
and recalls the emphasis on the offensive nature of shields in Edward II.
In a move that is analogous to the play’s prologue and Tamburlaine’s
scene of self-arming, these portraits place these nine subjects in a com-
pelling relationship to one another, both temporally and spatially.
Tamburlaine is one of a series. By gathering these figures together, this
series collapses time in an exercise in militant nostalgia. The series also
establishes a tradition of “worthiness” into which these figures enter. The
images are very similar overall insofar as each depicts a figure in full mili-
tary dress. Like the others, the image of Tamburlaine is a portrait not of a
man but of his clothing. Tamburlaine’s “complete armour” is depicted in
exquisite detail. This illustration provides a vision of Tamburlaine as liber-
ated from theatrical representation. This portrait represents a transition,
or translation, of the armored Tamburlaine from the theater to the printed
page; it also underscores the extent to which his armored body remained
a culturally powerful image of military prowess into the seventeenth cen-
tury. The engraving draws attention to the date of Tamburlaine’s death in
1402, but it simultaneously presents this image as beyond time, as out of
time. The art of “Pourtraiture” renders Tamburlaine “Moderne” as well
52 S. HARLAN

Fig. 1.1 Robert Vaughan, “Tamburlaine,” Pourtraitures of Nine Modern

Worthies of the World, 1622
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 53

as establishing him as a historically significant figure whose “worthiness”

can only be ascertained at a later cultural moment and in relationship to
other exemplary figures.
In Edward II, Mortimer Junior bemoans the “garish robes” of player-
soldiers in his elaboration of Holinshed’s account of the Bannockburn
campaign:

When wert thou in the field with banner spread?

But once! And then thy soldiers marched like players,
With garish robes, not armour, and thyself,
Bedaubed with gold, rode laughing at the rest,
Nodding and shaking thy spangled crest,
Where women’s favours hung like labels down. (E2, 2.2.181–86)

Conversely, in Tamburlaine, “garish robes” cannot compete with the

luxurious armor that the play both stages and invokes. Mortimer Junior’s
insistence on the practical function of armor in Edward II is in stark con-
trast to its treatment as a sort of wartime luxury good in Tamburlaine.
Moments after Tamburlaine arms himself in Part 1, he and a soldier dis-
cuss the armor of the off-stage enemy. The armor of these anonymous
figures renders them objects of desire:

Tamburlaine. A thousand horsemen! We five hundred foot!

An odds too great for us to stand against.
But are they rich? And is their armour good?
Soldier. Their plumed helms are wrought with beaten gold,
Their swords enameled, and about their neck
Hangs massy chains of gold down to the waist,
In every part exceeding brave and rich. (Part 1, 1.2.121–27)

This is only one of many reports in the play of the enemy’s enormous
armies.66 Tamburlaine imagines this huge number of soldiers—and the
resulting battle “odds”—in terms of their “rich” and “good” military
dress. He fixates on their armor. Moments later, in a moment of misrecog-
nition, Theridamas comments on Tamburlaine’s clothing in an aside:
“Tamburlaine?/A Scythian shepherd, so embellished/With nature’s pride
and richest furniture?” (Part 1, 1.2.154–6). Here, “richest furniture”
refers to Tamburlaine’s armor. This aside establishes a connection between
54 S. HARLAN

his onstage and offstage audience, for both are asked to evaluate him as a
military leader based on his appearance. In Act 4, a Messenger reports to
the Soldan that, “Three hundred thousand men in armour clad,/Upon
their prancing steeds, disdainfully/With wanton paces trampling on the
ground …” (Part 1, 4.1.21–3). The armor of this militarized mass is
not described in detail; it is simply the clothing of a monolithic group.
Conversely, in Act 2, Tamburlaine describes his own armor as flashing in
the sun: “And with our sun-bright armour as we march/We’ll chase the
stars from heaven and dim their eyes/That stand and muse at our admired
arms” (Part 1, 2.3.22–4). This preoccupation with sumptuous armor cul-
minates at the end of Part 2 when Tamburlaine imagines himself riding in
triumph, dressed in golden armor like Apollo:

Through the street with troops of conquered kings

I’ll ride in golden armour like the sun,
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,
Spangled with diamonds dancing in the air,
To note me emperor of the three-fold world. (Part 2, 4.3.114–8)

Tamburlaine’s vision of himself is beyond the play in two senses: first,

golden armor would not be easy for a theater company to represent and,
secondly, this triumph remains only a vision, not an actuality.
I have argued that armor is essentially an aesthetic object in Tamburlaine
that obscures “actual” military violence by constructing the military
subject as an aesthetic object. Marlowe’s attention to military dress is
Homeric in its obsessiveness. This attention demonstrates nostalgia for
a fully constituted heroic male body. There are four arming scenes in the
Iliad, and each precedes a crucial epic engagement for the armored figure
in question. The most famous is Achilles’ in Book 19. Thetis presents her
son with the “shining gift of Hephaistos,” which is a terrible sight:

Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons. None had the courage
to look straight at it. They were all afraid of it. Only Achilles
Looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him
And his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like sunflare. (Book 19,
lines 14–17)67

His self-arming is of course recounted in great detail, from his “fair

greaves” (Book 19, line 369) to the “corselet” (Book 19, line 371) to
his sword, his “fair elaborate shield,” (Book 19, line 379) and helmet.
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 55

Like  Tamburlaine’s armor, Achilles’ armor “fits” him: “And brilliant

Achilles tried himself in this armour, to see/if it fitted close, and how his
glorious limbs ran within it …” (Book 19, lines 384–85). His armor
is the ultimate aesthetic object: the “helmet crested with horse-hair/
shone like a star, the golden fringes were shaken about it …” (Book 19,
lines 381–82). Achilles’ armor prepares him for battle and operates as a
double for the other body in Book 19: the rotting corpse of Patroklos.
Conversely, Achilles’ armored body is permanent, unchanging; it will not
degenerate or change.
This aestheticizing of the military subject is borne out in the exqui-
site English catalogue of armor The Almain Armourer’s Album. The term
“Almain” is derived from the French word for “German,” and an Almain
rivet was a type of light German armor for the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries that was characterized by overlapping plates designed
to slide on rivets. This album appears to be a record of armors made for
wealthy English citizens and courtiers in the late sixteenth century. 68 The
armors were designed by Jacob Halder, who was active in England from
1557–1607 and drawn by an unidentified member of the workshop at the
Royal Armories near London in Greenwich. Mann notes that this album is
likely “a retrospective record, because some of the armours go back to the
reign of Mary.”69 In this collection of 31 large drawings in ink and water-
color, each 17 inches by 11.5 inches, the illustrator presents 29 distinct
whole suits of armor, each seemingly standing on its own, with another,
complimentary drawing of the suit broken into its composite parts on
the following page. In the sixteenth century, most armor was made in
Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, but by the end of the century, the
armors of Greenwich armory were regarded as equal to their Continental
counterparts in design and function. These illustrations establish armor
not simply as clothing but as fashion: something that, as Fred Davis notes,
creates a “social identity” for its wearer. Davis writes that,
By social identity, I mean much more than the symbols of social class
or status to which some sociologists are inclined to restrict the concept.
I include within the concept’s purview any aspect of self about which
individuals can through symbolic means communicate with others, in the
instance of dress through predominantly non-discursive visual, tactile, and
olfactory symbols, however imprecise, and elusive these may be.70
This social identity is shared by the 29 aristocrats whose armors are pic-
tured in this album, but each suit is slightly different, assuring singularity
in the series.
56 S. HARLAN

Hollander notes that illustration plays an essential role in the history

of fashion:

And so when Western fashion came into existence in the late Middle Ages,
and inaugurated modernity in dress to match the other modernities emerg-
ing at the same period, it began the process that has finally put all modern
clothing (not just the trappings of the rich and idle, who merely began the
idea) into the representational mode. To do that, it needed the help of the
new realistic representations in art, which had achieved a stunning perfec-
tion by the fifteenth century. Then, the swift spread of printed images after
1500 could set visual standards for dress, and support the idea that an actual
clothed figure is most desirable when it looks like an ideal realistic picture.71

One such idealized picture is the armor of Henry Herbert, the 2nd Earl
of Pembroke (Fig. 1.2). In this illustration, the armor stands seemingly on
its own, positioned on a small tuft of green earth. Although the armor is
presented head-on to the viewer, the head of the suit is turned 90 degrees
to the left and is therefore in profile. As the helmet is closed, it is unclear
whether a human body occupies this suit. It is both subject and object,

Fig. 1.2 Jacob Halder, The Almain Armourer’s Album: Henry Herbert, the 2nd
Earl of Pembroke, c.1557–87
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 57

delivered to the client whose name is inscribed, almost as a caption, in the

upper right-hand corner of the image. The next plate in the book breaks
the Earl of Pembroke’s armor into its 17 distinct and separate pieces, scat-
tered in an ordered manner around the page. Unlike the whole suit of
armor, these pieces are viewed from above, as if they have been laid out on
the floor of the armory in order to be examined. This illustration is repre-
sentative of the other 28 suits of armor depicted in the album, as one can
see by examining that of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and 1st Earl
of Dorset (Fig. 1.3), which includes supplementary pieces for jousting.
The actual armor of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (1536–1608) is
housed in The Wallace Collection in London.72 Unlike many of the other
illustrations in the album, Lord Buckhurst’s face is exposed. Although he
stands in precisely the same—but reverse—position as the Earl of Pembroke,
his profiled face is partially visible, thus lending an interior to the exterior
shell of his suit. However, his body still seems strikingly absent, as well as
undistinguishable from the others.73 Apart from the caption that asserts

Fig. 1.3 Jacob Halder, The Almain Armourer’s Album: Thomas Sackville, Lord
Buckhurst, c.1557–87
58 S. HARLAN

the distinctiveness of a given armor, these armors are anonymous. Steven

Conner argues that, “there can never be any such thing as pure or exact
repetition. In order to be recognizable as such, a repetition must, in how-
ever small a degree, be different from its original.”74 Such is the case with
the armored figures of The Almain Armourer’s Album. Each watercolor is
indeed different from the others, and each is simultaneously original and
serial. “Difference” in the album is registered on the level of minute aes-
thetic detail: the armors—and, by extension, the subjects—are distinguished
from one another by slight variations in design features.75 Paradoxically, it
is only by situating oneself in a group of virtually identical figures that one
may be perceived as distinct. Distinction must be asserted in relationship
to others. The album is a sort of anthology, in the strict sense of the term
as a gathering. In the Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe dramatizes this very
dynamic. Tamburlaine is an extraordinary military leader, and he consis-
tently differentiates himself from other subjects in the plays, and from other
historical and mythical figures. But the plays also insist on his embeddedness
in a Western literary and visual tradition of militarized subjects, and this
situatedness allows him to perform his own status as unique.

A FAREWELL TO ARMS: UNDRESSING AT WAR’S END

War begins with getting dressed. It ends with getting undressed. In this
final section, I turn my attention to how arms and armor figure into two
non-military practices in this play: mourning and banqueting. As Simon
Shepherd argues, the relationship between the realms of the civic and
militant is fraught in the plays.76 In both plays, the civic activities of
mourning and banqueting require the repurposing of armor. In Act 5 of
Part 1, Tamburlaine performs, or calls for, several related activities in rapid
succession: he crowns Zenocrate Queen of Persia, he declares “a truce
with all the world” (Part 1, 5.2.467), and he orders the burial of Arabia
with Bajazeth and Zabina, the “great Turk and his fair emperess” (Part 1,
5.2.470). All of these activities signify a transition from war to peace, a
shift that is emblematized by the shedding of military clothing:

Go now, my lords and loving followers,

That purchased kingdoms by your martial deeds,
Cast off your armour, put on scarlet robes,
Mount up your royal places of estate,
Environed with troops of noblemen,
And there make laws to rule your provinces. (Part 1, 5.2.460–65)
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 59

Armor performs a crucial role in the transition from the realm of the
military to that of the civic, but the act of “casting off” clothing—much
like the act of putting it on—is a problematic gesture. Here, “scarlet robes”
replace armor. The robes that displace the fighters’ armor emblematize an
ordered world of lawmaking and nation-building that ostensibly stands in
opposition to the military world. Troops of military figures are replaced
by “troops of noblemen,” and one builds “royal places of estate,” not
barricades and fortresses. But the lawmaker is here imagined as a military
figure, and the language of civic and military rule is one and the same.
Tamburlaine’s image of a civic ruler “environed” with noblemen invokes
the iconography of the battlefield and suggests that the end of war involves
not a movement away from militarism or a rejection of its values and rules
and regulations, but an appropriation of its language in the service of civic
and peaceful undertakings.
Ironically, this appropriation of military language is accompanied by a
rejection of military dress. At the end of Part 1, Tamburlaine orders his
troops to “cast off” their armor, an act that may or may not have been
performed on stage. This action is promised, but it is arguably not per-
formed. To “cast off” armor suggests liberation from the labor of war.
The deliberate and violent nature of the term “cast off” also looks forward
to the prologue’s assertion at the beginning of Part 2 that “murd’rous
Fates throws all [Tamburlaine’s] triumphs down” (Part 2, Prologue, 5,
emphasis mine). But “scarlet robes” suggest a world of ease, a world free
from constriction. Armor disciplines the body; it is quite literally laborious
and weighty. Tamburlaine looks forward to a life of leisure, a conventional
wish of the military leader. The realm of “scarlet robes” hovers beyond the
plays; this ideal, peaceful state has already passed by the time Part 2 begins.
Tamburlaine’s speech negotiates a relationship to war that is dependent
on an understanding of time that engages with nostalgia and anticipation
simultaneously. Like Henry V, Tamburlaine looks forward to a moment
that may or may not exist, a moment that is envisioned but not necessarily
realized.
This conventional casting off of armor reappears in Part 2 of the play.
In 4.2, the King of Argier Theridamas promises Olympia, the wife of the
Captain of Balsera, a post-war world in which she will be clothed in “costly
cloth of massy gold” and he will reject his “arms”:

Thou shalt be stately queen of fair Argier

And, clothed in costly cloth of massy gold,
Upon the marble turrets of my court
60 S. HARLAN

Sit like to Venus in her chair of state,

Commanding all thy princely eye desires;
And I will cast off arms and sit with thee
Spending my life in sweet discourse of love. (Part 2, 4.2.39–45)

In this vision, she displaces Theridamas as commander: he commands in

war and she in peace. Tamburlaine frequently invokes the same language
of female dominance in reference to Zenocrate, as Anthony Miller has
shown.77 “Sweet discourse of love” replaces the martial language of domi-
nance and expansion of empire, and this promised linguistic shift is under-
scored by a promised costume change. The casting off of arms is thus
more a rhetorical device than a reality in the play. It seems that “arms and
the man” are difficult to separate, despite all protestations to the contrary.
To cast off arms is to accept loss: the loss of one’s military self in favor of
a ruling self, the loss of the homosocial camaraderie of the battlefield in
favor of the pleasures of marriage. The rejection of military dress is a ges-
ture of mourning for the past, an acknowledgment of an essential break
between past, present, and future.
It is thus appropriate that Tamburlaine’s speech at the end of Part 1
calls for the burial and mourning of his enemies. Zenocrate becomes a liv-
ing military trophy that represents his victories, his fitness to rule, and his
authority to command the end of war, the burial of his enemies, and the
entrance into the civic sphere.78 She is a symbol of past victory, a leftover
from the battlefield, a reminder of the militaristic realm’s shadowy pres-
ence in the realm of the civic:

As Juno, when the giants were suppressed

That darted mountains at her brother Jove,
So looks my love, shadowing in her brows
Triumphs and trophies for my victories;
Or as Latona’s daughter bent to arms,
Adding more courage to my conquering mind. (Part 1, 5.2.448–53)

The “triumph and trophies” of Zenocrate’s “brows” inspire

Tamburlaine to engage in further military conquest; they are his reward,
as she herself is.79 He sees the destruction he has wrought in Zenocrate’s
face and declares this destruction as proof of his fitness as it generates tro-
phies. Patricia Cahill argues that, “each part [of the play] represents mass
death as the goal of warfare rather than as an incidental outcome, and …
each renders destruction a (paradoxically) creative act—at times even an
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 61

act of ingenuity.”80 This is one such moment in the play when destruc-
tion enables creation. In Part 1, the “overdetermination of Zenocrate’s
beauty”81 rendered her an object of desire. Mark Thornton Burnett argues
that Tamburlaine’s speech to her in his scene of self-arming “… points
to a colonial act, with Tamburlaine weighing Zenocrate down with the
fruits of his brigandage and marking out the extent of his empire.”82 Gibbs
also argues that Zenocrate, like many of Marlowe’s female characters, is
“reduced to a sign signifying [Tamburlaine’s] supremacy.”83 By the end of
Part 1, the trophy is established as the ultimate sign of supremacy.
Tamburlaine’s vision of trophies “shadowing in her brows” foreshadows
Zenocrate’s own reduction to a trophy in Act 3 of Part 2. Tamburlaine’s
memorial to Zenocrate in Act 3 necessitates that casting off of arms, and
these arms construct a hybrid structure. Calyphas, Amyras, Celebinus,
and Tamburlaine each describe an aspect of the memorial, and their joint
descriptive effort suggests that the object’s meaning, like its physicality,
is defined by its status as composite. Calyphas begins by describing the
“pillar,”84 which is certainly onstage and visible to the theatrical audience:

This pillar placed in memory of her,

Where in Arabian, Hebrew, and Greek, is writ,
‘This town being burnt by Tamburlaine the Great,
Forbids the world to build it up again.’ (Part 2, 3.2.15–18)

He emphasizes the textual component of the memorial and its engage-

ment with translation: the monument marks one of Tamburlaine’s past
military exploits in three languages in order to assure that all can read
it, understand it, and heed its message. The memorial is intended as a
warning, even as a threat, for it mandates that the town never be rebuilt.
It is thus a figure for the ironic permanence of destruction. The spell-
ing of the words “moniment” and “monument” were interchangeable in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ben Jonson’s line “Thou art a
moniment without a tomb” in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays
draws on the two meanings of “moniment” as a written record and as a
monument,85 and in stanza 24 of his “Epithalamium,” Spenser puns on
“moniment” as admonishment and memorial:

Song made in lieu of many ornaments,

With which my love should duly have bene dect,
Which cutting off through hasty accidents,
62 S. HARLAN

Ye would not stay your dew time to expect,

But promist both to recompens,
Be unto her a goodly ornament,
And for short time an endlesse moniment.86

The scene’s visual iconography suggests an engagement with the related

activities of warning and remembering. One activity looks forward to the
future—and attempts to shape this future by coercion; the other registers
loss and absence by looking backwards to the past.
Zenocrate’s memorial is built on stage as the men describe it. Amyras
adds a “mournful streamer” to the carved “pillar”:

And here this mournful streamer shall be placed,

Wrought with the Persian and Egyptian arms
To signify she was a princess born
And wife unto the monarch of the East. (Part 2, 3.2.19–22)

The streamer identifies Zenocrate in a way that the text does not, for
the representations of “Persian and Egyptian arms” signify that she is the
daughter of a king and the wife of “the monarch of the East.” Celebinus’
addition to the trophy is a “table intended” as “a register/Of all her vir-
tues and perfections,” (Part 2, 3.2.23–4) but the content of this tablet
is not described in any detail. The term “register” suggests that the text
is informative and objective, as well as elegiac and mournful. Finally,
Tamburlaine places “a picture of Zenocrate/To show her beauty which
the world admired” (Part 2, 3.2.25–6). The assembling of Zenocrate’s
onstage memorial constitutes appropriation of military iconography in the
service of mourning a non-militarized, female figure and act of communal
arming. In death, she also becomes a Bellona figure.87 In his classic future-
tense mode, Tamburlaine says of her totemic representation:

every town and castle I besiege,

Thou shalt be set upon my royal tent,
And when I meet an army in the field
Those looks will shed such an influence in my camp
As if Bellona, goddess of the war,
Threw naked swords and sulphur balls of fire
Upon the heads of all our enemies. (Part 2, 3.2.42–48)

Her “influence” on the militaristic realm is arguably greater as a por-

trait than as a living subject (or a dramatic representation). Tamburlaine’s
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 63

promise to carry her embalmed corpse with him completes his transforma-
tion of her into a golden trophy:

Where’er her soul shall be, thou shalt stay with me

Embalmed with cassia, ambergris, and myrrh,
Not lapped in lead but in a sheet of gold,
And till I die thou shall not be interred. (Part 2, 2.4.129–32)88

Tamburlaine promises Zenocrate four memorials: her “pillar,” the

“cursed town I will consume with fire,” (Part 2, 2.4.138) “as rich a tomb
as Mausolus’” (Part 2, 2.4.133), and, finally, her own preserved body.
Michael Neill argues that the Tamburlaine plays themselves constitute a
triumph of death:

In a career which exhibits all the blind, mechanical urgency that Aries asso-
ciated with the Triumph of Death, this self-proclaimed ‘Scourge of God’
sweeps through the world, meting out destruction like some catastrophic
pestilence, his chariot-wheels rolling like those of Death’s car, over ‘heaps
of carcasses’ … With its remoselessly linear design, declamatory rhetoric,
and driving verse rhythms, Marlowe’s play constantly draws attention to the
pageant-like nature of its action—above all through the fascinated repetition
of the word ‘triumph’, which rises to a climax in the hero’s celebrated incan-
tation of ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’ (I Tamb. II. v. 50–4).” (93)89

His attention to how funeral pageantry resonates with the pageantry of

the triumphator recalls the iconography of the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney.
Zenocrate’s golden sheath is a double for Tamburlaine’s fantastical golden
armor. Of course, Tamburlaine dresses in other emblematic colors else-
where in the plays. When he throws a banquet in order to display his cap-
tives, Bajazeth and Zabina, in Act 4 of Part 1, the stage direction indicates
that he is dressed “all in scarlet.” His red clothing also complements the
“bloody colours by Damascus” he invokes in the first line of the scene,
as well as the blood of Damascus’ citizens and, of course, the banquet’s
wine.90 “Streaming blood” is at times figured as a form of clothing in the
plays; in Act 3 of Part 2, Tamburlaine asserts that, “Blood is the god of
war’s rich livery” (Part 2, 3.2.116). His call to festivity in Part 1 requires
the repurposing of armorial “helmets”:

Then let us freely banquet and carouse

Full bowls of wine unto the god of war,
64 S. HARLAN

That means to fill your helmets full of gold

And make Damascus’ spoils as rich to you
As was to Jason Colchos’ golden fleece. (Part 1, 4.4.5–9)

Tamburlaine presents the “full bowls of wine” as an uncanny double to

the “helmets full of gold” he promises his soldiers in battle. These bowls
of wine prefigure the helmets filled with “Damascus’ spoils”; the bowls
are refigured as pseudo-helmets, civic objects that remind one of war.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary, from the mid-fourteenth
century, the term “plate” was used to refer to gold and silver vessels and
utensils; by the mid-sixteenth century, it came to signify tableware gener-
ally. The term was also used to refer to flat pieces of steel or iron fastened
together as armor. Marlowe draws on the resonance of these two types of
“plate” in his banquet scenes. In his speech to his soldiers, Tamburlaine
controls the meaning of these helmets by controlling their function, and
by linking the present bowls to the absent helmets, he allows for the mili-
tary to intrude into the civic.
Drinking and eating are metaphors for spoiling in these plays, as
Tamburlaine demonstrates moments later in his infamous courses of
crowns. Crowns and armor are often associated in the plays. In Act 1 of
Part 2, Usumcasane offers Tamburlaine “men in armour” as a supplement
to his crown, which he also turns over to the conquering Tamburlaine:

A hundred thousand expert soldiers:

From Azamor to Tunis near the sea
Is Barbary unpeopled for thy sake,
And all the men in armour under me,
Which with my crown I gladly offer thee. (Part 2, 1.6.5–9)

In Act 4, Amyras describes crowns in language that recalls Tamburlaine’s

“sun-bright” armor: “Now in their glories shine the golden crown/Of
these proud Turks, much like so many suns/That half dismay the maj-
esty of heaven …” (Part 2, 4.1.1–3). As many critics have noted, crowns
are fetish-objects in the plays; they are both objects of desire and cheap
trinkets. An accessory to be worn on the head, the crown is a double for
the wine-filled helmets. In Part 2, Tamburlaine has a vision of muzzling
his enemies with “burnished steel.” He says to the King of Soria, “Well,
bark ye dogs. I’ll bridle all your tongues/And bind them close with bits of
burnished steel/Down to the channels of your hateful throats …” (Part 2,
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 65

4.1.180–83). This horrific vision stands echoes the banquet scene, in which
Tamburlaine and his soldiers’ consumption of delicacies is accompanied by
the starvation of Bajazeth. Fred B. Tromly argues that,

Unlike most Elizabethan stage banquets, which are acted emblems of com-
munal festivity and creaturely satisfaction, this feast is marked by compulsive
rage and unappeasable hunger…To see the imprisoned, starving emperor
Bajazeth placed in the middle of a banquet is to see a re-enactment of the
punishment of Tantalus, another king (he still wears his crown in Whitney’s
woodcut) who suffers starvation in the midst of plenty.91

Banquets also figure prominently in Part 2. In Act 2, Orcanes prom-

ises “full Natolian bowls/Of Greekish wine” at a future banquet (Part
2, 2.3.403), and Tamburlaine links the related rituals of banquet and
triumph:

Then will we triumph, banquet, and carouse,

Cooks shall have pensions to provide us cates
And glut us with the dainties of the world,
Lachryma Christi and Calabrian wines
Shall common soldiers drink in quaffing bowls,
Ay, liquid gold when we have conquered him,
Mingled with coral and with orient pearl.
Come let us banquet and carouse the whiles. (Part 2, 1.6.91–98)

By transforming wine to gold, it becomes a rich spoil.

Costume serves as a nexus for the play’s treatment of civic and military
customs, the construction and dismantling of identity, and the perfor-
mance of subjectivity. In Part 1 of Tamburlaine, his self-arming empha-
sizes the constructedness of the military subject, and the casting aside of
armor draws attention to the fragmentation of the subject. Like the arms
that are used to build Zenocrate’s memorial, the banquet’s helmets are
parts of a whole. The movement of military dress across the boundar-
ies of fighting, mourning, and banqueting suggests that these realms are
mutually constitutive and that the values of war and peace—as well as their
governing rules and regulations—are likewise dependent on one another
for definition. The shedding of armor, like the forceful reimagining of
bowls of wine as “helmets” in Act 4 of Part 1, operates as a reminder.
Banqueting and mourning in Tamburlaine encourage the memory of past
battles and look forward to future ones. These activities return the soldier
66 S. HARLAN

to the scene of battle. The necessity of costume in the observation of

custom is established in Tamburlaine’s scene of self-arming in Part 1 and
culminates in a performance of the rejection of war. In their shared reli-
ance on the iconography of the battlefield, the practices of banqueting and
mourning implicate the theatrical audience in scenes of violence by way of
a performative “return” to scenes of battle. Likewise, the casting aside of
one’s military dress is not a rejection of war but rather an active construc-
tion of a battlefield nostalgia in the realm of the civic. In its presentation
of suits of armor in its wholeness and in its composite parts, The Almain
Armourer’s Album pointed to the constructed nature of the armored body
and its resulting divisibility. In Chap. 3, I will return to the problematic
divisibility of this body, but in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, armor is not
so much cast aside as forcefully removed from the body. Marlowe’s treat-
ment of armor in scenes of mourning and banqueting is likewise engaged
with this discourse of fragmentation of the military subject. Piece by piece,
armor is cast aside and repurposed, and this action paradoxically assures
the soldier’s memory of the battlefield, for it mirrors the moment of dress-
ing for war. Tamburlaine’s command to his men to “cast off” their armor
reminds, and returns, his audience to his scene of self-arming.
The objects of war operate in a manner unlike any other early modern
stage properties. Like the triumph, the theater divorces arms and armor
from their extra-theatrical violent function. However, by repurposing
these objects as dramatic props, Marlowe allows for an encounter between
actor and audience that is figuratively violent. In Edward II, Mortimer
Junior employed the term “device” in reference to his shield. I will take
up the role of military “devices” in the mourning and memorializing of
Sir Philip Sidney again in Chap. 2. In the Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe
appropriates military devices as dramatic devices, a move that implicates
his theater audience in a discourse of militarism and renders these things
nostalgic objects of desire.

NOTES
1. All citations are taken from Anthony B.  Dawson, ed. Tamburlaine the
Great, Parts One and Two (London: A & C Black, 1997).
2. Part 2 was staged shortly after Part 1. I take for granted in my analysis that
the plays are two separate dramatic works. On the separateness of the
plays, see Malcolm Kelsall, who maintains that, “continuation is not an
integral part of Marlowe’s original conception” (Christopher Marlowe
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 67

[Leiden: Brill, 1981], 112). For the same position, see also Claude
J.  Summers, Christopher Marlowe and the Politics of Power (Salzberg:
Universitat Salzberg, Salzberg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan
and Renaissance Studies, 1974), 74, and J.W. Harper, ed. Tamburlaine the
Great (London: Benn, 1971), ix. Conversely, David Bevington notes that,
“The homogeneous structure of the two plays … inevitably suggests an
entity of ten acts. The whole is plausible as a single linear narrative. Part II
continues with essentially the same central cast as that of Part I, and pro-
ceeds episodically to further exploits in the life of the hero.” He also notes
that Part 2 has the same “tripartite construction” as Part 1 (From Mankind
to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962], 206 and 213). On the
repetitive structure of the plays, see Lawrence Benaquist, “The Tripartite
Structure of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays and Edward II,”
Salzberg Studies in English Literature 43 (1975), I.
3. Ann Hollander, Feeding the Eye: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1999), 106.
4. In designating this suit of armor a stage “prop” or “property,” I draw
primarily on Andrew Sofer’s definition. He defines a prop as “… a dis-
crete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in
the course of a performance. It follows that a stage object must be ‘trig-
gered’ by an actor in order to become a prop (objects shifted by stage-
hands between scenes do not qualify). Thus a hat or sword remains an
article of costume until an actor removes or adjusts it, and a chair remains
an item of furniture unless an actor shifts its position” (The Stage Life of
Props [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003], 11–12). Similarly,
Erika Fischer-Lichte notes in The Semiotics of Theatre that, “… props can
be classified, generally speaking, as those objects which an actor uses to
perform actions: as such, they are defined as the objects upon which A
[the actor] focuses his intensional [sic] gestures” (The Semiotics of Theatre,
trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones [Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992], 107). Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda offer a more
capacious definition: they maintain that stage props are “all the moveable
physical objects of the stage” and point out that, “‘Prop’ is derived from
‘property’, as the OED points out. Yet the term has also acquired some of
the connotations of ‘prop’ in the sense of ‘an object placed beneath or
against a structure’ (emphasis added). The latter meaning certainly reso-
nates with the tendency to regard stage properties as theatrical prostheses,
strictly ancillary to and ‘beneath or against’ the main structure, the play-
text.” See Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan
Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 1. Frances Teague offers a definition linked to function: “A property
68 S. HARLAN

is an object, mimed or tangible, that occurs onstage, where it functions

differently from the way it functions offstage. At the moment when the
audience notes its entry into the dramatic action a property has meaning:
it may also have meaning as one of the class of objects. A property can
carry multiple meanings, which may sometimes conflict. Generally, a
playwright uses a property to establish a character or to forward action.
In production and analysis, properties specified by the playwright, rather
than someone else, usually receive special attention.” She also notes that
“[c]ostumes and furniture differ from properties in that they usually retain
their ordinary functions onstage.” See Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991), 16–7 and 19. From
the moment that Tamburlaine dons the armor, it becomes a costume.
5. David Bevington has argued that the plays of the 1580s and 1590s were
characterized by a post-Armada preoccupation, or obsession, with milita-
rism and war, and Brian Gibbons takes a similar position. See Bevington,
Tudor Drama and Politics. A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) and 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). More
recently, Patricia Cahill has questioned this reading, asserting instead that
the martial dramas of post-Armada England were defined not by “patri-
otic fervor” but rather by “the force of the encounter between actors and
audiences.” She maintains that, “What the vogue for martial drama repre-
sents, then, is not so much a clear moment of triumphalist war-monger-
ing, but rather a far messier effort to come to terms with the culture’s
unequivocal turn towards warfare.” See Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial
Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 10–11.
6. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991), 2.
7. As a number of critics have noted, Tamburlaine’s military might is made
possible by his effective rhetoric. The prologue of Part 1 promises that we
will “hear the Scythian Tamburlaine/Threat’ning the world with high
astounding terms/And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword”
(Part 1, Prologue, 4–6). On a related note, Marjorie Garber has studied
the “trope of writing and unwriting” in Marlowe’s plays and argued that,
“…the act of writing or signing conveys, not just a struggle between con-
tending characters, but a struggle for mastery of stage and text between
the playwright and his inscribed characters.” See Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing
Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumspection in Marlowe’s Plays,” Theatre
Journal 36 (1984), 301.
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 69

8. Harry Levin, The Overreacher (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1952).
9. Una Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1927).
10. Raphael Falco, Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 2.
11. Ibid.
12. Jennifer Low reminds us that, according to the classical model, the hero
might represent his own authority: “Most classical heroes are generals or free
agents who consent on occasion to aid nearby rulers. Not only is the task of
ruling distinguished from the performance of glorious deeds, the king and
the hero may be independent of one another. A hero’s career does not neces-
sarily depend on serving the king; his heroism may serve the larger commu-
nity instead, without any implication of servitude or significant fealty to
another. The hero stands apart from governing institutions, and on another
plane.” See Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern
Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 23.
13. John Parker has argued that Tamburlaine is essentially a medieval and
Christian figure. In his study of images of the figure of the Antichrist in
Marlowe’s drama, Parker rejects “accounts of Marlowe as a novel deviant”
and argues that: “… the Marlovian revolution in drama revolves around
traditional instabilities. He models three of his heroes, for example, on
scriptural personages that medieval exegetes had always taken as types of
the Antichrist: Barabbas for Barabas, of course, and Simon Magus for
Faustus. Tamburlaine presents a special case, connected as he is to Paul, a
former persecutor, who according to tradition began as an Antichrist but
ended as a Christian.” See Parker, The Politics of Antichrist: From Christian
Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2007), Introduction, xi. Falco also links Tamburlaine to the Pauline
tradition: “Not lineage kings or queens but outsider and near-outsiders
demonstrate charismatic authority: we need only think of Tamburlaine,
Hamlet, or Bolingbroke to recognize the vitality and suggestiveness of the
Pauline model of charisma on the early modern stage.” See Falco, 5. For
the argument that Marlowe’s plays are at odds with the Christian tradition
and constitute an early expression of secular atheism, see Dollimore. For
the position that the plays recover atheism’s classical analogues, see David
Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004). For crit-
ics that link Marlowe to heresy, see A.D. Nuttall on the Gnostic elements
of Protestantism (The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe,
Milton, and Blake [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 41–77).
See also Roger Moore, “The Spirit and the Letter: Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
and Elizabethan Religious Radicalism,” Studies in Philology 99.2 (2002):
123–51. Conversely, many critics have reflected on the extent to which
70 S. HARLAN

Tamburlaine is a very contemporary character: a figure for the self-made

man or the Renaissance “individual,” as Burckhardt famously formulated
it. David Riggs argued that, “The representation of a modern ‘worthy’
aspiring to heroic fortitude generally resembles the most important social
phenomenon of the later sixteenth century: a rapid rise in social status by
an individual who looks to his personal abilities rather than his gentle birth
to justify his high worldly station.” See Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical
Histories: Henry VI and its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971), 63. For Jonathan Dollimore, Tamburlaine is the
epitome of the “self-determining hero bent on transcendent autonomy—a
kind of Renaissance theme of aspiring man.” See Dollimore, Radical
Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his
Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 112.
14. George Whetstone, The English Myrror (London, 1586). The other major
source for the plays is Petrus Perondinus’ 1551 Vita Magni Tamerlanis, in
which Tamburlaine is represented as far more destructive and savage than
in the Whetstone. C.L. Barber claimed that, “There is no stable moral,
eschatological framework … The two parts are so radically and consis-
tently amoral and antimoral that they are hard to read on their own terms,
as the record of criticism shows.” See Barber, Creating Elizabethan
Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988), 48 and 51. Greenblatt has argued that Tamburlaine’s
machine-like militarism renders him a sort of grotesque automaton:
“Tamburlaine almost ceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is not
actually on the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing reports of
grueling marches … Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring machine that
produces violence and death … Once set in motion, this thing cannot
slow down or change course; it moves at the same frenzied pace until it
finally stops.” See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 194–5. For a response to
this argument, see Robert Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern
Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 149–57. On Tamburlaine’s “aspiring minds” line as a
Pauline parody, see A.B.  Taylor, “Tamburlaine’s Doctrine of Strife,”
English Language Notes 27 (1989): 30–31. While Alexander Leggatt
maintained that war in Part 2 is defined by “mindless repetition to which
we react first with indifference, then with disgust, and finally, perhaps,
with pity for the figure who is so trapped by his own destiny,” (see
Alexander Leggatt, “Tamburlaine’s Sufferings,” The Yearbook of English
Studies 3 (1973): 35), John Gillies argues that, “the plays are uncanny in
the Freudian sense of a dream-image, which is at once intimately known
and yet estranged, hence horrific. The Tamerlane of European legend was
already uncanny in this way: a traum-figure cathecting a waking trauma.”
See Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,”
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 71

in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama,

ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Associated
University Presses, 1998), 209.
15. Lily B. Campbell notes that this text was “dedicated to the task of expound-
ing the present by reference to the past, using history to teach political
lessons which its authors reckoned most pertinent to the understanding of
political events in their own day” (Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of
Elizabethan Policy [San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1978], 109).
16. Greenblatt has maintained that Tamburlaine personifies “the acquisitive
energy of merchants and adventurers, promoters alike of trading and the-
atrical companies.” See Greenblatt, “Marlowe and the Will To Absolute
Play,” in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Wilson
and Richard Dutton (London: Longman, 1992), 58.
17. The prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V (a play that owes a great deal to
Tamburlaine) famously draws attention to the limitations of the early
modern theater in performing war. War is beyond the theater and in excess
of the theater’s physical space and representational capacities:

Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt? (H5, Prologue, 11–4)
The prologue asks the audience to “pardon” (15) these shortcom-
ings and appeals to the audience’s “imaginary forces” (18) to bring
forth vast military force. Perhaps surprisingly, the prologue to Part 1 of
Tamburlaine belies no such anxiety regarding the representation of a
great soldier, but this anxiety surfaces elsewhere in the plays.

18. Marlowe’s treatment of imperialism and the figure of the “barbarian” is

relevant to his handling of militarism. Since the publication of Edward
Said’s seminal text Orientalism in 1978, in which he attended to Marlowe’s
“Oriental stage,” critics have debated how to read Tamburlaine’s
Otherness. Said maintained that, “The Orient then seems to be, not an
unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a
closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe … In the depths of this
Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual
items evoke a fabulously rich world: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy,
Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon.” See
Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 62. Stevie Simkin argues
in Marlowe: The Plays that Tamburlaine is fundamentally a threatening
figure: “Tamburlaine, probably even more than Barabas, remains a dra-
matic character very alien to his audience. For Elizabethans, still aware of
the threat posed by the threat of Islam in the East, he would in any case
72 S. HARLAN

have been a figure inspiring a degree of fear and hostility. Our inability to
feel ‘sympathy’ for Tamburlaine is built largely upon our perceptions of his
brutality, and the massacre at Damascus provides no better illustration of
that brutality given full rein.” See Simkin, Marlowe: The Plays (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 55. Ania Loomba echoes these sentiments:
“… the literature of the [early modern] period simultaneously distin-
guishes between the different ‘others’, and begins to encode a fundamen-
tal divide between Christian and non-Christian, Europeans and
non-Europeans.” See Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (New
York: Oxford, 2002), 41. In his 2003 work Before Orientalism, Richmond
Barbour also generally upholds binary readings of the plays, but con-
versely Jonathan Burton has looked at “reciprocal relation between East
and West” and argued that, “Immovable stereotypes of the Ottoman Turk
as an ahistorical, irrational, despotic, and fanatical ‘Other’ are more char-
acteristic of nineteenth-century Orientalism than of early modern struc-
tures of thought.” See Barbour, “Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the
Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 30.1 (Winter 2000): 125. Working from the opposing viewpoints
of Said and Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance Orientale (1950), Emily
Bartels’ 1993 Spectacles of Strangeness examines the relationship between
Tamburlaine’s self-representations and his spectators’ expectations. She
argues that in fact Marlowe’s plays deconstruct traditional binaries of race,
gender, and sexuality: “… in bringing alien types to center stage, [the
plays] subversively resist that exploitation and expose the demonization of
an other as a strategy for self-authorization and self-empowerment,
whether on the foreign or the domestic front.” For Bartels, Tamburlaine
is “… an imperialist, strategically constructing a self of remarkable igno-
miny or nobility from his spectators’ expectations, showing us that civility
and barbarity are only skin deep.” See Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness:
Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press, 1993), Introduction, xv and 66.
19. Peter Donaldson, “Conflict and Coherence: Narcissism and Tragic
Structure in Marlowe,” in Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature
and the Psychology of Self, ed. Lynne Layton and Barbara Ann Schapiro
(New York: New York University Press, 1987), 34.
20. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602), Orsino draws on the last meaning
when he says to the cross-dressed Viola at the end of Twelfth Night: “Give
me thy hand,/And let me see thee in thy women’s weeds,” (5.1.264–65)
a request that is not carried out within the confines of the play.
21. Charles Carlton, Royal Warriors: A Military History of the British Monarchy
(London: Pearson Longman, 2003), 3.
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 73

22. I am influenced by Kathryn Schwartz’s observation that, “As a votary of

an ordained future, Tamburlaine believes what we know, a convergence
that situates the play at the intersection of prophecy and history. And his
idiosyncratic prophecy works like history, in the sense that the prophecy
erases even the illusion of alternative routes” (194). See Schwartz,
“Marlowe and the question of will,” in Christopher Marlowe in Context,
ed. Emily Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 192–201.
23. Judith Butler’s interrogation of the binary categories of “constructed”
and “performative” is useful in thinking about Tamburlaine’s manipula-
tion of his military dress and his self-constructions more generally: “There
is a tendency to think that sexuality is either constructed or determined; to
think that if it is constructed, it is in some sense free, and if it is deter-
mined, it is in some sense fixed. These oppositions do not describe the
complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the condi-
tions under which sex and sexuality are assumed. The ‘performative’
dimension of construction is precisely the forced reiteration of norms.”
See Butler: Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 94–95. In
arming himself, Tamburlaine engages in such a “forced reiteration of
norms” and raises questions about what constitutes the norms—or cus-
toms—of war, how these norms operate, and to what extent they can be
questioned or destabilized by dramatic performance.
24. For more on the term “scourge” in the plays, see R.M.  Cornelius,
Christopher Marlowe’s Use of the Bible (New York: Peter Lang Publishers,
1984), 65–66.
25. At the beginning of Part 1, he has an almost preternatural knowledge of
war. Machiavelli’s work on the art of war became well known in England
under Queen Elizabeth, although it had been available since the reign of
Henry VIII. Alan Shepard has attended to how Marlowe’s treatment of
war was influenced by contemporary military treatises. He notes that, “…
all [of Marlowe’s] plays are to some degree engaged in the general talk of
war, its philosophical and practical dimensions.” He refers to Marlowe’s
treatment of militarism in his plays as a form of “epideictic war rhetoric”:
“The Marlowe plays engage in deeply ambiguous, sometimes subtle acts
of resistance to the explicit endorsement of martial law (and of militarism
as the best foundation of civil society) being furnished in other public texts
such as homilies and prayers, royal proclamations, poems, and especially in
the contemporary military handbooks that were for sale.” See Shepard,
Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada
(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 3. Certainly, the many military
handbooks and treatises by English authors such as Thomas Diggs,
Barnabe Rich, Sir John Smythe, and William Garrard attest to an early
74 S. HARLAN

modern fascination with war and the ideal figure of the military leader.
Nina Taunton’s work has also examined the relationship between early
modern English drama and military treatises. She attends to “war as dis-
course, serving multiple functions through a variety of texts and with sym-
bolic as well as literal significance for the last troubled years of Elizabeth
I’s reign” and argues that, “plays about war and the ‘art of war’ literature
proliferating in the 1590s intervene in the military realities of the last few
years of Elizabeth’s reign much more closely than is appreciated …” See
Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe,
Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2001), 3–4.
26. If Tamburlaine casts off his shepherd’s “weeds” to reveal his armor
beneath, he effectively displays a layered sartorial self to his audience.
However, this would blunt the dramatic effect of the scene by suggesting
that his armored body is actually his natural body.
27. This linguistic performance encodes his body as an object capable of
inflicting violence. As Janet Clare has argued, “The verbal and visual vio-
lence essential to all of Marlowe’s plays produces a highly effective idiom
of theatre. Marlowe’s development of an aesthetic of cruelty was such a to
radicalize the whole nature of and experience of performance” (79). See
Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘theatre of cruelty,’” in Constructing Christopher
Marlowe, ed. J.A.  Downie and J.T.  Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 74–87.
28. Pollard, “Enclosing the Body: Tudor Conceptions of Skin” in A
Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 111–22, 112.
29. Pollard, 118.
30. Pollard, 119.
31. Kopytoff outlines this idea as follows: “In doing the biography of a thing,
one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What,
sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and
in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where
does the things come from, and who made it? What has been its career so
far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things?
What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are
the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its
age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?”
(66–7). He also notes of collecting and “singularizing” objects—or “pull-
ing them out of their usual commodity sphere” (74)—that “much of the
collective singularization is achieve by reference to the passage of time,”
(80) thus drawing attention to the relationship between the value of
objects and time—certainly an important idea for thinking about out-
moded objects. See Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: com-
moditization as process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 75

Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1986), 64–91.
32. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2003), 7. It is possible that spectators who recognized certain stage
properties might refer to them by a name that invoked a past use. For
example, the beaver worn by the actor who played Old Hamlet might
become “Old Hamlet’s beaver,” as is the case with some property and
costume entries in Henslowe’s Diary. However, it must also be acknowl-
edged that the reusing of stage properties may have rendered an object
less distinct and recognizable.
33. Jonathan Miller, The Afterlife of Plays (San Diego: San Diego State
University Press, 1992), 5.
34. Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning and
Character (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 207. He further notes
that, “None of Marlowe’s descriptions of warfare warrants our concluding
that he ever saw actual service in the field. It is not that they are amateurish
or essentially inaccurate; they are not. But all of them could easily have
resulted from the reading he did in Paul Ive and similar authorities, per-
haps vitalized by conversation with some of the veterans of the struggles
in France and the Low Countries. Further, the whole tone of both parts
of Tamburlaine is unrealistic, as everyone admits, in the sense that it shows
little realization of the darker elements in the experience of war. Almost
absent from it are the long, dreary sieges, the epidemics of dysentery and
plague, the perpetual internal bickerings and delays, the infected wounds
and other circumstances which made Renaissance campaigns something
less than glorious. Marlowe is a young man dreaming of battle, not a sol-
dier who has undergone its waking and horrible actuality” (225).
35. Peter Stallybrass reminds us that, “… since there were no ready-made
clothes until the later seventeenth century, every record of the buying of a
gown or a petticoat or a doublet or breeches must be presumed to refer to
the purchase of second-hand clothing unless there is evidence to the con-
trary. New clothing is recorded by payments for cloth, for ribbon, for lace
and points, and for the transformation of these into a garment by a tailor”
(“Properties in clothes,” in Staged Properties, ed. Harris and Korda, 179).
Stephen Orgel also notes that costumes in the early modern English the-
atre were “for the most part the cast-off clothes of real aristocrats”
(Impersonations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 105.
Indeed, Thomas Platter wrote in 1599 that, “The comedians are very
expensively and elegantly costumed, since it is usual in England, when
important gentlemen or knights die, for their finest clothes to be
bequeathed to their servants, and since it is not proper for them to wear
such clothes, instead they subsequently give them to the comedians to
purchase very cheaply.” See E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2
76 S. HARLAN

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 364. Some objects were rented by the
theaters. It is thus possible that a given suit of armor simply may have been
on lend. There has been much work on the relationship between clothing
in the theatres and clothing in the extra-theatrical world. Stallybrass out-
lines the relationship between the livery society of early modern England
and costumes. See Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: clothes and identity on the
Renaissance stage,” Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 289–320. Stephen Greenblatt has
illustrated how costumes migrated between the institutions of the church
and the theatre (Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance England [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988],
112–3).
36. Jones and Stallybrass, 258.
37. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3. Kastan also notes
that, “Our awareness of the existence of time is dependent upon our aware-
ness of the evanescence of the present. Ostensively we are conscious that
somehow the present becomes past—that something that ‘is’ becomes
something that ‘was’, and that something that ‘will be’ becomes successively
the thing that ‘is’ and then that ‘was’. […] This, of course, is not a peculiarly
modern insight. Augustine himself is constantly aware of the ontological
difficulty raised by speaking of the passage of time” (10). See Kastan,
Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (New Hampshire: University Press of
New England, 1982).
38. Ibid.
39. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R.A.  Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1961), 217.
40. Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson note that the term “arms” might desig-
nate armor, weapons, or a heraldic coat of arms in early modern stage
directions. See Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in
English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 11.
41. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 319, 320.
42. Jones and Stallybrass, 257.
43. As Charles Ffoulkes noted in 1912, “Towards the end of the twelfth cen-
tury we find the material known as ‘cuir-bouilli’ or ‘cuerbully’ mentioned
as being used for the armour of man and horse. The hide of the animal was
cut thick, boiled in oil or in water, and, when soft, moulded to the required
shape. When cold it became exceedingly hard and would withstand nearly
as much battle-wear as metal. It had the advantage of being easily pro-
cured, easily worked, and also of being much lighter than the metal. For
this reason it was used largely for jousts and tourneys, which up to the
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 77

fifteenth century were more in the nature of mimic fights than was the
case at a later date, when the onset was more earnest and the armour was
made correspondingly heavy to withstand it” See Ffoulkes, The Armourer
and His Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century (London: Methuen,
1912), 97.
44. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 321.
45. Leah Marcus, “Marlowe’s magic books: the material text,” in Christopher
Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15–26, 18.
46. Ibid.
47. Mary Floyd-Wilson reminds us that the Tamburlaine plays “are engaged
in the question of how to fashion Englishness—a question that stems from
the culture’s double vision of itself as either deficiently or excessively ‘civi-
lized’” (96). See Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early
Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
48. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen,
1980), 10.
49. Kocher points out that the use of “ponderous steel equipment” persisted
“even so late as Marlowe’s day” but that such military objects were “swiftly
becoming obsolete, and extremely heavy armor, already inadequate against
musket bullets, was being shed in order that the cavalryman might move
more freely” (Kocher, 209). As Cyril Falls notes, “Armour, like the bow,
was gradually passing out of use, thought it was to survive its old enemy for
a long time to come. On setting forth upon Continental expeditions, the
captains of companies sometimes told their men to throw away their pol-
drons (shoulder-pieces) and other accessories, as useless encumbrances.
The portraits of noblemen and commanders in full armour, with visored
helmet lying on a table or held by a page, which appear as late as the
American war of Independence, are somewhat deceptive. They are show
portraits, and the armour may bear no closer relation to the realities of
warfare than the plump, winged cherubs who hold wreaths of laurel above
the heads of the wearers. Yet it was still the general practice until long after
the Elizabethan age for the pikemen to wear steel caps, breast-plates, and
back-pieces, possibly cuisses protecting the thighs. The same was true of
the cavalry, even the light horse employed in Ireland.” See Falls, Elizabeth’s
Irish Wars (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1950), 40. Oman
notes that during the reign of Elizabeth, “The pikeman also wore both
breastplate and backplate, with ‘tassets,’ broad curved plates of steel, hang-
ing from the breastplate to protect his thighs. These the man with firearms
never possessed, though he seems for some time to have had a breast-
plate—which was finally given up in favour of a buff jerkin. By the reign of
James I military opinion had come to the conclusion that all protection of
head armour and body armour for skirmishers was a mistake, and that
78 S. HARLAN

lightness of movement was the one desideratum. Wherefore felt hats and
leather coats became the only wear of the musketeer, though his comrade
with the pike continued to sheath himself in steel. As to the horseman, it
may be said that the ‘demi-lance’ completely superseded the fully armoured
man by the end of the century. Only generals and superior officers contin-
ued for some time to wear leg-armour, which in all other ranks was dropped
in favour of high leather boots. It may be doubted whether the greaves and
steel shoes, seen in some portraits of late sixteenth-century magnates, were
not really ‘armour of parade,’ or for tilting, and not used on active service.
But the cuishes covering the thigh continued to be worn by all heavy
horse” (386).
50. David H. Thurn, “Sights of Power in Tamburlaine,” ELR 19.1 (1989): 17.
51. In the prologue to Part 2, Marlowe addresses not only the dramatic tradi-
tion that preceded Part 1, but his own previous play, as well:

The general welcomes Tamburlaine received

When he arrived last upon our stage
Hath made our poet pen his second part,
Where death cuts off the progress of his pomp
And murd’rous Fates throws all his triumphs down. (Part 2, Prologue, 1–5)

Douglas Cole refers to the “change of tenor” in the prologue to Part 2.

Unlike Part 1, the audience is promised not a relentless progression of mili-
tary victories but rather an irreversible movement towards death. See Cole,
Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Marlowe (New York: Gordian Press,
1972), 103. The prologue refers to the play as “second part,” a term that
implies return. For more on the subject of repetition and return, see Clare
Harraway, who posits that, “On both a structural and a linguistic level, the
two parts of Tamburlaine consider how the processes of repetition affect
art.” She further notes that, “… both prologues begin by carving a place
for their plays in relation either to previous dramatic styles, the ‘jigging
veins of rhyming mother wits’, or to a previous drama, when Tamburlaine
‘arrived last upon our stage’. The first part is designed to grab audience
attention by being unlike those plays which have come before it, while the
second part claims its dramatic appeal by resembling the play which pre-
cedes it; the originality, or at least novelty, of part one become the success-
ful dramatic formula, or convention, of part two.” See Harraway, Re-citing
Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 82.
52. Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
53. Manfred Pfister notes that prologues “comment and reflect on the ensu-
ing action through a mediating communication system, thereby placing it
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 79

in a certain perspective” See Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 74.
54. See Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, ed. Antony B. Dawson.
55. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1962), 201–02.
56. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, war is likewise imagined in spatial or geo-
graphic terms, for the “fields of Trasimene” stand in metonymically for
not only the battle in which Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 B.C.
but also for Marlowe’s dramatic engagement with militarism more gener-
ally. He does not refer directly to Tamburlaine or Dido, Queen of Carthage
but rather invokes their settings: the “fields” and the “courts of kings.”
Like the “… jigging veins of rhyming mother wits/And such conceits as
clownage keeps in pay” in Part 1 of Tamburlaine, the battlefields of Doctor
Faustus are invoked only to be rejected. These prologues each dictate a
transition from one play to another, and this transition is represented as a
shift in location: in Tamburlaine, one is led “to the stately tent of war,”
and in Doctor Faustus, one is led away from the “fields of Trasimene.”
57. In her work on martial order in the Tamburlaine plays, Cahill argues that,
“… the Prologue’s evocation of the ‘stately tent of war’ suggests 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
phrases—but also in the proportionate forms that can be seen, or imag-
ined, on stage” (59).
58. Marshall, 5 and 7.
59. For more on the question of “recognizably modern forms of Renaissance
coercion,” see Breight, 7.
60. See Introduction, xi, of Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, ed. Anthony
B. Dawson.
61. See “‘What are kings, when Regiment is gone?’: The Decay of Ceremony
in Edward II,” in Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance
B.  Kuriyama, eds. “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on
Christopher Marlowe (New York, 1988), 269–71.
62. All citations are taken from Edward the Second, ed. Charles R.  Forker
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
63. Edward the Second, ed. Forker, 190.
64. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the aesthetisizing of the armored French
encodes them as moribund chivalric figures inferior to the king’s rag-tag
yeoman army. At the beginning of 4.2, Orleans exclaims, “The sun doth
gild our armour; up, my lords!” (4.2.1). Earlier in the play, the Constable
and Orleans reflect on the magnificence of the Constable’s armor:
80 S. HARLAN

CONSTABLE: Tut, I have the best armour of the world. Would it

were day!
ORLEANS: You have an excellent armour; but let me horse have his
due. (3.7.1–4)
And later in the scene, they focus on their armor’s decorations:
RAMBURES: My Lord Constable, the armour that I saw in your tent
tonight, are those stars and suns upon it?
CONSTABLE: Stars, my lord.
DAUPHIN: Some of them will fall tomorrow, I hope.
CONSTABLE: And yet my sky shall not want. (3.7.6973)

This exchange suggests that to emphasize the design of one’s armor is to

establish oneself as an improper military model. This armor will fail to
protect the French aristocracy and royalty from the assault of the English.
65. In my understanding of seriality, I am influenced by Patricia Cahill’s work
on diagrams of troops formations in early modern military treatises, where
in some cases she identifies “men were defined through a rhetoric of
equivalence” (36). See Cahill, Unto the Breach:: Martial Formations,
Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
66. Bartels argues of these “infinite numbers” that, “Instead of measuring
power, the seemingly infinite numbers of men and nations that Tamburlaine
and his opponents continually display no longer mean anything, because
of their commonality, the variability of how they are perceived, and their
arbitrary relation to triumphs and defeats. The rhetoric of power emerges
as just that, a rhetoric of power, full of sound and fury, signifying noth-
ing—or at least nothing singular” (74).
67. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1998).
68. Janet Arnold notes the following of the history of patterns: “By the mid-six-
teenth century the foundations of the cut and craft of tailoring, as we know it
today, had been laid.” See Arnold, Patterns of Fashion: The cut and construc-
tion of clothes for men and women c1560–1620 (London: Macmillan, 1985), 3.
Tailors’ albums of the period record the patterns—or “pattern diagrams,” (8)
as Arnold calls them—that were the first step of his work. These patterns
depict simple geometric shapes, arranged on the page so as to minimize waste
when transferred to fabric. Such patterns record an early phase in the produc-
tion of clothing. The use of the term “pattern” to designate a model for
example (from which something else is to be made) dates to the early four-
teenth century. (It seems that the term was not used to refer to a design in
dressmaking until the mid-seventeenth century.) A “pattern” in an ethical
sense—as a model to be imitated, or an example of particular excellence—
dates to the early fifteenth century. But “pattern” could also mean simply
“image”: any pictorial representation might be referred to as a “pattern.”
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 81

69. J. Mann, “The Exhibition of Greenwich Armour at the Tower of London,”

Burlington Magazine 43 (1951): 382.
70. Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 16.
71. Ann Hollander, Sex and Suits, 27–8. She also notes in Seeing Through
Clothes that, “When the tailor’s art combines with a body to complete an
ideal living dressed image, it may use all sorts of artificially created mate-
rials—paint or beads or silk or burlap—and unlimited amounts of skill
and imagination. The body, of course, remains plain flesh. But the com-
bined result may be so stylized or abstract that the body is seen as styl-
ized, too. When many different people wear similarly designed clothes,
their bodies appear to have been as in one mold—or to seem as if they
should have been. A company of uniformed soldiers illustrates this
extremely …” (86).
72. As the website of the Wallace Collection indicates, “The armour was
acquired in the early 19th century by Sir Samuel Rush-Meyrick, reputedly
from the chateau of Coulommiers in France. Although Meyrick initially
thought it French, an almost identical armour with matching etched-and-
gilt decoration is depicted in the Almain Armourer’s Album of manuscript
watercolour drawings from the Greenwich workshops, now in the V&A
museum in London. These pictures appear to record armours made for
various aristocratic clients, the names of whom appear at the head of each
illustration. That showing our armour is inscribed ‘My Lorde Bucarte.’”
See http://www.wallacecollection.org/whatson/treasure/45. For an
overview of the collection, see David Edge, The Wallace Collection:
European Arms and Armour (London: The Trustees of the Wallace
Collection, 1992) and Guy Francis Laking, Catalogue of the European
Arms and Armour in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House (London:
HM Stationery Office, 1910).
73. Like classical epic heroes such as Achilles, the armored male body can
seem non-corporeal in its constructedness, as if the corporeal has been
entirely lost or is not relevant. On the ritual arming of the chivalric Sir
Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Clare R. Kinney has argued
that, “If fitt II’s arming sequence figures forth an impossibly idealized,
communally constructed, and practically disembodied Gawain, the hero’s
difficult and lonely journey through the northern wilderness might never-
theless be expected to reminds him and us of his corporeality.” “The (Dis)
Embodied Hero and the Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight,” Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed.
Clare Lees (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press,
1994), 47–57, 51.
74. Steven Conner, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Aurora, CO:
The Davies Group, 1988), 7.
82 S. HARLAN

75. With regards to the influence of medieval/romantic/chivalric models on

the early modern armored body, Lees considers “how the ideologies of
masculinity promote sameness and, at the same time, reject difference”
(Medieval Masculinities, Introduction, xxiii).
76. Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), 150–51.
77. Miller, 91.
78. In reading Zenocrate as a military trophy, I am influenced by Gillies’ asser-
tion that, “Strangely, Zenocrate’s funeral is actually more evocative of
ancient triumphal ritual than Tamburlaine’s victories are. It has the mili-
tary, geographic, and ethnographic features of the victories, but it also has
a Roman emphasis on place, the need to memorialize and monumental
emblems” (216).
79. Of Zenocrate’s death and memorial, Joanna Gibbs argues that,
“Resurrecting his beloved by recreating her image and embalming her
body, Tamburlaine proposes to cheat death by constructing Zenocrate as
immortal and thereby further enhancing his own godlike image.” See
Gibbs, “Marlowe’s Politic Women,” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe,
ed. J.A.  Downie and J.T.  Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 172. Fred Tromly argues that, “He carries her embalmed corpse
with him in order to demonstrate that he still has the power to maintain
her presence and to encompass her.” See Tromly, Playing with Desire:
Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998), 82. See also Barbara Bowen, Gender in the Theatre
of War: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (New York: Garland, 1993).
80. Patricia Cahill, “Marlowe, death-worlds, and warfare,” in Christopher
Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169–80, 170.
81. Parker, 225.
82. Mark Thornton Burnett. “Tamburlaine the Great Parts One and Two,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 136.
83. Gibbs, 172.
84. In Lord Morley’s English translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, a text to which
I will return in Chap. 2, the opening lines of “The Triumph of Death”
read: “This most noble and mooste gloryouse Ladye,/That nowe is a
spirite and in the earth doth lye/And somtyle was the high pyller of valour
…” See Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke, ed. D.D. Carnicelli
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). This designation of
the allegorical figure as a “pillar” has a distinctly moral value. A “pillar” is
a support, both a physical support (in the sense of a column); it also refers
to one who holds a position of respectability and importance (“pillar of
strength”) or displays a quality in an exemplary way (“pillar of society”).
 “OBJECTS FIT FOR TAMBURLAINE”: SELF-ARMING IN MARLOWE’S… 83

Zenocrate’s pillar is both a memorial and a testament to her status as

exemplary.
85. See The First Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Norton Facsimile, ed.
Charlton Hinman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
86. Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. Hugh Maclean (New
York: Norton, 1982), 503.
87. For more on the role of women in scenes of arming, see Helen M. Cooper,
Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, eds. Arms and the
Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1989). See also Mary Lynn Broe and Angela
Ingram, eds. Women’s Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989) and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a
Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Presss, 1989). Lisa Lowe examines “the
hero’s [in this case, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’] complex inheritance of the
warrior ethos through the mother.” See Lowe, “‘Say I play the man I am’:
Gender and Politics in Coriolanus,” Kenyon Review 8.4 (1986): 87. See
also Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of
Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York:
Routledge, 1992) and Coppelia Kahn’s Roman Shakespeare: Warrior,
Wounds and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
88. Susan Zimmerman underscores the relationship between transvestism and
the “impossible” representation of the corpse on the early modern English
stage: “As the ultimate hybrid, the utmost in marginality situated at the
furthermost border, the corpse signifies the body/not-body that resists
impersonation altogether, an entity in the grips of a primordial—or, as
Christianity would have it, transfiguring—process. Thus the (impossible)
representation of the corpse on the Renaissance stage was further and
profoundly complicated by the hybridity of transvestism in representations
of female corpses.” See Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and
Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 12.
She cites Philippa Berry on the missing female body on the early modern
English stage: the hybridity of the transvestite actor “delineates ghostly
traces of the ‘more’ that is mysteriously inherent in [all] absence and loss.”
See Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the
Tragedies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 10.
89. Of Zenocrate’s funeral, Neill also notes that, “For all its heraldic ortho-
doxy, however, this is a funeral without an internment; and its deferral of
the promised end creates a sense of unease that is exacerbated by other
details of the scene.” (98). See Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity
in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
90. John Russell Brown argues that, “Costumes should be strong, like the
‘breeches of crimson velvet’ that Henslowe kept in his wardrobe for
Tamburlaine.” See Brown, “Marlowe and the Actors,” The Tulane Drama
84 S. HARLAN

Review 8.4 (1964): 167. Of the color-coding in the scene at Damascus,

Stevie Simkin notes, “When [Tamburlaine] does appear, attended by his
followers, the stage direction tells us that he is ‘all in black, and very
melancholy.’ His black garb is in keeping with a custom that the play has
established (and which is also drawn from Marlowe’s sources): in act IV
scene I, a messenger reports that Tamburlaine uses three colours for his
tents and banners. On the first day, white tents and banners indicate that
an offer of immediate surrender will be accepted mercifully. On the sec-
ond day, the white banners and tents are exchanged for red, meaning that
only those who do not bear arms will be spared. Finally, the red is replaced
by black: on that third day, the messenger warns, ‘Without respect of sex,
degree, or age,/He razeth all his foes with fir and sword.” See Simkin,
Marlowe: The Plays (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 52.
91. Fred B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of
Tantalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 74–5.
 Interlude–Epic Pastness: War Stories,
Nostalgic Objects, and Sexual and Textual
Spoils in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen
of Carthage

INTRODUCTION
In the Tamburlaine plays, armor is a crucial object both during and after
war; it performs aesthetically and memorially. But Marlowe’s earlier play
Dido, Queen of Carthage focuses entirely on the post-war moment: a
space in which the representation of memory of the Trojan War, both
individual and communal, has implications for the future. The future in
this play is twofold—it involves not only Aeneas’ founding of Rome, but
also early modern England’s perceived connection to this ancient city,
which Clifford Ronan has termed a “mythic kingdom of the mind.”1 As
“New Rome,” early modern London saw itself as a belated double of
Aeneas’ city.2 For the play’s audience, the aftermath of the Trojan War has
implications for understandings of English national identity, the transmis-
sion of heroic models of militant masculinity, and epic as way of narrating
the past.3 This war embodied a series of tensions that only bolstered its
cultural centrality in the sixteenth century; it was a foundational conflict
and, the hands of early modern writers, one defined by contradictions.
Ruth Morse’s observations regarding Shakespeare’s engagement with epic
might be applied to Marlowe, as well:

Arguments about Shakespeare’s engagement through the English history

plays with the idea of ‘Epic’ occupied many critics after the Second World
War, and established commonplaces of controversy (unifying the state, good

© The Author(s) 2016 85

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_3
86 S. HARLAN

and bad kingship, strength and tyranny, magnanimity and extravagance).

Epics established ideas about writing war, about war as foundation myth, as
passage to immortality, as in some sense the telos of masculine, aristocratic
aspiration. Most studies have therefore concentrated on the nobles, ‘the
great and the good’. The great epics, however, always weighed their legend-
ary heroes’ public achievements against the public and private costs of those
achievements.4

For the early modern English subject, the war of Homer’s Iliad—and
by extension the post-war moment of Virgil’s Aeneid—was both heroic
and wasteful, ethical and transgressive, Other and obliquely English, his-
tory and myth. It was also past and present: a distant focus of militant
nostalgia and perpetually current in the form of its many retellings.5 The
play depicts the figures in the Aeneid as familiar cultural constructs, known
by way of seemingly endless incarnations.6 England’s mythic militant past
was constructed discursively through forms such as the theater, chron-
icle history, and epic.7 In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, the war is
debased and mocked; it is no more than a petty quarrel between fools
that have been mistaken for heroes. To a lesser degree, this is also true of
Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the play’s relationship to its source material
is hardly reverential.8 This play looks back at the war from two related
vantage points: the position of the characters and the position of the the-
atrical audience.9 I will argue that although Dido, Queen of Carthage has
a certain amount of fun with its classical sources, its characters are none-
theless haunted by the Trojan War in a manner that resonates with the
backward-looking gaze of the opening books of the Aeneid. This haunting
also defines the play itself, which stages the challenges of simultaneously
remembering the past and looking to the future. These challenges are
treated in relationship to questions of despoliation. Objects and subjects
are spoiled in the play, both in the (past, remembered) military realm and
(present, future-oriented) in the civic, or domestic, realm. Given the play’s
emphasis on the latter, hospitality and the host–guest relationship become
one way that the memory of military violence is engaged and controlled.
Material things are both gifted and stolen, pointing to a larger concern
with the play’s relationship to its epic source text—from which it cites
directly, sometimes in Latin—and to the foundational female, sexual spoils
of the epic tradition: Helen of Troy and Dido. Ultimately, Dido’s mourning
for the lost and disarmed Aeneas and her own object-laden suicide-funeral
engage questions of militant nostalgia that are also central to Sir Philip
Sidney’s career, funeral, and Greville’s biography.
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 87

A HAUNTING WAR: HOSPITALITY AND WAR STORIES

Dido, Queen of Carthage was likely performed between 1587 and 1593
and is probably earliest of Marlowe’s plays, possibly written while he was
still at Cambridge. Syrithe Pugh notes that, “The play excerpts the liaison
of Dido and Aeneas from Books I to IV of the Aeneid. This was the most
widely read section of Virgil’s epic, but it marks one major digression in
Aeneas’ quest.”10 Published in 1594, the title page indicates that it was a
collaborative work with Thomas Nashe performed by the boy actors of
the Children of the Chapel, a fact that informs its mock-heroism.11 It is
worth nothing, however, that the extent of Nashe’s contribution is not
clear; it may be minimal or non-existent.12 The title page deems the play
The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage, but it certainly has elements of
burlesque beyond its staging by children.13 This generic hybridity informs
the play’s treatment of a violent past. Anthony Dawson remarks on how
performance relates to the unique cultural memory of the theater:

Performance is a form of remembering just as remembering is a form of

repetition: both hark back to a past that is originary and yet inaccessible.
What remains for those who are left in the after-time is somehow lesser, only
a shadow. There are two aspects of this: first, the theater itself impoverishes
its heroic subjects—a point made all the more vivid by the fact that children
are playing the parts of the most famous ancient heroes and lovers.14

Performance is indeed a form of remembering, and it is not an easy

one. As Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey point out in the introduction
to their edition of Marlowe’s plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage teems with
“constant reminders of Helen and the fall of Troy.”15 Doctor Faustus is
haunted by Helen, as well, but the succubus he encounters represents a
material, if suspicious, intrusion of the past into the present. His famous
response—“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt
the topless towers of Ilium?/Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss”
(13.90–2)—suggests he believes that the lost past can be embodied in the
present.16 But these lines also underscore his doubt (“Was this the face
…?”), thus reminding the theatrical audience that the face in question is,
of course, the face of a boy actor and not of Helen of Troy. Faustus also
speaks in the past tense; he does not conjugate this would-be Helen into
the present. As in this moment, the characters of the Aeneid can be reani-
mated in Dido, Queen of Carthage, but they remain ghostly, not unlike the
conflict in which they participated. As Patrick Cheney notes, critics have
88 S. HARLAN

been “divided over Marlowe’s attitude towards his primary source.”17 I will
argue that although the play is no doubt comedic and mock-heroic, it
nonetheless demonstrates an investment in how the theater transmits the
violent narratives of the classical past. Its militant nostalgia is, therefore,
generically hybrid.
In Act 1, Venus speaks of a second sacking of Troy in the present tense,
envisioning the sea as a battlefield:

Poor Troy must now be sacked upon the sea,

And Neptune’s waves be envious men of war;
Epeus’ horse, to Etna’s hill transformed,
Preparèd stands to wrack their wooden walls,
And Aeolus, like Agamemnon, sounds
The surges, his fierce soldiers, to the spoil. (1.1.64–9)

She understands the destruction of Troy as a model for other catastro-

phes, including the shipwreck of Aeneas. The term “now”—“Poor Troy
must now be sacked upon the sea”—transforms memory into anticipated
horror. She imaginatively enacts a series of transformations (waves to men
of war, Epheus’ horse to Etna’s hill, Aeolus to Agamemnon), and in the
lines that follow, the encroaching night is analogized to Ulysses (1.1.70),
and the stars become “Rheus’ steeds … drawn by darkness forth Astraeus’
tents” (1.1.72–3). To “transform” is to change the present into the past,
or to see it as inextricable from what has come before. This shipwreck-as-
sacking-of-Troy is an unbearable excess of spoilage, a perpetual war that
refuses to produce a post-war moment free of destruction. Venus’ vision
renders her son a potentially spoiled subject, but her appeal to Jupiter is
successful, and the possibility that Aeneas will be spoiled before he can
fulfill his duty to found Rome is foreclosed.
Venus’ mode of militant memory is one of haunting, a term that Aeneas
employs moments later in reference to Helen:

You sons of care, companions of my course,

Priam’s misfortune follows us by sea,
And Helen’s rape doth haunt ye at the heels.
How many dangers have we overpassed! (1.1.142–5)

The Trojan War “follows” Aeneas. It is a shadow that “doth haunt ye

at the heels.” By invoking “Priam’s misfortunes”—a reference either to
Paris’ theft of Helen or to the death of Priam’s sons in the ensuing war
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 89

(including the violated Hector)—Aeneas shifts his focus onto the victors,
suggesting that their triumph constitutes a “haunt[ing].” The phrase “at
the heels” also invokes, in synecdochal and corporeal form, the absent
figure of Achilles. Venus’ attention to repetition suggests an engagement
with performance; she also refers to what the theater does: it plays a scene
again and again. Just before Aeneas enters, she figures Triton as a spoiler
who desires no further destruction:

Triton, I know, hath filled his trump with Troy

And therefore will take pity on his toil,
And call both Thetis and Cymodoce
To succor him in this extremity. (1.1. 130–33)

Here, “pity” and “succor” replace filling one’s “trump.” The question
of spoiling is also treated in relationship to the domestic. In his appeal for
hospitality at the beginning of 1.2, Ilioneus assures Iarbus that he need
not be worried about theft:

We come not, we, to wrong your Libyan gods,

Or steal your household lares from their shrines;
Our hands are not prepared to lawless spoil,
Nor armèd to offend in any kind.
Such force is far from our unweaponed thoughts,
Whose fading weal, of victory forsook,
Forbids all hope to harbor near our hearts. (1.2.10–6)

His promise that military violence will not explode into the “house-
hold,” as it does at the end of the Odyssey, is backed up by his emphasis
on the Trojans’ physical weakness: they are “Wretches of Troy” (1.2.4)
in a state of “poor distressed misery” (1.2.8). This narrative of their tri-
als echoes Venus in figuring the sea as militant—“Save, save, O save our
ships from cruel fire,/That do complain the wounds of thousand waves
…” (1.2.7–8)—for these wounding waves have rendered the men inca-
pable of “lawless spoil.” That Ilioneus should characterize despoiling as
“lawless” underscores the divide between sanctioned and unsanctioned
modes of theft: stealing from a household is not the same as stealing from
a battlefield. He begins his appeal by drawing attention to this distinction
as foundational for host–guest social contract in the post-war moment.
The possibility of lawlessness resonates with Venus’ fear of Aeneas’ destruc-
tion at sea and points to a wider concern in the play with the dangerous
90 S. HARLAN

potential of militant values and practices to surface in the realm of the civic.
Ilioneus’ insistence that he and his men are not “armed to offend in any
kind” collapses “offense” as military aggression and offense in the social
sense of improper behavior toward one’s host, including the violation of
her household.18 By promising that, “Such force is far from our unweap-
oned thoughts,” he presents the Trojans’ “thoughts,” here understood as
intention, as peaceable.
The encounter between Iarbus and Ilioneus emblematizes Jacques
Derrida’s understanding of “conditional hospitality” as informed by
duties, rights, and obligations to both host and guest: the host must
establish that the guest will operate within the parameters that the host
delineates.19 Hospitality is also a negotiation of borders—between self and
Other or one nation and another, and indeed Aeneas identifies himself and
his men as “strangers” when they arrive (2.1.44). The border negotiated
here is also one between war and peace, which takes the form of a tempo-
ral border that must be crossed for Aeneas and his men to move forward
as mytho-historical subjects charged with a nation-building project. In
fact, when Aeneas speaks of departing in 4.3, he will address the city itself
as his host—“Carthage, my friendly host, adieu” (4.1.1)—and Dido as
“patroness of all our lives” (4.4.55). In this earlier moment, Ilioneus is at
pains to present the returned soldier as a good guest: one who capitulates
to the authority of the host and respects her property.20 The understand-
ing of household objects as unspoilable opens up a space in the play for a
post-war ethos that turns away from wartime theft.
This movement from the realm of the militaristic to the domestic has
implications for the identity of the soldier in the post-war moment and,
by extension, for the early modern audience’s conception of their own
national identity. When Dido asks, “What stranger art thou that dost eye
me thus?” (2.1.74), Aeneas responds, “Sometime I was a Trojan, mighty
queen,/But Troy is not. What shall I say I am?” (2.1.75–6). Her ques-
tion directs our attention to the play’s eroticism, but Aeneas fails to reg-
ister this in his response. Instead, he shifts the focus to national identity
and the precarious position of the soldier-guest as “stranger.” Lacking a
nation and thus unable to identify himself as “Trojan,” he finds himself
in an uncertain position—both geographically and temporally. He was
“sometime” a Trojan, a term that locates his secure national identity in the
past. Ilioneus resists this uncertainty, assuring the queen that, “Renowned
Dido, ‘tis our general,/Warlike Aeneas” (2.1.77–8). He insists on Aeneas’
military rank as a stable and immutable form of identity in the post-war
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 91

moment. Although Ilioneus strove to underscore the de-militarized nature

of the Trojans in his interaction with Iarbus, here Aeneas is re-encoded as
“warlike.”
As in the first four books of the Aeneid, Aeneas is strongly associated
with memory in the opening acts of this play, and association bolstered
by Dido.21 When he thanks her for her hospitality—“In all humility I
thank your grace” (2.1.99)—she asks him to, “Remember who thou art.
Speak like thyself;/Humility belongs to common grooms” (2.1.100–01).
Remembering is a form of knowledge: to “Remember who thou art” is to
know who one is, and for Aeneas, this means remembering, and narrating,
the war. But this command is also a significant one for the audience, for
whom the performance of the play also operates as a reminder and a way
of knowing the present in relationship to the past. In her request for war
stories at the end of Book 1 of the Aeneid, Dido outlines a linear narrative
“from the first beginning”:

“No, come, my guest,” she calls, “and tell us all

things from the first beginning: Grecian guile,
your people’s trials, and then your journeyings.
For now the seventh summer carries you,
a wanderer, across the lands and waters.” (Book 1, lines 1049–53)22

And as in the epic, Dido’s curiosity in the play springs from a lack of
report:

My I entreat thee to discourse at large,

And truly too, how Troy was overcome?
For many tales go of that city’s fall,
And scarcely do agree upon one point. (2.1.106–09)

Her request is perplexing in the Aeneid, given the mural of the Trojan
War that Aeneas himself encounters in Book 1. The mural indicates that
the war has already been transformed into myth, even before Aeneas’
arrival in Carthage.23 His emotionally charged encounter with “the wars
of Troy set out in order,” (Book 1, line 647) gives rise to the epic nar-
rator’s line “Sunt rerum lacrimae et mentem mortalia tangunt.”24 The
mural represents his comrades, many of whom are deceased. As Miola
points out, “The scenes on the temple are carefully arranged to emphasize
Greek cruelty and treachery, Trojan helplessness, and a pervasive sense
of doom, fata Troiana. They bring Aeneas to the painful realization that
92 S. HARLAN

his city is lost forever, having already passed from reality into the realms
of art, legend, and song.”25 In this ekphrastic moment, cultural memory
and individual memory collapse: he sees what he remembers, and what he
sees assures what will be remembered (both by him and by others) in the
future.26 Because this scene is absent from the play, Dido and Aeneas’ dis-
cussion in 2.1 is the theatrical audience’s first exposure to Aeneas’ memo-
ries of war. This narrative is provided in response to Dido’s request for
news: she says that, “ … we hear no news” (2.1.113). Aeneas’ understand-
ing of memory is violent and militant:

A woeful tale bids Dido to unfold,

Whose memory, like pale death’s stony mace,
Beats forth my senses from this troubled soul,
And makes Aeneas sink at Dido’s feet. (2.1.114–117)

This kind of memory “beats forth” his senses with a “mace,” or club
primarily associated with medieval horsemen—it is not an art of mem-
ory so much as an attack that produces pain and possibly interrupts
the narrative itself (“And makes Aeneas sink at Dido’s feet.”) Dido is
surprised to witness these effects of memory—“What, faints Aeneas to
remember Troy,/In whose defense he fought so valiantly?” (2.1.118–
19)—and reminds Aeneas that his masculine, militant participation in the
conflict mandates a mode of memory associated with the transmission
of narrative: “Look up and speak” (2.1.120). As will be the case for the
old soldier-host that Shakespeare’s Henry V conjures in his St. Crispin’s
Day speech before the battle of Agincourt, returned soldiers transmit
stories that encode military values. The national past becomes a means by
which future soldierly communities are formed. Aeneas’ lengthy ensuing
speeches, punctured by Dido’s brief responses, present vivid scenes of
combat that underscore the unperformability of battle—also a central idea
in Henry V—and suggest that the transformation of the Trojan War into
narrative form is enacted by Aeneas himself in this post-war moment.27
This narrative answers to the absence Achates speaks of at the beginning
of Act 2: “O, where is Hecuba?/Here she was wont to sit; but, saving
air,/Is nothing here, and what is this but stone?” (2.1.12–4). Both the
absence of Hecuba and the sense that Carthage is a kind of “nothing” are
echoed by Aeneas, who sounds like the hero of a revenge tragedy when
he speaks of “Theban Niobe,” now transformed to stone (2.1.3). Indeed,
Aeneas’ memories of the war mandate revenge, suggesting that the play is
invested in transforming him from epic hero to theatrical revenge hero.
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 93

The founding of Rome is thus not only a communal, nationalist project,

but also a personal one:

And would my prayers, as Pygmalion’s did,

Could give it life, that under his conduct
We might sail back to Troy and be revenged
On these hard-hearted Grecians which rejoice
That nothing now is left of Priamus! (2.1.16–20)28

His reference to Pygmalion reminds the theatrical audience of the play’s

erotic potential by turning briefly from Virgil to Ovid, but this potential is
subsumed in his militant counterfactual—“We might sail back to Troy”—
and his desire to revise the past. Aeneas’ affective response of weeping
(itself a response to a statue created by weeping) resonates with the tears
of the mural in Book 1 of the Aeneid and directs our attention to how an
audience responds to narratives, and memories, of the Trojan War.
As in Book 2 of the Aeneid, telling war stories does not come easily to
Aeneas. At times, his militant nostalgia is informed by counterfactuals, as
when he figures the Trojan horse or “Epeus’ pine-tree horse” (2.1.162)
as the cause of Troy’s destruction: “These hands did help to hale it to the
gates,/Through which it could not enter, ‘twas so huge./O, had it never
entered, Troy had stood!” (2.1.170–73). (As Shepard notes, “… a medi-
eval tradition thought Aeneas guilty of inviting the Greeks inside Troy’s
walls …”.29) This wish is irreconcilable with his duty of nation building;
events cannot have happened other than they did, and the present cannot
be other than it is. The destruction of Troy is necessary to assure Aeneas’
fame, so in the context of theatrical performance, a counterfactual is dan-
gerous. In her examination of the relationship between fame and history,
Linda Charnes notes that, “Fame by its nature is redundant. Like history,
it condenses meaning around—and as—both persons and events ‘after the
facts.’ Always constituted retroactively, famous figures and historical events
exist as representations, as well as effects, of their own belatedness.”30 The
characters in Dido, Queen of Carthage are indeed belated, for they represent
multiple texts, cobbled together for the early modern theater.
Aeneas’ memory of the “fatal instrument” (2.1.177) of the Trojan
Horse produces a scene of combat that emblematizes a mode of epic
memory that is not only Virgilian, but also Homeric:

Frighted with this confused noise, I rose,

And looking from a turret might behold
94 S. HARLAN

Young infants swimming in their parents’ blood,

Headless carcasses pilèd up in heaps,
Virgins half-dead, dragged by their golden hair
And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,
Old men with swords thrust through their agèd sides,
Kneeling for mercy to a Greekish lad,
Who with steel pole-axes dashed out their brains. (2.1.191–99)

He remembers the scene not as a participant, but as a surveyor.

Although his narrative is violent, it is also oddly detached; Aeneas seems
more like he is reciting the Iliad than recalling his participation in it. And
these memories—supposedly emotionally difficult but also rote—are pro-
duced by figuratively despoiling the body parts of other fighters, a rhe-
torical move that anticipates his focus on the mutilation of male bodies in
combat in his stories:

Then speak, Aeneas, with Achilles’ tongue,

And, Dido, and you Carthaginian peers,
Hear me, but yet with Myrmidons’ harsh ears,
Daily inured to broils and massacres,
Lest you be moved too much by my sad tale. (2.1.121–25)

He claims “Achilles’ tongue” and appeals to his audience—both on

stage and theatrical—to listen with “Myrmidons’ harsh ears” so as not to be
overwhelmed by affect. The danger that these war stories will “[move] too
much” is controlled by these violent synecdoches, which suggest a collapse
between actual combat and the representation of combat in nostalgic form.
This recollection is about fragmentation, which the play treats as a feature
not only of war narratives, but also of the relationship between the past and
the present. The phrase “out of joint” recurs throughout the play as a way of
marking breaks and fissures. Aeneas narrates Hector’s ghost as “out of joint”:

Then buckled I mine armour, drew my sword,

And thinking to go down, came Hector’s ghost,
With ashy visage, bluish sulphur eyes,
His arms torn from his shoulder, and his breast
Furrowed with wounds, and—that which made me weep—
Throngs at his heels, by which Achilles’ horse
Drew him in triumph through the Greekish camp,
Burst from the earth, crying, ‘Aeneas, fly!
Troy is a-fire, the Grecians have the town!’ (2.1.200–08)31
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 95

As a disfigured and mutilated combatant (“His arms torn from his

shoulder”), he prefigures Williams’ horrific vision of soldiers’ fragmented
limbs joining together on the Day of Judgment in Henry V, which I will
address in the second interlude. In Act 3, Dido chastises Iarbus as poten-
tially “out of joint”:

How now, Gaetulian, are ye grown so brave

To challenge us with your comparisons?
Peasant, go seek companions like thyself,
And meddle not with any that I love.
Aeneas, be not moved at what he says,
For otherwhile he will be out of joint. (3.1.19–24)

Here, the idea is assigned a temporality: “otherwhile,” or at another

time. Achates employs the phrase “out of joint” in a literal, corporeal sense
in reference to the storm at the beginning of Act 4:

I think it was the devils’ reveling night,

There was such a hurly-burly in the heavens;
Doubtless Apollo’s axle-tree is cracked,
Or aged Atlas’ shoulder out of joint,
The motion was so over-violent. (4.1.9–13)

This sense of dislocation is echoed in the vision of Apollo’s “cracked”

tree. Both images suggest a problem of properly fitting together, or join-
ing. Harris invokes this phrase in his discussion of early modern under-
standings of time and matter:

Contrary to our either/or habits of local and universal reading, English

Renaissance theorists of matter regard it as neither of an age nor for all time.
Rather, they see it as out of time with itself—that is, as untimely. In the stone
tablets of religious typology, the city walls of urban chorography, that com-
pound substances of vitalist philosophy, and the matter of the Shakespearean
stage—histrionic actors’ bodies, malodorous special effects, and even trifling
hand properties—time is repeatedly, to use Hamlet’s well-known phrase,
out of joint.32

As in Hamlet, time is “out of joint” in Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Achates’ vision of “aged Atlas’ shoulder out of joint” is one of a broken
body, and Aeneas’ memories of the Trojan War are, for his theatrical audi-
ence, also “out of joint,” or dislocated from their epic source material and
96 S. HARLAN

claimed as theater. The question of joining also resonates with the play’s
erotic dimension and the potential union between Aeneas and Dido.
Patricia Parker has attended to how the language of joining and joinery in
Shakespearean comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You
Like It demonstrates an interest in the “joining (or misjoining) in matri-
mony, the material constructions of the artisan joiner, and what may seem
to modern sensibilities the completely unrelated sphere of the deforming
of a text or improper joining of words.”33 Dido, Queen of Carthage consid-
ers whether ancient Rome can be joined to early modern England. Such
a joining depends on presenting the theatrical audience with models for
how to prosthetically remember, to use Landsberg’s term, a war that pro-
duced a new Trojan empire.

NOSTALGIC OBJECTS AND TEXTS: FORGETTING

THE FUTURE AND CITING THE PAST

I have argued that the play’s treatment of hospitality in Act 1 suggests a

turn away from the theft of objects associated with combat, but this is not
to say that objects are not contested. Rather, they become another means
by which the play engages questions of memory and the past. In Act 3,
Dido imagines transforming Aeneas into a series of objects that resemble
relics:

O dull-conceited Dido, that till now

Didst never think Aeneas beautiful!
But now, for quittance of this oversight,
I’ll make me bracelets of his golden hair;
His glistering eyes shall be my looking-glass,
His lips an altar, where I’ll offer up
As many kisses as the sea hath sands. (3.1.81–7)34

The bracelet she invokes resonates with the “bracelet of bright hair
about the bone” (line 6) in John Donne’s “The Relique,” in which the
speaker imagines himself (and his love) exhumed in the future to make way
for a new corpse. Aeneas’ “glistering eyes” become a mirror in which Dido
sees herself, a doubling that underscores the agonistic quality of the rela-
tionship between these two rulers and their present, and future, empires.35
In Act 5, she also refers to the Ethiopian priestess of the Hesperides “who
willed me sacrifice his ticing relics,” (5.1.277) objects that she invokes
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 97

again in her scene of self-slaughter: “Now, Dido, with these relics burn
thyself,/And make Aeneas famous through the world/For perjury and
slaughter of a queen” (5.1.292–94). These objects include his sword, gar-
ments, and letters. By the end of the play, they have become perverted
things that represent not a saint, but a transgressor, and they secure Dido’s
version of their romantic narrative and Aeneas’ infamy.
Dido’s blazon-like transformation of Aeneas into objects is only one
way the play treats material possessions, which tend to circulate, changing
hands as both stolen and gifted things.36 Disguised as Ascanius, Cupid
conceals his “golden arrow” at the beginning of Act 3:

Now, Cupid, cause the Carthaginian queen

To be enamoured of thy brother’s looks;
Convey this golden arrow in thy sleeve,
Lest she imagine thou art Venus’ son;
And when she strokes thee softly on the head,
Then shall I touch her breast and conquer her. (3.1.1–6)

Given the play’s preoccupation with memories of the war, the golden
arrow here takes on a distinctly militaristic significance.37 As both a weapon
and an emblem of erotic desire, it collapses these domains, suggesting
that they are in fact inextricable in the post-war moment. At the begin-
ning of the play, Ganymede speaks of Jupiter’s “bright arms”—“And I
will spend my time in thy bright arms” (1.1.22)—thus likening the body
to a weapon or suggesting that the domain of the erotic relies on military
iconography associated with the concluded Trojan War. To seduce Dido
is to “conquer” her. This is certainly a conventional poetic formulation,
but it also constitutes an engagement with militant nostalgia. When Venus
and Cupid plan to make Dido fall in love with Ascanius at the end of Act
2, they figure it as a self-consciously theatrical wounding; Cupid assures
Venus that, “I will, fair mother, and so play my part/As every touch shall
wound Queen Dido’s heart” (2.1.332–33). Dressed as Ascanius, Cupid
is also linked to the past war through Helen: when Dido asks “… tell
me where learn’dst thou this pretty song?” (3.1.27), Cupid replies, “My
cousin Helen taught it me at Troy” (3.1.28). Troy is again a space of past-
ness and one associated with the transmission of not only military values,
but also aesthetic ones. The song is something carried away from its ruins.
Cupid also requires gifts of Dido, asking, “What wilt thou give me? Now
I’ll have this fan” (3.1.32). Like the jewels Jupiter bestows on Ganymede
98 S. HARLAN

in Act 4, Venus’ gifts to Cupid (“Ascanius”) in 2.1, and Dido’s gifts to

Aeneas in the cave of Act 3, this fan serves to solidify a romantic bond, but
these gifts are unstable, for the theatrical audience know that they cannot
fulfill their purpose: the erotic cannot be privileged.38
In the case of Dido’s gift to Aeneas, the memorial objects have implica-
tions for his political role, as well. She narrates the significance of her gifts
in Act 3:

‘Sichaeus’, not ‘Aeneas’, be thou called;

The ‘King of Carthage’, not ‘Anchises’ son’.
Hold, take these jewels at thy lovers hand,
These golden bracelets and this wedding-ring,
Wherewith my husband wooed me yet a maid,
And be thou king of Libya, by my gift. (3.4.58–63)

By transferring the gifts her husband gave her to Aeneas, Dido reshapes
his post-war identity, doubling him with Sichaeus and obscuring his for-
mer selves: “Aeneas” and “Anchises’ son.” The latter designation invokes
the rescue of his father and links him to the fall of Troy, a history that here
Dido seeks to efface. The material gifts that proliferate in this play under-
score the power relationships that also inform the host–guest relationships
of Act 1 and remind Aeneas that he is subject to Dido, his “patroness”
(4.4.55). If he is to be king of Libya, this role will be a “gift” and will
thus imply obligation.39 Dido also puns on the question of theft when
she deems Aeneas’ departure in Act 4 “stealing”: “O foolish Trojans that
would steal from hence/And not let Dido understand their drift!” (4.4.5–
6). She then catalogues the gifts she would have given them:

I would have given Achates store of gold,

And Ilioneus gum and Libyan spice;
The common soldiers rich embroidered coats
And silver whistles to control the winds,
Which Circe sent Sichaeus when he lived. (4.4.7–11)

Here, Dido’s counterfactual language echoes Aeneas’ in Act 2 regarding

the Trojan Horse: “O, had it never entered, Troy had stood!” (2.1.172).
Rather than bestowing these gifts, she plans to steal Aeneas’ “oars, his
tacking, and his sails” (4.4.109) as part of her self-eternizing project:
“For in his looks I see eternity,/And he’ll make me immortal with a kiss”
(4.4.122–23). Another line that anticipates Faustus’ encounter with the
 INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 99

succubus of Helen, her line has both romantic and mytho-historical impli-
cations. The “eternity” of which she speaks is not simply enduring love,
but her own enduring status as a character in both the Aeneid and the play.
These material things also emblematize an encounter between past
and future, the very encounter the play stages, as well.40 Aeneas envisions
Rome as a place constructed of the spoils of other civilizations:

From golden India Ganges will I fetch,

Whose wealthy streams may wait upon her towers,
And triple-wise entrench her round about;
The sun from Egypt shall rich odours bring,
Wherewith his burning beams, like laboring bees
That load their thighs with Hybla’s honey’s spoils
Shall here unburden their exhaled sweets,
And plant our pleasant suburbs with her fumes. (5.1.8–15)

The “sun from Egypt,” figured here as spoiler, is compared to “laboring

bees,” an appropriation of Virgil’s famous epic simile in Book 1 regarding
the construction of Carthage. Here, the subject is not Carthage’s rising
walls, but Aeneas’ city, a hybrid place comprised of stolen materials (river,
sun, etc.). To found the city is to “unburden” oneself of these “spoils,”
which is a form of “triumph,” but one that does not take place in city
space, as will be the case at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,
but is itself the city space. Aeneas’ vision is one of conquest—the lay-
ing claim to foreign land—but it is also a powerful fantasy of redrawing
maps in a Tamburlaine-like manner: he wants nothing less than to reframe
geography, or to fit (of “join”) parts together in a new manner. When
he asserts that “Carthage shall vaunt her petty walls no more,/For I will
grace them with a fairer frame,” he suggests that his duty is to fill in this
frame. In Act 5, he speaks of building “a statelier Troy” as a “triumph”:41

Triumph, my mates, our travels are at an end.

Here will Aeneas build a statelier Troy
Than that which grim Atrides overthrew.
Carthage shall vaunt her petty walls no more,
For I will grace them with a fairer frame
And clad her in a crystal livery
Wherein the day may evermore delight. (5.1–7)

This city lacks a name, as Ilioneus’ question indicates: “But what shall
it be called? ‘Troy’, as before?” (5.1.18). But Aeneas’ city can’t be “as
100 S. HARLAN

before”; it must be better than that which has come before, and so it must
have a new name. Cloanthus advises that Aeneas name the city “Aenea”
(5.1.20) after himself, and Sergestus suggests a name that honors his
son—“Rather ‘Ascania’, by your little son” (5.1.21)—but Aeneas opts
for “my old father’s name,” (5.1.22) emphasizing not the present or the
future, but the past.
Although the Trojan War was a haunting specter in the opening acts
of the play, by Act 4, characters are more concerned with forgetting than
remembering. In 4.4, when Hermes chastises Aeneas for wanting nothing
more than to “[beautify] the empire of this queen,” (5.1.28) his concern
centers on the problem of memory:

Why, cousin, stand you building cities here

And beautifying the empire of this queen
While Italy is clean out of thy mind?
Too too forgetful of thine own affairs,
Why wilt thou so betray thy son’s good hap? (5.1.27–31)

Aeneas is “Too too forgetful,” and Italy is “clean out of [his] mind.”
Dido has a moment of forgetting in Act 3 when she confesses her love for
Aeneas: “Do shame her worst; I will disclose my grief;/Aeneas, thou art
he—what did I say?/Something it was that now I have forgot” (3.4.27–
9). These two modes of forgetting are not quite the same. In Aeneas’ case,
to be “Too too forgetful” is to lose sight of duty and to forget Rome, a
place that does not yet exist. Achates insists that remaining in Carthage
erodes one’s masculine, militant identity:

This is no life for men-at-arms to live,

Where dalliance doth consume a soldier’s strength
And wanton notions of alluring eyes
Effeminate our minds inured to war. (4.3.33–6)

But the threat to identity posed by remaining has wider implications

beyond the play. The kind of forgetting Hermes witnesses in Aeneas has
mytho-historical implications; it could disrupt the early modern English
theatrical audience’s national narrative and, by extension, their identity.
Charnes notes that dramatic subjectivity “means the subject’s experience
of his or her relationship to his or her ‘identity.’ Hence, a necessary space
is opened up between ‘identity’ (which is the artificially constructed
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 101

‘thingness’ of self as it has been constituted in the past) and ‘subjectivity’

(which is the relationship to that ‘thingness’ as it is experienced in the
present).”42 Drawing on this claim, Garrett Sullivan posits that, “… forget-
ting is a form that subjectivity—a relationship to identity that represents
the shattering of identity—frequently takes on the early modern stage.”43
According to Hermes, Aeneas experiences what Sullivan terms “forget-
fulness,” whereas Dido’s failure to recollect what she was going to say is
“forgetting.”44 But her lapse also concerns Aeneas’ identity; this moment
of forgetting comes after she establishes who he is: “Aeneas, thou art he—
what did I say?/Something it was that now I have forgot” (3.4.28–9).
When a character performs forgetting, it may appear to the theatrical
audience, if only for a moment, that the actor has forgotten his lines. In
the epic context of this play, what Dido enacts here is a brief forgetting
the Aeneid, which is not only classical source material but also theatrical
script. She will not forget for long, and her forgetting will elicit none of
the anxiety that Aeneas’ forgetfulness does, but these two moments point
to a problem of memory that informs the play’s anticipation of the future
spoiling of Carthage.45 Carthage must be, in a sense, forgotten for legend-
ary history to unfold in the manner expected by the play’s audience.
This mode of forgetting also has implications for the play’s treatment of
the spoiling of women, both Dido and Helen before her. In Act 5, Dido
invokes the question of forgetting to chastise Aeneas as a “perjured man”
(5.1.156):

Hast thou forgot how many neighbor kings

Were up in arms or making thee my love?
How Carthage did rebel, Iarbus storm,
And all the world calls me a second Helen,
For being entangled with a stranger’s looks?
So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,
Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sacked
Ad I be called a second Helena! (5.1.141–48)

In one sense, she is asking him if he has forgotten the play that is now
almost over, but she is also asking if he has forgotten the war that he nar-
rated in Act 2. This mode of forgetting would enable a dangerous form
of historical repetition. Dido imagines that she is “a second Helen”—a
phrase she repeats—and Carthage as “fair Troy” that “might be sacked.”
Her memory, both of the play in which she is a character and the texts
102 S. HARLAN

from which the play is derived, in part enables the transmission of epic
tradition by way of the theater and constitutes a mode of theatrical
power that complements her political power and even challenges Aeneas’
forward-looking political aspirations to “raise a new foundation to old
Troy” (5.1.79). Like Helen, who haunts this play as the supposed cause
of the Trojan War, Dido is a foundational sexual and cultural spoil. She
refers to Helen as “she that caused this war” (2.1.292).46 The nostalgic
relationship between early modern England and ancient Rome relies, in
part, on sexual violence against women, which in this play is a mode of
spoiling that bears a relationship to the anticipated spoiling of Carthage
in future wars with Rome.47 In my attention to the representation of rape
and spoiling, I am influenced by Stephanie Jed’s study of how the han-
dling of Lucretia’s rape by late fourteenth-century Florentine humanists
“exemplifies the humanistic habits of handling and interpreting literary
materials.”48 She argues that, “From the perspective of the legend’s trans-
mission, we can begin to see this rape not as an inevitable prologue to
Rome’s liberation but as historical figuration, informed and reformed to
serve various interests and needs in different historical moments.”49 The
question of nostalgia also occupies her:

The rape of Lucretia is of central importance to humanism because of its

place in a narrative of liberation. Just as the Florentines nostalgically con-
structed the descent of their own liberty from the liberty of Republican
Rome, so modern humanists tend to reconstruct fifteenth-century Florence
as a place uncontaminated by present-day corruption of free thought. In
both cases, however, the nostalgia for past freedoms is dependent upon the
representation of rape.50

Like Lucretia, Helen’s narrative has been endlessly represented. In Dido,

Queen of Carthage, she is a means by which the play remembers not only
the Aeneid, but also the Iliad, engaging not with the military violence of
the Homeric tradition, but with the question of Helen as cause. If Aeneas
sees the Trojan Horse as the source of Troy’s destruction and wishes he
could revise this aspect of the past, Dido’s counterfactual vision concerns
Helen, a “strumpet” whose story gives rise to an affective response in the
listener: “O had that ticing strumpet ne’er been born!/Trojan, the rueful
tale hath made me sad” (2.1.300–01).
Dido’s vision of herself as “a second Helena” (5.1.148) appears
after she and Aeneas cite directly from Book 4 of the Aeneid. The play
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 103

frequently cites from the epic in translation, but here, the players perform
the Latin text itself:

DIDO. Si bene quid de te merui, fuit aut tibi quidquam

Dulce meum, miserere domus labentis, et istam
Oro, si quis adhuc precibus locus, exue mentem.
AENEAS. Desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis,
Italiam non sponte sequor.

Dido’s appeal is translated as, “If I have deserved anything from you, or
anything about me has been dear to you, take pity on a falling house; and
I beg this—if there is still [adhuc for Q’s ad haec] any place for prayers—
abandon this purpose,” and Aeneas’ response reads, “Stop inflaming both
of us with your laments. Against my will, I must go to Italy.”51 This is a
moment of linguistic alienation for those in the theatrical audience who
do not understand the lines. But this alienation produces an effect of the
authentic, a fiction that the theatrical audience is being given access to the
epic itself, which possesses the power to return one to the past. Latin is the
means by which Dido claims a position not only as spoil but also as spoiler
at the end of the play. It is she who cites from the Aeneid in Latin most
frequently in Act 5. As she approaches her textually inescapable fate, these
citations proliferate, suggesting a relationship between her performative
mode of linguistic repetition and the performance of her self-slaughter. In
his fine study of repetition in the play, Dawson notes that,

Repetition, in this literary-performative context, is inescapable, but also in

one sense impossible. It is inescapable because it is the imperative of mourn-
ing and of story-telling, just because the cultural forms that mourning and
story-telling take must involve ritual and narrative repetition. But it is also
impossible because the kind of triumphant continuity implied, for example,
by the return to Aeneid is impossible.52

Such a return is indeed impossible; what the play performs instead is

closer to ventriloquism. Before throwing herself into the fire, Dido says:

Litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas

Imprecor; arm armis; pungent ipsique nepotes:
Live, false Aeneas! Truest Dido dies;
Sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras. (5.1.310–13)
104 S. HARLAN

These lines—“I pray that coasts may fight opposing coasts, waves fight
waves, arms fight arms; may they and their descendants go on fighting”
(Book 4, lines 628–9) and “Thus, thus I rejoice to go down into the shad-
ows” (Book 4, line 660) solidify her connection to the epic and re-encode
her as an emblem of cultural memory: a spoiler, not the spoiled.53 She also
takes on Aeneas’ language of the revenger from earlier in the play, figuring
herself not as a second Helen, but as a second Hannibal: “And from mine
ashes let a conqueror rise,/That may revenge this treason to a queen/
By ploughing up his countries with the sword!” (5.1.306–08). This
phoenix-like conqueror will avenge not Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido,
but “treason,” a political rather than romantic transgression. Dido’s self-
slaughter anticipates Cleopatra’s in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
as a means by which one escapes the fate of being rendered a spoil. The
“relics” she burns with herself include Aeneas’ sword, so in the end, it is he
who is reduced to a memorial, militant object. The sword reminds her of
his promise to her in the cave—“Here lie the sword that in the darksome
cave/He drew and swore by to be true to me …” (5.1.295–96)—but
she re-inscribes it with a new significance: it is her trophy of his treach-
ery. Aeneas is gone, and his accouterment remains behind. These objects
enable Dido to transmute her mourning for him into her own funeral,
which like Sir Philip Sidney’s far more elaborate one, constitutes a perfor-
mance of militant nostalgia intended to assure its audience of the future.

NOTES
1. Clifford Ronan, “Antike Roman”: Power Symbology and the Roman Play
in Early Modern England, 1585–1635 (Athens and London: the University
of Georgia Press, 1995), 1.
2. Derek Keene reminds us that, “… cities do not stand in isolation. They are
shaped by, and themselves shape, wider demographic trends, political
structures, accumulations of knowledge and credit, and, above all, the bal-
ance of comparative advantage between cities, regions, and states. In any
one city each of these forces can follow different trajectories in time and
space, although often the trajectories are linked.” See Keene, “Material
London in Time and Space,” Material London, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin
(Philadelphia: the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 55. In the
introduction to this collection, Lena Cowen Orlin notes that early mod-
ern London had “multiple identities”: “London had many guises: prehis-
toric settlement, Roman occupation, medieval city, and modern
conurbation; capital city, seat of national government, and home of the
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 105

monarch; great port of trade (unlike other European national capitals);

culture center, with a near monopoly on printing and publishing; emer-
gent center of industry and of empire” (3). Gail Kern Paster’s founda-
tional study of the early modern city attended to how Horace, Juvenal,
and Plautus’ understandings of Rome informed the work of Shakespeare,
Jonson, and Middleton and broader understandings of the human: “… in
all three Roman writers, the idea of Rome generates dichotomies of char-
acterization, language, and theme which are almost Augustan in severity.
As Romans, they do not escape from the notion that the city occupies a
central position in any meaningful definition of human nature.” See
Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1985), 34.
3. As Heather James notes, “The Troy legend, canonized by Vergil to ease
Rome’s painful transitions from republican to trumviral and finally impe-
rial government under Augustus Caesar, became a privileged topos for
nationalistic endeavors in early modern Europe.” See James, Shakespeare’s
Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13–4.
4. Ruth Morse, “Some social costs of war,” Shakespeare and War, ed. Ros
King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
56–68, 57.
5. James reminds us that in relationship to the Troy myth, Shakespeare “repu-
diates the kind of imitation that honors its model and hopes to transport
some essential value from the original” (31). Robert Miola refers to “the
gloriously slapdash character of Elizabethan classicism” (5) and notes that,
“For Elizabethans, ancient authors provided a treasury of practical informa-
tion on everything from the raising of bees to the attaining of wisdom.
Their advice pointed to a better, richer, and fuller life. As a result, English
classicism came to be ahistorical and eclectic in character, little concerned
with understanding the past on its own terms” (9–10). See Miola,
Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. Writing of Troilus and Cressida, Charnes argues that the play underscores the
“legendary citationality” of its characters. See Charnes, Notorious Identity:
Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 86. In a related vein, Harris has argued that, “Shakespeare’s
second Henriad repeatedly palimpsests its characters with oriental despots,
such as Cambyses of Persia, Tamburlaine of Scythia, Amurath of Turkey, and
Herod of Jewry” (21). We might say that the characters of the Trojan War
are, in a sense, palimpsested with themselves; they represent certain aspects
of the many representations that have come before.
7. Richard Helgerson has attended to how “The discursive forms of nation-
hood and the nation’s political forms were mutually self-constituting.
106 S. HARLAN

Each made the other. Something of this reciprocal process can be seen in
the sixteenth-century development of chronicle history. Chronicle was the
Ur-genre of national self-representation. More than any other discursive
form, chronicle history gave Tudor Englishmen a sense of their national
identity.” See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing
of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
11. Such texts were, of course, important source material for the drama
of the period.
8. Troilus and Cressida and Dido, Queen of Carthage share an investment in
the relationship between comedy and war. Shepard reads Marlowe’s play as
“an anti-war burlesque,” (57) referring to it as “Marlowe’s scrutiny of the
fictions of epic masculinity that are implicitly resident in the Dido-Aeneas
myth” (55). The problems of the epic heroic model also inform the narra-
tives of the death of Sir Philip Sidney and the tributes to him, which I will
discuss in the next chapter. Shepard makes this connection: “The tension
between heroic duty and romantic love that is at the heart of the Dido-
Aeneas myth is a major topic in early modern English literature … Reading
the literary trends, it seems that as the reign of Elizabeth wore on, fewer
poets and readers were assuming, as Homer and Virgil had, that men
would inevitably prefer the glory of Mars to the pleasures of Venue; or that
being devoted to a woman was certainly tragic but inevitable. Could it have
seemed to late Elizabethan writers, in the wake of Sidney’s death in
Zutphen in 1586 and his florid London funeral, simply too ironic in the
1580s and 1590s to continue calling on the medium of poetry to celebrate
the heroic deeds of men at arms? Had it become a commonplace that
Astrophel, or Sidney himself, had perhaps made the wrong choice?” (58).
9. In my understanding of Marlowe’s audience, I drew on the work of critics
such as Jeremy Lopez, who notes that, “Given the state of the documen-
tary evidence in the field [of early modern drama], there is a point at
which imagination must take over where evidence leaves off.” See Lopez,
“Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval and
Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 187–203, 188–89. In a related
vein, Brian Walsh observes that, “Marlowe does not make it easy for audi-
ences to take any one message with them from the playhouse.” See Walsh,
“Marlowe and the Elizabethan theatre audience” Christopher Marlowe in
Context, ed. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 68–79, 77. Jennifer A.  Low and Nova Myhill
distinguish between an “audience” and “audiences”: “The first term
implies a collective entity—one that the dramatists might know and appeal
to (and even create) as a group; the second emphasizes the variety of expe-
riences and viewing practices that individuals brought to the early modern
theater.” See Low and Myhill, “Audience and Audiences,” Imagining the
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 107

Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. Jennifer A. Low and

Nova Myhill (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 1–18, 1.
10. Books I, II, and IV, specifically. See Syrithe Pugh, “Marlowe and classical
literature,” Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily C.  Bartels and
Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 80–89,
84. Shepard also observes that, “… the Trojan material, like the legend of
Tamburlaine, was understood to be available for a variety of ideological
tasks” (57). For a consideration of Marlowe’s classicism in his poetry, see
Georgia Brown, “Marlowe’s poems and classicism” on the goals of a clas-
sical education and the fact that the “acquisition of Latin by Renaissance
schoolboys was as a male “puberty rite” (107). See The Cambridge
Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106–26. On the printed translations
of the Aeneid that Marlowe may have worked with and on Hall’s transla-
tion of the Iliad, which covered only Books 1–10 (as well as Latin transla-
tions of the poem, which Marlowe may have used), see the Introduction
to the Revels edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at
Paris, ed. H.J. Oliver (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968),
xxxiv–xxxv and xxxvii.
11. Sara Munson Deats reads the play as staging “a carnival world in which the
norms of gender behavior, sexuality, and political responsibility are turned
topsy-turvey” (195). She also notes that, “In many ways Dido, Queen of
Carthage is an anomaly in the Marlowe canon. In no other Marlowe play
does the male hero share his central position with a female protagonist—
one who, according to many commentators, brazenly upstages her lover”
(194). See Deats, “Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris,”
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 193–206.
12. Oliver, Introduction, xx–xxv.
13. For a “repertory approach” to early modern English drama, see Lucy
Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Thetare Repertory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005).
14. Anthony B. Dawson, “Priamus is dead: memorial repetition in Marlowe
and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter
Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63–84, 65.
15. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert
Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003), xv. All citations from the play are from
this edition.
16. Ronan reminds us that early modern Roman plays “problematize the topi-
cality of anachronism, the inertness of archaeological fact, and the very
possibility of cultural death and resurrection” (7). Although Doctor
Faustus is certainly not a Roman play, this moment engages the question
of cultural resurrection of the classical past.
108 S. HARLAN

17. Cheney himself maintains that, “In Dido, Marlowe transacts an Ovidian
career change, from love elegy to tragedy, and this is the most primary
thing we can say about the play—the starting-point for criticism. More
specifically, Marlowe imitates Ovid’s own movement from the Amores to
Medea via the two models of tragedy that he had available to him: the
elegiac Ovid of the Heroides and Seneca.” See Cheney, Marlowe’s
Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1997), 101.
18. Given Dido’s sovereignty, we can consider this household as inflected with
elements of the early modern. In her study of the private in early modern
England, Lena Cowen Orlin locates “the private in property, both real and
movable” and argues that the dominant narrative was that male house-
holder in post-Reformation England was “responsible for the mainte-
nance of moral order in his immediate sphere but to macrocosmic benefit”:
“In the decades following the Reformation, the state and its attendant
institutions reformulated ideas of social order, ideas adapted to the reli-
gious upheaval launched by the crown. The state designated the individual
household, in the absence of the old authoritarian church and of a national
police, as the primary unit of social control.” However, Orlin notes that
this model has its limitations when it came to practice. See Orlin, Private
Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press), 3. Critics such as Wendy Wall have
also shown that “patriarchalism failed to dictate or contain actual practice”
of the household (7). Her work directs our attention to how “ordinary
domestic life” (1) was defamiliarized on the early modern English stage,
often erotically: “Since these representations turn up surprising erotic
investments, they nudge critics to account for the mobile sexualities resid-
ing in and around the household” (8). See Wall, Staging Domesticity:
Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
19. See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000) and Adieu, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
20. Natasha Korda notes that, “The early modern conception of what consti-
tuted a household was … defined as much by objects as it was by subjects”
(1) and reminds us that in the texts she examines, “The linguistic and
material economies of words and things … are clearly intertwined” (5).
See Korda, Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern
England (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
21. Dawson observes that Virgil “rewrites both Odyssey and Iliad as part of his
project of establishing his imperial vision; and within the poem, one of the
main functions of repeating the story of the fall of Troy is simultaneously
to stir and assuage Aeneas’ grief, impelling him to confront the pain of his
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 109

own survival as the first stage in the long preparation for his imperial task”
(67–8).
22. All citations from the text are from the Aeneid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum
(New York: Bantam, 1961).
23. As L.V. Pitcher notes, “The writers of classical antiquity were amongst the
first to grapple with the problem of how to depict war and its effects. This
was a problem not just moral—what attitudes and reactions warfare should
evoke—but also formal and technical. How can words best evoke the
experience of war? Which literary tropes are effective, and permissible?
Which, by contrast, are to be decried, as generating the inappropriate
effect?” See Pitcher, “Classical war literature,” The Cambridge Companion
to War Writing, ed. Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 71–80, 71.
24. This line has proven notoriously difficult for both translators and critics
and raises important questions about how, and what, Aeneas remembers
about the Trojan War in the epic—particularly in relationship to a visual
representation. Classicist David Wharton cites upwards of 25 translations.
See Wharton, “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: An Exploration in Meaning,” The
Classical Journal 103.3 (2008): 259–79. Most recently, in 2006, Robert
Fagles translated these lines as: “The world is a world of tears, and the
burdens of mortality touch the heart.” See Fagles (New York: Viking,
2006). In 1990, Robert Fitzgerald rendered them as: “They weep here/
For how the world goes, and our life that passes/Touches their hearts,”
[See Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990)] and Alan Mandelbaum’s
1961 translation reads: “… and there are tears for passing things; here,
too,/things mortal touch the mind.” Mandelbaum’s “… there are tears
for passing things” locates the tears elsewhere—“there”—and does not
assign them explicitly to the images of the warriors. Fitzgerald revises this:
“They weep here …” locates the act of crying in the same space Aeneas
occupies (“here”) and explicitly assigns the tears to the images themselves
(“They weep”). And Fagles’ “The world is a world of tears …” not only
pulls back from Fitzgerald’s assigning the tears to the images but also
expands the line far beyond the specificity of Aeneas’ encounter. Wharton
maintains that “… sunt rerum lacrimae is perceptibly and intentionally
ambiguous” (260) and that the “openness and oddness of the locution”
encourages the reader to linger over the passage (271).
25. Miola, 30.
26. Elizabeth Bearden defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual
representation” and points out that it was a rhetorical term originating in
grammar school exercises of the Second Sophistic. The term, she further
notes, has been “defined as broadly as vivid description, and as narrowly as
the description of an extant work of visual art.” See Bearden, The
Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of
110 S. HARLAN

Greek Romance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 3–4.

Leonard Barkan deemed ekphrasis a lie: “It is not a visual figure so much
as a figure of speech, and like all tropes it is a lie. The specific figural activ-
ity is akin to prosopopoeia, that is, the bestowing of a voice upon a mute
object; and the larger lie is that these pictures have a prior existence inde-
pendent of the poet, who is ostensibly merely ‘describing’ them.” See
Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature,
Modern Scholarship,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 326–51, 332.
27. Dawson attends to how the play anticipates the treatment of performing
the heroic in Henry V: “Dramaturgically, Marlowe here (well before
Shakespeare made it a trope in Henry V) highlights his awareness of the-
atrical poverty—the problem of representing on stage the grand images of
past heroism and defeat” (65). Oliver notes that the play is largely defined
by “‘set speeches’ and purple passages,” which he reads as Marlowe’s
attempt to shift emphasis from character to words for the boys’ company
(Introduction, xiv).
28. In Act 4, Ilioneus speaks of raising Priam from his grave. Dido cannot
produce this ghost, which is required in order to found a new city:

Why, let us build a city of our own,

And not stand lingering here for amorous looks.
Will Dido raise old Priam forth his grave
And build the town again the Greeks did burn?
No, no, she cares not how we sink or swim,
So she may have Aeneas in her arms. (4.3.37–42)

29. Shepard, 54.

30. Charnes, 1.
31. This ghost appears to a sleeping Aeneas in Book 2 of the Aeneid, “dis-
membered by the dragging chariot” (Book 2, lines 375–76). An emblem
of pity and suffering, Aeneas questions him:

‘O light of Troy, o Trojans’ trusted hope!

What long delay has held you back? From what
seashores, awaited Hector, have you come?
For, weary with the many deaths of friends,
the sorrows of your men, your city, how
our eyes hold fast to you! What shameful cause
defaced your tranquil image? Why these wounds?’ (Book 2, 386–92)

Hector “wastes no words, no time on useless questions” (Book 2, line

393) and offers only a warning. He is no less than the spectral embodi-
ment of the war’s waste, an emblem of pity, a “defaced” militant subject.
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 111

32. Harris, 4–5.

33. Patricia Parker, “Rude mechanicals,” Subject and Object in Renaissance
Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43–82, 49.
34. Kopytoff notes that, “relics belong to that category, unusual in Western
society, of objects that are both persons and things.” See Chap. 2 of The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Patrick Geary has
the following to say about the value of relics in the early Middle Ages:
“Relics of saints, whether particles of clothing or objects associated with
them during their lives, particles of dust or vials of oil collected at the site
of their tombs, or actual portions of their bodies, had no obvious value
apart from a very specific set of shared beliefs. Such relics ere of no practi-
cal use … The value attached to the special corpses that would be vener-
ated as relics required the communal acceptance of three interrelated
beliefs: first, that an individual had been, during his life and more impor-
tant after his death, a special friend of God, that is, a saint; second, that the
remains of such a saint were to be prized and treated in a special way; and
third … that the particular corpse of portion thereof was indeed the
remains of that particular saint.” See Geary, “Sacred commodities: the
circulation of medieval relics,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 169–91, 174–5.
35. As Joanna Gibbs notes, “Like Isabella [in Edward II], Dido tends to be
read as a woman for whom ‘the emotional life is everything’ (Steane, 38).
All too often, Dido appears to critics to be the ‘ticing dame’ (4.3.31) that
Achates perceives her to be, a woman whose sole purpose is to draw
Aeneas into an emotional world at odds with the serious business of
founding a new Trojan empire. The Dido of this approach is a woman
who dies for love because unable to comprehend, and therefore accom-
modate herself to, the male preoccupation with issues of government and
of policy … Yet if Dido strives to be loved, there is nonetheless in this play,
as in Edward II, a clear political logic to her desires.” See Gibbs,
“Marlowe’s political women,” Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed.
J.A. Downie and J.T. Parnell (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164–
76, 170–71. Emily Bartels likewise argues that, “If Dido uses Aeneas to
validate her empire, Aeneas too uses Dido to further his imperial project.”
See Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and
Marlowe (Philadelphia: the University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 172.
36. In my attention to the place of gifts in the play, I am influenced by Marcel
Mauss’ 1954 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange, trans. Ian Cunnison
(Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011). Pierre Bourdieu focused on the
gift’s temporal dynamics: “If it is true that the lapse of time interposed is what
enables the gift or counter-gift to be seen and experienced as an inaugural act
112 S. HARLAN

of generosity, without any past or future, i.e., without calculation, then it is

clear that in reducing the polythetic to the monothetic, objectivism destroys
the specificity of all practices which, like gift exchange, tend to pretend to put
the law of self-interest in abeyance.” See Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of prac-
tice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 171.
37. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cupid is absorbed into the mili-
tary realm by aiding Cleopatra to arm Anthony for battle, as I will discuss
in Chap. 3.
38. Pugh argues that Aeneas is “diminished” in the play and links this phe-
nomenon in part to the text’s treatment of gift-giving: “For instance,
where Virgil has Aeneas present gifts to Dido (1.647–55), Marlowe
reverses the direction of the gift (II.1.80), encapsulating his emphasis on
shipwrecked Aeneas’ beggarly status and dependence on the munificent
queen” (85). Drawing on Philip Grierson’s 1959 essay “Commerce in the
Dark Ages: A Critique of Evidence,” in which he maintained that gift and
theft were more important than trade in distributing commodities in the
early Middle Ages, Geary reminds us that, “Between equals or near-equals,
cordial relationships were created and affirmed by the exchange of gifts.
Between individuals or groups of differing status, the disparity of the
exchanges both articulated and defined the direction and degree of subor-
dination. Similarly, hostile relationships were characterized by violent sei-
zures of property or persons under the control of an enemy.” See Geary,
173. See also Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of
Evidence,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6.9 (1959),
123–40.
39. Mauss, 11 and 39–41.
40. Writing of Troilus and Cressida’s complex relationship to its own subject
matter of the Trojan War, Charnes reminds us that: “… the play enacts its
own essentialist longing for something self-evident, something appre-
hendable without the publishing of rhetoric or narrative authority—a
sense of presence that can be empirically grounded. This peculiar longing
… is generated, I would argue, by the physical and visual conditions of the
theater itself. ‘Playing’ opens up an aleatory space in which the ‘then’ of
narrative can be set against the ‘now’ of drama … Drama brings together
the textual and the visual, the inscribed and the mimetic, the ‘original text’
and the repeatable performance. As a consequence, alterity to textual
identity is an inevitable condition of theater, since there are always at least
‘two’ of each character—the written character and the figure on stage, the
actor playing the role” (86).
41. The question of triumph arises in Aeneas’ memories of the war, as well,
but it is a non-thing. He recounts that Pyrrhus’ “triumph” over Priam did
not even take place:
INTERLUDE–EPIC PASTNESS: WAR STORIES, NOSTALGIC OBJECTS, AND SEXUAL… 113

Yet he, undaunted, took his father’s flag

And dipped it in the old king’s chill cold blood,
And then in triumph ran into the streets,
Through which he could not pass for slaughtered men. (2.1.259–62)

42. Charnes, 8.
43. Garrett A. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama:
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 12.
44. Sullivan distinguishes between forgetting and forgetfulness as follows:
“Forgetting* is a specific act that refers to the unavailability of memory
traces to recollection, due either to their erasure or to their being, for
whatever reason, irretrievable from memoria. Forgetfulness, on the other
hand, describes a mode of being and a pattern of behavior that is linked to
forgetting* but more broadly to specific somatic phenomena—specifically,
lethargy, excess sleep, inordinate sexual desire. More broadly still, forget-
fulness connotes the non-normative; this mode of being is routinely
understood as erosive of one’s identity” (12–3). See also Engel on how
“Memory and Oblivion are bound in a dialectical relation” in early mod-
ern England (Death and Drama, 171).
45. At times, Aeneas’ anticipatory rhetoric sounds not unlike Tamburlaine’s:

Then here in me shall flourish Priam’s race,

And thou and I, Achates, for revenge
For Troy, for Priam, for his fifty sons,
Our kinsmen’s loves and thousand guiltless souls
Will lead an host against the hateful Greeks
And fire proud Lacedaemon o’er their heads. (4.4.87–92)

46. At the beginning of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–

96), Theseus says to Hippolyta, another spoil of war:

I woo’d thee with my sword,

And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling. (1.1.16–19)

Laura Levine notes that he alludes to “something like a rape, an originary

violence which he says he wishes to transform.” She reads his reference to
“pomp … triumph … and reveling” as an allusion to the theater, which
becomes a way “to turn something like a rape into a legitimate marriage”
but argues that the play fails to perform such a transformation. See Levine,
“Rape, repetition, and the politics of closure in A Midsummer Night’s
114 S. HARLAN

Dream,” Feminist readings of early modern culture: Emerging subjects, ed.

Valerie Traub, M.  Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 210–28, 210. We might also note
that the term “triumph” suggests a collapse between marriage and mili-
tary triumph, thus re-inscribing Hippolyta in a military system that sanc-
tions sexual violence as a means of despoiling women. As a comedy, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream provides an alternate vision of how rape is
reckoned with in the post-war moment, for comedy privileges the poten-
tially corrective institution of marriage. In this sense, the claiming of
Hippolyta resonates with the treatment of Katherine in Henry V, which I
will discuss in the second interlude.
47. Gibbs notes that the spoiling of women is part of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
plays, as well: “Tamburlaine appropriates women as at once signs of his
magnanimity, and of his projected invincibility. In Tamburlaine, Part II,
for example, Tamburlaine forces the Turkish concubines to submit to his
soldiers’ lust. The Turkish women’s misery is thus made into a mark of
Tamburlaine’s benevolence, figuring his willingness to share with his male
subjects the spoils of war” (171).
48. Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of
Humanism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1989), 4.
49. Jed, 6–7.
50. Jed, 14.
51. Aeneid, Book 4, lines 317–19 and lines 360–61. See Notes to the Penguin
edition, ed. Romany and Lindsey, 576.
52. Dawson, 80.
53. Pugh argues that, “Through incorporating much direct translation,
Marlowe inverts the significance of Virgil’s episode, amplifying Dido’s
tragedy and undermining the values to which she is sacrificed in the
Aeneid” (85).
 CHAPTER 2

Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning

and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lant’s
Roll, and Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir
Philip Sidney

DOING OBSEQUIOUS SORROW

I begin this chapter on memorializing and mourning with a quotation
from Hamlet (1601) that draws attention to the relationship between
mourning and the passage of time. Claudius has the following to say to
his nephew:

‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father,
But you must know your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his—and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. (1.2.87–94)

According to the new king, Hamlet’s mourning—expressed in both

his clothing and his behavior—exceeds the social and cultural limits of
acceptable duration and intensity. In Claudius’s lecture to his black-clad
nephew, the king establishes a relationship between perseverance and
mourning. What upsets him is that Hamlet “persevers” in mourning—that
is, he continues to mourn long after others have stopped. To “persevere”
connotes steadfast determination and dedication (what Claudius refers to

© The Author(s) 2016 115

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_4
116 S. HARLAN

as obstinacy and stubbornness); it also suggests the presence of an opposing

force, of something against which one must struggle. Hamlet resists and
rebels against what he believes to be the court’s faulty, or short, memory:
these subjects have failed to properly mark and meditate on King Hamlet’s
death. To borrow a term from Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning,
the court has not reckoned with the king’s death, an imprecise but crucial
process that Derrida defines as “to recount, relate, or narrate, to consider,
judge, or evaluate, even to estimate, enumerate, and calculate.”1 Hamlet
can do nothing but reckon. In dedicating himself to mourning his father,
he becomes mourning itself.
Hamlet has something to say about memorializing a departed subject
and about the relationship between death and artistic production, or the
work-of-art-as-tribute.2 It also has something to say about excessiveness—
about how mourning tends toward the excessive and why. In this chapter,
I am interested in the mourning of Sir Philip Sidney. Like Hamlet, Sir
Philip Sidney’s mourners “persevered” in their grief and in demonstra-
tions of their loss. The many tributes that circulated after Sidney’s death
attest to an overwhelming, almost unaccounted for, sense of loss.3 I will
examine several of the texts that “reckoned” with Sidney’s death with an
eye to the relationship between mourning and militant nostalgia: these
texts include a score of elegies, Thomas Lant’s 1588 illustrated scroll of
Sidney’s funeral procession, and a pseudo-biography published many years
later, Sir Fulke Greville’s 1652 The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney,
also titled A Dedication to the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. These texts
represent only a few of the many tributes that circulated after Sidney’s
death. They are excessive in both their praise and their mourning; they
also attempt to harness or control excessiveness by invoking military dis-
course and iconography.4 Philippe Aries argues that,

from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century mourning had a
double purpose. On the one hand, it constrained the family of the deceased
to demonstrate, at least for a certain period, a sorrow it did not always feel
… On the other hand, mourning served to protect the sincerely grieving
survivor from the excesses of his grief.5

Aries sees mourning as a safeguard against overwhelming, or uncon-

trolled, grief. It is protective. It regulates. But, as he argues, this protection
and regulation of the self is dependent on constraining the self and on
forcing it to engage in certain behaviors. All of the texts that I examine
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 117

here participate in the communal mourning of Sidney by addressing or

narrating his death in battle, and all are constrained by the literary and
social traditions—processional, elegiac, biographical, and otherwise—that
to some extent dictate their form.
In Hamlet, militant nostalgia certainly controls and reckons with exces-
sive mourning. The armored Ghost of King Hamlet reminds his son,
and the play’s audience, of a past military engagement, the fallout from
which culminates in the appearance of Fortinbras at the end of the play.
In 1.1, Horatio provides a narrative of King Hamlet’s battle with Old
Norway. In 1.5, the Ghost’s armor tells this same warlike story. It is a
backward-looking object, a nostalgic thing with a life in the past. Jones
and Stallybrass note that “Armor was often a form of haunting, whether
or not it was activated by a ghost” and remind us that it was “a crucial
memorial bequest of clothes amongst the aristocracy.”6 Hamlet’s father’s
armor is familiar to Hamlet, and so its presence renders the Ghost both
familiar—in other words, recognizable as his dead father—and alien: a
militant king defined by violent exploits, a reproducible type. As Derrida
notes, the question of identity is central to this encounter as the armor is
a “‘costume’ which no stage production will ever be able to leave out …
This protection is rigorously problematic (problema is also a shield) for it
prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly
in its carapace.”7 The Ghost is both recognizable and unrecognizable,
past and present, and like Hamlet’s own clothing, which he dismissively
characterizes as “the trappings and the suits of woe,” (Ham. 1.2.86) the
Ghost’s armor participates in the work of mourning. In its invocation of
the past, the armor encourages mourning, but it also threatens to displace
the “thing” (Ham. 1.1.24) or “figure” (Ham. 1.1.44) beneath it.8
This struggle between the actual, lost subject and an object that stands
in for this subject plays itself out in the Sidney texts, as well. Like King
Hamlet’s battle with Old Norway, Sidney’s wounding at Zutphen hov-
ers behind, and before, the attempts to construct him as an object of
mourning. To imbue this past scene of military violence with meaning is
part of mourning. In other words, these textual tributes are informed by
Sidney’s status as a military subject, and they reckon with him as such.
These works negotiate a relationship among violence, memory, mourn-
ing, and objectification; they are forms of textual trophy that claim Sidney
himself as a trophy or spoil. Of course, Hamlet himself also is spoiled in
the final moments of the play. Fortinbras’ command—“Go, bid the sol-
diers shoot” (Ham. 5.2.408)—assures Hamlet a soldier’s burial, which,
118 S. HARLAN

however inappropriate to his character, reasserts the role of militarism

in controlling mourning and funereal practices. Fortinbras’ command to
“shoot” controls how the funeral will be staged. The sound of the shots
controls—and silences—language. Embodied in the sounds of gunshots,
militarism displaces language in the play. In the end, Hamlet may not
mourn the dead King Hamlet, but it does mourn the prince himself.
These Sidney texts rely on military spoiling as a mode of mourning.
The battlefield provides a vocabulary and a storehouse of images and prac-
tices from which Sidney’s mourners drew, converting his military death
into a triumph over something more than Spain—into a triumph, indeed,
over mourning itself. But this did not occur overnight. Some of the texts
were produced immediately after Sidney’s death; others appeared soon
thereafter, and still others appeared many years later. Some elegies were
thrown as “bouquets” onto Sidney’s passing hearse at the funeral.9 These
texts were produced rapidly so that they might participate in the funeral
itself. Such texts are examples of what Juliet Fleming refers to as a “posy,”
or “all forms of poetry (portable or not) that understand themselves to be
written on something.”10 She outlines George Puttenham’s definition of
the genre:

Puttenham’s first examples of the genre are “new yeares giftes” (occasional
verses) and short poems “printed or put upon” a dish of “sugar plate” and
taken home at the end of a banquet as a kind of party favour … Such poetry,
says Puttenham, is “made for the nonce”—that is, it is designed to mark a
specific occasion or to serve a particular purpose. The posy is the form that
poetry takes in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, at a
particular site.11

Although Fleming focuses chiefly on early modern writing arts that

did not involve paper, the “bouquets” of elegies at Sidney’s funeral were
no doubt understood to be written on something, which allowed them
an identity as immediate, material memorials. Greville did not write his
own tribute until decades after Sidney’s death, and it was not published
until 1652, 66 years after the wounding it records in such detail. His read-
ers were thus at a significant temporal remove from Zutphen and from
Sidney’s funeral. For his funereal scroll, Lant derived much of his informa-
tion—who was present, what the mourners wore, and so on—from other,
non-illustrated texts about the funeral, some produced in anticipation of
the event and some produced afterwards. But in its capacity to endlessly
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 119

“replay” Sidney’s funeral, Lant’s Roll creates its own temporality. The
texts I examine here are all concerned with the temporality of mourning
and memorializing, as well as with the limitations of these enterprises.
Ultimately, Hamlet’s obsequious sorrow produces no lasting obse-
quies, and it is I part this absence of obsequy that haunts him. The tex-
tual tributes to Sidney are also concerned with absences—absent subjects
and absent objects—but the obsequies themselves are powerfully and
even excessively present, and they position Sidney as a contested military
object, a Christ-like figure whose wounds arrest the gaze of his elegists.
To adopt a term from Michael Serres, Sidney is established as a “quasi-
subject” and “quasi-object.”12 Death and identity were intimately linked
in the English Renaissance: how one died, and how one was mourned,
said something about who the subject was and how this subject wished
to be remembered.13 My focus in this chapter is on how subjects are ren-
dered objects: both literally, of course, by death, and then in the process
of mourning and in the texts that attend it. In their shared reliance on
military iconography, these texts engage with the relationship between
violence and objectification in compelling ways.14

READING ARMOR AND WOUND: SIDNEY AS CONTESTED

OBJECT IN THE ELEGIES
In his 1779 The Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson famously asserted that,
“Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”15 The “fiction” to
which he was referring was Milton’s “Lycidas,” but the capaciousness of
the term “fiction” suggests that he condemned elegy generally. Johnson’s
attention to “leisure” would seem to indicate that grief, and the practices
associated with grief (namely, mourning), should render artistic produc-
tion impossible. These practices, or activities, are in direct contrast with
“leisure.” They are, therefore, a type of work that Johnson maintained
should displace the work of “fiction.” Johnson was concerned with the
sincerity of elegy as a genre or mode, and he is not alone in his cynicism.
Other critics, most notably Peter Sacks, have also attended to the “cer-
emonious self-dramatization” and the “sense of performance” that define
elegy and, he argues, frequently render readers uncomfortable or embar-
rassed.16 Johnson’s strict assertion that if one is truly grieving, one should
not be able to communicate such grief draws one’s attention to the very
problem that Derrida explores: the tension, in facing the death of another,
120 S. HARLAN

between the acknowledgment of the unspeakable and one’s impulse to

speak or memorialize. For Sacks, English elegists generally view mourn-
ing as a compensatory activity.17 In his study of the modern elegy, Jahan
Ramazan summarizes this reading of the “psychological structure” of ele-
gies such as Milton’s “Lycidas,” in which the shepherd ultimately

[displaces] affection from the dead man to the sunlike radiance of his immor-
tal soul … Analogous to the shepherd’s lament is, of course, the implicit
work of mourning carried out by the poet himself; he finds recompense not
only in religious substitution but in making this very poem, redirecting his
affection from the lost friend to the brilliant artifact that is in some measure
a replacement for the man it mourns.18

It is a convention of the elegist and the eulogist to begin by assert-

ing that he cannot speak—that grief is beyond language or unrepresent-
able—and then, of course, to speak. In their reliance on both the excessive
mourning of the classical pastoral form and on Christian narratives of
redemption and triumph over death, the elegies for Sidney are in many
ways conventional. But in their reckoning with an absent scene of mili-
tary violence and a nostalgically chivalric militant figure, these elegies
also break free of the rigid demands of the form. The scenes of Sidney’s
wounding and death displace the scene of mourning that generally serves
as the focus of the classical and Christian elegist.
The classical elegy was defined by its verse form, not by its subject,
which need not have been death, mourning, or grief. As Esther Schor has
noted, the genre, understood in antiquity as a form, was reinterpreted
in the eighteenth century as a mode.19 At this point, the subject of the
elegy—death and loss—came to define it. The dominant modes of criticism
of the elegy have drawn on Freud’s definition of the work of mourning in
“Mourning and Melancholia” and, to a lesser extent, on Harold Bloom’s
theory of the “anxiety of influence.”20 For Freud, the elegy is a translation
into literature of the process of grieving that follows death. If this grieving
is healthy, the process will lead to the consolation of the grieving subject.21
However, by turning away from psychoanalytic concerns with how the
elegy negotiates internal struggles—loss versus consolation, substitution,
and compensation, continuity versus break—we can think about how the
elegies for Sidney negotiate external struggles, both the military engage-
ment that resulted in Sidney’s death and the struggle I identify among
the elegists. The former struggle provides the elegists with their subject
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 121

matter; the latter provides a way of placing these texts in relationship to

one another and reading them as something other than expressions of
grief.22 Indeed, Dennis Kay argues that, “The Tudor modes [of elegy]
gradually became unequal to the task: they came to seem inadequate both
as a medium for rehearsing the excellences of the subject and for consid-
ering, anatomizing, consoling the grief of the speaker.”23 These elegists
are concerned with “anatomizing” Sidney, as well as with the possible
limitations of the elegiac form in the face of death in battle. These texts
participate in a sort of communal “work of mourning,” but this mourning
need not be read in strict Freudian terms. To return to Derrida’s term, the
elegies “reckon” with Sidney’s wounding and death, but this reckoning
is dictated by violence and conflict in compelling ways that suggest that
consolation, whether personal or public, must be forcibly obtained, must
indeed be won. The rituals of war and the rituals of elegy are bound up in
one another.24
Sidney was wounded in battle at Zutphen on September 22, 1586,
and died in Arnhem on October 17 at the age of 31. He was fight-
ing the Spanish in the Netherlands and had led a successful raid on the
Spanish forces at Axel earlier in the year. As Sir Fulke Greville’s Life and
the anonymous “The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death” (likely by
George Gifford) recount in great detail, Sidney was wounded by a bullet
to his unarmored thigh. His death was narrated by George Whetstone
in Sir Philip Sidney (1587), Edmund Molineux in Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles (1588), and Henry Archer in John Stow’s Annales (1592).25
His death also produced numerous elegies that filled over 200 volumes.
Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Leiden issued collections of
elegies. Unknown and anonymous writers wrote elegies. Established poets
wrote elegies. Sidney’s friends and family wrote elegies. Some of these
elegies were published; others were not.26 There were doubtless others of
which we have no record at all: texts that marked Sidney’s death and then
disappeared. As Steven W. May observes, “… the nationwide mourning
after his death would elicit the most significant outpouring of funeral verse
written by courtiers in English.”27 Latin elegies were also produced, but
the vernacular elegies were “like instant artifacts on the English literary
scene,” as Raphael Falco argues.28 In “The Mourning Muse of Thestylis,”
Lodowick Bryskett commands, “Mourne, mourne, great Philips fall,
mourne we his woefull end.” The line begins with a command to mourn
and ends with an assertion that this activity is already underway. The “we”
to which Bryskett refers underscores the polyvocality of mourning Sidney;
122 S. HARLAN

indeed, many of the elegies contain multiple voices or dialogues and, read
as a group, the elegies themselves comprise a type of dialogue.
Many elegies were published in memorial volumes or miscellanies, most
notably The Phoenix Nest (1593) and Astrophel (1595). The Phoenix Nest
contains three anonymous elegies: “An Elegie, or friend’s passion, for his
Astrophill,” “An Epitaph upon the right Honourable sir Philip Sidney
Knight,” and the aptly titled “Another of the same.” The authors of these
elegies are likely Matthew Roydon, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Fulke Greville.
The Astrophel volume, which was presented to Sidney’s widow, Frances
Walsingham, the Countess of Essex, contains Spenser’s “Astrophel” and
Mary Sidney’s “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda.” (These were also repub-
lished with Spenser’s Colin Clout in another volume that also contained
Bryskett’s elegy and The Phoenix Nest elegies.) Mary Sidney also wrote a
dedicatory poem to her brother, which she affixed to her translation of
the Psalms, a project that Philip began and she completed. Several of the
elegies in these memorial volumes provide detailed narratives of Sidney’s
wounding and death. All of them reckon with Sidney as a militarized object
of mourning.29 These elegies present the armored Sidney as a contested
object or spoil of war and ask the reader to consider what relationship
this construction bears to personal and communal mourning. Like Lant’s
Roll and Greville’s Life, the memorial volumes in which these elegies were
published are forms of textual trophy that negotiate relationships between
the living and the dead, the present and the absent.
In Spenser’s “Astrophel,” mourning is not identified with the speaker
so much as it is with the verse itself. The poem begins with a conven-
tional address to shepherds: “To you alone I sing this mournfull verse,/
The mournfulst verse that ever man heard tell” (lines 7–8).30 The verse is
“mournfull.” Language itself mourns. The speaker asserts that Sidney’s
own poems are “bold achievements” in the service of Venus:

Ne her with ydle words alone he wowed,

And verses vaine (yet verses are not vaine)
But with brave deeds to her sole service vowed,
And bold achievements her did entertaine.
For both in deeds and words he noutred was,
Both wise and hardie (too hardie alas). (lines 67–72)

Sidney’s poetry is likened to his military achievements in a classic

shepherd-knight formulation. But more particularly, Spenser establishes
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 123

Sidney’s poetry as “hardie” or brave—the opposite of “ylde” or “vaine”—

as his “deeds” are brave. Sidney’s dedicated service to Venus is paralleled
with his fearless military service to the Queen. Although Spenser renders
Sidney’s military “deeds” as a hunt in this elegy, this conventional scene
cannot regulate the excessiveness of mourning and grief that the poem
performs. Militarism displaces other conventional elements of the elegy
as the chief regulating and controlling force. The last line of the stanza
moves from the past to the present. The speaker presents Sidney’s stellar
personal qualities—he was “wise and hardie”—and then presents what he
knows now in a parenthetical: that Sidney was “(too hardie alas).” Sidney
was unregulated; the word “too” embodies excess.
The speaker refers to his readers as “… you whose softened hearts it
[the verse] may empierse,/With dolours dart for death of Astrophel” (lines
9–10). The verse’s capacity to “empierce” the reader invokes, and dis-
places, the actual “dart”—or bullet—that pierced Sidney’s thigh in battle.
The elegy begins by narrating Sidney’s journey abroad and poses a rhe-
torical question: “What needeth peril to be sought abroad,/Since round
about us, it doth make aboad?” (lines 89–90) As is also be the case with
Lant’s Roll, the speaker establishes a community of readers and mourners
with the term “us.” In other words, it is not only the elegy’s shepherd-
speaker who mourns; the act of reading becomes an act of mourning, as
well. The elegy establishes Sidney as geographically displaced. He is “In
forreine soyle,” (line 92) and the word “abroad” is repeated throughout,
underscoring his status as Englishman in a land that is not only alien, but
itself occupied by “the brutish nation,” (line 98) the Spanish. Spenser’s
layers of allegory reassert Sidney’s status as English and as representa-
tive of all things English: he is “Astrophel” (which echoes Sidney’s own
poetic self-presentation as Astrophil in his sonnets) and the Greek Adonis,
Venus’s lover who is wounded in the thigh by a wild boar. Here, the
Spanish troops become the boar—or “beastly rout” (line 115)—and
Sidney fights them with “his sharp borespear” (line 108) rather than with
a musket. Hunting was a means of training young men for war; the meta-
phor thus encodes military violence.31
Spenser establishes Sidney as a “happie” (line 101) spoiler at the begin-
ning of the elegy. Sidney looks on the Spanish troops with the eye of a
conqueror:

There his welwoven toyles and subtil traines,

He laid the brutish nation to enwrap:
124 S. HARLAN

So well he wrought with practice and with paines,

That he if them great troups did soon entrap.
Full happie man (misweening much) was hee,
So rich a spoile with his power to see. (lines 97–102)

The “spoile” here refers to the “great troups,” a rich treasure in the
“waste” (line 95) that surrounds him. Here, skill is rewarded with spoil;
Sidney is a skilled military leader and thus deserves to spoil the “great
troups”; his skill and “toyles” will be properly rewarded. Sidney looks on
his spoil; his gaze spoils before acts of military violence does, but in this
moment Sidney misjudges like a good tragic figure. Although Sidney is
mistaken—or “misweening”—in his vision of spoils, the speaker none-
theless constructs him as a spoiler (rather than spoil) in his wielding of
his “borespear”: “Wide wounds emongst them many one he made,/Now
with his sharp borespear, now with his blade” (lines 107–08). By isolating
Sidney, the speaker spoils him from his own troops, or “shepheard peares”
(line 126), that fight alongside him. Here, the solitary Sidney fights a
“heard” (line 104): he is one against many.
Spenser dwells at great length on the wounding of Sidney’s armored
body. He singles out the one “cruell beast of most accursed brood” (line
116) who wounds Sidney, Adonis-style, with his “fell tooth” (line 118):

So as he rag’d emongst that beastly rout,

A cruell beast of most accursed brood
Upon him turnd (despeyre makes cowards stout)
And with fell tooth accustomed to blood,
Launched his thigh with so mischievous might,
That it both bone and muscles ryved quight. (lines 115–20)

The boar “launches” Sidney’s thigh: he wounds or pierces it. But

“launch” also connotes the action that brings about the wound—the dart-
ing or rushing forwards of the boar itself —and the hurling, shooting, or
discharging of a weapon (a musket) that is rendered absent, or effaced, by
the Adonis story. The boar’s “tooth” “ryve[s],” or tears, Sidney’s “bone
and muscles,” resulting in a wound that bleeds excessively:

So deadly was the dint and deep the wound,

And so huge streams of blood thereout did flow:
That he endured not the direful stound,
But on the cold deare earth himselfe did throw.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 125

The whiles the captive heard his nets did rend,

And having none to let, to wood did wend. (lines 121–26)

This “dint” refers to both the strike itself and the resulting indentation,
or wound, in and on the body of Sidney. Sidney’s wound is still bleeding
twenty lines later, as it bleeds in Mary Sidney’s dedicatory poem “To the
Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney” from the Psalms.
The Countess writes, “Deep wounds enlarg’d, long festered in their gall/
Fresh bleeding smart; not eie but hart tears fall./Ah memorie what needs
this new arrest” (lines 19–21).32 In both elegies, the bleeding wound is a
means of accessing memories and of accessing the past. In “Astrophel,”
the wound bleeds “wondrously” (line 132). It is an aesthetic object that
inspires wonder. On October 17, 1586, Dr. James, who attended to the
wounded Sidney, wrote the following in his journal:

This afternoon about two o’clock, the most virtuous and honourable gentle-
man Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Governor of Vlissingen [Flushing] being clean
worn away with weakness (all strength of nature failing to continue longer
life in him) departed in wonderful perfect memory even to the last gasp, and
in so good and godly a mind, as they that were present stood astonished,
in doubt whether they should receive greater comfort of the manner of his
death, or grief for the loss of so rare a gentleman and so accomplished with
all kind of virtue and true nobility, as few ages have ever brought forth his
equal, and the very hope of our age seemeth to be utterly extinguished in
him. (emphasis mine)33

James’ journal entry is the first narrative of Sidney’s death, produced

immediately after the event. Certainly, his assertion that Sidney “departed
in wonderful perfect memory” indicates that he died in a state of sound
mind, but this suggestive phrase also foreshadows the elegists’ reliance
on this trope of memory’s perfection (or its capacity to communicate
truth) and its capacity to perfect. For James, Sidney is perfected in the
moment of his death, as are the narratives that will be attached to him.
This militant nostalgia transforms Sidney into “so rare a gentleman and
so accomplished with all kind of virtue and true nobility, as few ages have
ever brought forth his equal.” The wondrousness of both memory and of
Philip, or Philip’s corpse, as an astonishing aesthetic object; his audience
“stood astonished” at his deathbed. Doctors figure prominently in Lant’s
Roll and in Greville’s Life, for those who have privileged access to the
body are allowed a privileged place in mourning. The wondrously bleeding
126 S. HARLAN

wound in “Astrophel” serves as a synecdoche for the wondrous Sidney

himself and provides a focus for his mourners.
In “Astrophel,” female figures ultimately encounter and reckon with
this wound and its significance. The shepherd-speaker narrates how the
shepherds carry the wounded Sidney-Adonis to Venus: “The dolefulst
beare that ever man did see,/Was Astrophel, but dearest unto mee”
(149–50). Before passing the wounded Sidney to Venus, his first female
mourner, and then to Clorinda, his second, the speaker claims him as
his own. The first person asserts itself for the first time since the opening
of the elegy: Sidney is “dearest unto mee.” Having begun as a potential
spoiler, he is now a spoil, reduced to his wounded thigh by the speaker
and carried from the battlefield by his troops. Venus, too, must claim
Sidney as her own spoiled object, which she accomplishes through her
own act of violence. As Sidney is “With crudled blood and filthie gore
deformed,” (line 152) so Venus desires to deform herself in his image.
Curiously, she selects her face as corollary to Sidney’s thigh: “Her face, the
fairest face, that eye mote see,/She likewise did deforme like him to bee”
(lines 155–56). Like Portia’s self-inflicted, “voluntary wound/Here in
the thigh” (2.1.313–14) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c.1599), Venus’s
self-spoiling is a female appropriation of masculine militarism that signi-
fies, and proves, female worthiness:

Her yellow locks that shone so bright and long,

As Sunny beames in fairest somers day:
She fiersly tore, and with outragious wrong
From her red cheeks the roses rent away.
And her faire brest the treasury of joy,
She spoyld thereof, and filled with annoy. (lines 157–62)

The speaker spoils, or claims, conventional Petrarchan tropes of female

beauty in a nostalgic move, and then Venus spoils these tropes in the
sense of quite literally tearing them apart. The speaker’s characterization
of “her faire brest” as “the treasure of joy” recalls Sidney’s earlier vision
of the Spanish troops as “So rich a spoile” (line 103). This moment of
feminine self-“riving” legitimates Venus as a worthy spoiler and mourner
and appropriates Sidney-Adonis for another female mourner who appears
shortly thereafter: Clorinda. Venus fills her spoiled body with “annoy,”
a term that is related etymologically to the French “ennui,” or pain and
vexation. “Annoy” refers to a mental state akin to physical pain that arises
from subjection to disturbing circumstances. In other words, self-spoiling
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 127

allows for the production of grief and allows, or indeed compels, one to
engage in activities of mourning. By rendering her grief physical, she mir-
rors the process of mourning itself, which requires the subject to render
external—in the form of clothing, keepsakes, and tokens—the internal.
This self-spoiling female figure manifests the grief of the male poet-
speaker; she embodies the masculine loss of a male friend. Celeste Schenck
argues that the elegy is a crucial site of male bonding.34 Here, this male
bonding relies on the presence of a female figure that performs masculine
grief through an act of violence. Melissa Zieger likewise notes that,

female figures abound in the major, canonical English elegies, occupying

constantly shifting roles as enabling or threatening adjuncts to the poetic
process. Although the proliferation and multiple functioning of female fig-
ures in the traditional English elegy may serve to consolidate male literary
authority, the sheer excess of these figures tends to betray an insecurity at
the heart of that authority.35

The spoiling that occurs at this moment in the poem is of two kinds: to
spoil is to claim and to ruin. By ruining “her faire brest,” Venus re-creates
herself in the image of the wounded, deformed Sidney. The “outragious”
nature of this undertaking refers to both the action of tearing and to its
result. Venus’s self-spoiling is cruel and injurious, as well as excessive or
unrestrained. It is also, in a sense, offensive or unjust—or “wrong,” as the
speaker indicates—insofar as it violates codes that govern social behavior.
The female body is reconfigured in this poem as an alternate object of hor-
ror identified with the masculine, war-wounded body. The violence of the
battlefield—violence that should rightly be directed against one’s enemy
and should be gendered as male—is here appropriated by the female
mourner and directed toward the self.
Ultimately, Venus must die in order to maintain symmetry between
mourner and mourned. The “piteous spectacle” (line 203) of the two dead
lovers replaces the image of the wounded and bleeding Sidney-Adonis; the
gods transform the pair into “one flower,” (line 184) a memorial object
to which other mourners may make pilgrimage. Venus’ self-spoiling allows
for the creation of throngs of mourners who memorialize not Adonis’ vio-
lent death, but rather the near-simultaneous deaths of “this paire of lovers
trew” (line 182). These mourners are described as follows:

And every one did make exceeding mone,

With inward anguish and great griefe opprest:
128 S. HARLAN

And every one did weep and waile, and mone,

And meanes deviz’d to shew his sorrow best. (lines 205–08)

The mourners struggle to “shew [their] sorrow best.” “Best” here con-
notes most appropriately—that is, one shows one’s sorrow according to
the conventions that govern the practice of mourning—and most effec-
tively. This latter sense points to the competition inherent in this memo-
rializing: each mourner desires to be “best” at mourning. The repetition
of “And every one” underscores the participation of all mourners in this
struggle to be “best” by “showing” best. But the speaker privileges one
mourner above the rest:

But first his sister that Clorinda hight,

The gentlest shepheardesse that lives this day:
And most resembling both in shape and spright
Her brother deare, began this dolefull lay.
Which least I marre the sweetnesse of the vearse,
In sort as she it sung, I will rehearse. (lines 211–16)

As is the case with Venus, Clorinda’s physical resemblance to Sidney dic-

tates her fitness as a mourner. The speaker’s anxiety that he might “marre
the sweetnesse of the vearse” echoes Venus’s self-marring, but here the text
of the “lay,” if not the woman, is presented as unspoiled. The speaker’s
charge is to “rehearse” or repeat this uniquely feminine elegy. Katherine
Duncan-Jones argues that the poem is “an early and derivative work of the
countess [Mary Sidney]” that Spenser most likely affixed to his own poem.
She cites much contemporary evidence, including Spenser’s attribution of
the poem to Mary Sidney in the Astrophel volume and several lines from
his poem “The Ruines of Time”:

Then will I sing, but who can better sing,

Than thine owne sister, peerless Ladie bright,
Which to thee sings with deep harts sorrowing,
Sorrowing tempered with deare delight.

Here again we encounter the language of competition in the speak-

er’s rhetorical question “but who can better sing/Than thine own sister
…” If Spenser did indeed incorporate “The Doleful Lay” into his own
“Astrophel,” this action of appropriation is fitting given Sidney’s ele-
gists’ preoccupation with laying claim to corporeal and textual bodies.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 129

Clorinda asserts that Sidney’s death is a “Greate losse to all that ever
him did see,/Great losse to all, but greatest losse to mee,” (lines 35–36)
lines which echo the speaker of “Astrophel”: “The dolefulst beare ever
man did see,/Was Astrophel, but dearest unto mee” (lines 149–50). The
dead Sidney is “dearest” to everyone who mourns him; his loss is “great-
est” to each mourning subject. Clorinda is her own audience. She begins
the poem by asking to whom she should communicate her grief—“To
heavens?” “To men?” (lines 7 and 13)—and then rejecting these options:
“Then to my selfe will I my sorrow mourne,/Sith none alive like sorrow-
full remaines:/And to my selfe my plaints shall back retourne …” (lines
19–21). She establishes herself as singular in her grief, and this singularity
mirrors Sidney’s own singularity as an object of mourning. As both elegist
and audience, Clorinda controls both the production and reception of
the text. She effaces the poem’s social function as one elegy of many in a
memorial volume, and she insists that her “sorrow” and the text it gener-
ates are private and closed, the products of a solipsistic exercise.
“Astrophel” is narrative; “The Doleful Lay” is lyric. Clorinda focuses
on her own grief, and the grief of the natural world, not on the details of
Sidney’s death in battle. Like Venus, she is left with “sad annoy,” or a grief
akin to physical pain:

Death the devourer of all worlds delight,

Hath robbed you and reft fro me my joy:
Both you and me, and all the world he quight
Hath robbed of joyance, and left sad annoy.
…Joy of the world, and shepheards pride was hee,
…Shepheardes hope never like againe to see. (lines 49–54)

Clorinda presents Sidney’s death as a form of theft. This idea is con-

ventional, but it again establishes Sidney as an object to which one lays
claim, whether legitimate (the elegist) or illegitimate (the thief Death).
She continues, “Oh death that hast us of such riches reft …” (line 55).
Sidney is imagined here as stolen riches, a spoil of Death as well as of war.
The “private lack” (line 89) of the robbed and mourning Clorinda is mir-
rored by the natural world, which is feminized—“the fields do waile their
widow state” (line 27)—and aids Clorinda in her mourning. Her reliance
on apostrophe to negotiate her relationship to the natural world and to
the absent Sidney creates what Jonathan Culler refers to as a “timeless
present.”36 Culler argues that to apostrophize things is “to locate them
130 S. HARLAN

in the time of the apostrophe … Apostrophe resists narrative because its

now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of
writing.”37 As is also the case with Lant’s Roll, “The Doleful Lay” creates
its own temporality that allows for the processes of mourning and memo-
rializing to occur perpetually. Sidney’s “immortal spirit” (line 61) replaces
his spoiled body as the object of memorializing and tribute. It, too, is
transformed into a beautiful spoil:

Ah no: it is not dead, ne can it die,

But lives for aie, in blisfull Paradise:
Where like a new-borne babe it soft doth lie,
In bed of lilies wrapt in tender wise.
…And compast all about with roses sweet,
…And daintie violets from head to feet. (lines 67–72)

The spoiled Sidney exists in Culler’s “now of discourse, of writing.”

Clorinda’s “Ah no” rejects the possibility of the death of the spirit. The
perpetual “now of … writing” is a figure for Paradise’s “everlasting bliss,”
(line 85) for both promise endlessness and an endless present.
Clorinda’s idealized vision is something other than—or more than—
mourning. She identifies mourning as narcissistic: “Thus do we weep and
waile, and wear our eies,/Mourning in others, our owne miseries” (lines
95–96). Sidney stands for or represents “our owne miseries,” or a commu-
nal grief, but these “miseries” are the true object of mourning. These lines
return the reader to Clorinda’s earlier assertion that she is both elegist and
audience, a self that talks to oneself, a figure engaged in a closed activ-
ity. To mourn an absent subject is to mark one’s own act of mourning.
The poem shifts from the first person of Clorinda to the first person of,
presumably, “Astrophel” in the final two stanzas. This speaker directs the
reader to the elegy of Lodowick Bryskytt, or “Thestylis,” as well as to the
elegies of “full many other moe” (line 103). These elegies are imagined as
bouquets tossed onto a now-absent hearse:

And after him full many other moe,

As everie one in order lov’d him best,
Gan dight themselves t’expresse their inward woe,
With dolefull layes unto the time addrest.
…The which I here in order will rehearse,
…As fittest flowers to deck his mournfull hearse. (lines 103–08)
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 131

The Astrophel elegies were written years after Sidney’s death, but the
speaker nonetheless establishes them as nostalgic textual trophies that have
a place in the funeral. The elegists look backwards not from the moment
of Sidney’s death—although this is the moment Spenser narrates—but
rather from a point in the future. The “dolefull layes” are to be “unto the
time addrest,” which refers to the occasion for which they are written. The
speaker’s repetition, or “rehears[al],” of these elegies reminds the reader
of the speaker’s earlier promise to “rehearse” Clorinda’s song (line 216)
and draws attention to the belatedness of this elegiac enterprise. “The
Doleful Lay” and Bryskett’s elegy are repeated texts; they are claimed by
the speaker of “Astrophel” and transmitted to the reader in reported form.
Both references to “rehearsing” point to the elegists’ concern with trans-
mitting these textual trophies in untouched, unspoiled form. The texts are
“fit” for their purpose insofar as they are decorous and decorative. The
elegies are not simply tributes to be read; they also function as material
memorials to Sidney.
Mary Sidney was also interested in securing memorials to her brother,
and the process of memorializing is a violent one that necessitates a medi-
tation on the image of Sidney’s wounded body. In the dedicatory poem
“To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney” that precedes
her completion of Philip Sidney’s unfinished translations of the Psalms,
she imagines her ability to remember, and to write, as a newly bleeding
wound: “Deep wounds enlarg’d, long festered in their gall/fresh bleeding
smart; not eie but hart tears fall./Ah memorie what needs this new arrest”
(lines 19–21).38 The spontaneous bleeding of Philip’s “long festered” bat-
tle wound allows for the production of the text.39 Blood and “memorie”
are creatively generative. Sidney worked on this translation of the Psalms
for a decade after her brother’s death. His authority takes the form of a
bleeding wound; as will be the case with Greville’s Life, her brother is
reduced to a wound. Here, a second wounding is a sort of resurrection.
By re-imagining the scene of battle as powerfully present, the Countess
establishes Sidney’s wounding as perpetual—as actually recurring in the
moment she remembers her brother. Sidney’s bloody destruction results
in her tears, which produce the text itself as a memorial or textual trophy.40
The mutilated, spoiled Sidney must be invoked for this to occur.
As a collaborative work that was begun by Philip and finished by his
sister, the text is itself a spoil from Sidney’s own interrupted poetic career.
As her poem “The Doleful Lay of Clorinda” was likely added to Spenser’s
132 S. HARLAN

own elegy, so too is she engaged in an exercise in amending here, but she
rejects the role of “Art” in this project:

As goodly buildings to some glorious ende

…cut off by fate, before the Graces hadde
…each wondrous part in all their beauties cladde,
Yet so much done, as Art could not amende;
…So thy rare works to which no witt can adde,
…in all men’s eies, which are not blindely madde,
Beyond compare above all praise, extende. (lines 64–70)

Philip’s own part in the project—the “so much done” to which the
Countess alludes—cannot be “amend[ed]” or improved upon by “Art”
or by the “witt” of another. The Countess insists that what she has done
is to transform the unfinished Psalms into something it could not have
been as Philip’s own project: a memorial to him. The text thus registers
his presence—as originator—but it also registers his absence in his status
as dedicatee. Although the Countess’ text is subject to several forms of
authority—her brother’s, her family’s, God’s, King David’s and, of course,
Queen Elizabeth’s (for the Psalter was to be presented to her)—she is
most ambivalent about her brother’s authority. The dedicator occupies a
position of power; as all receivers of gifts and tributes, the dedicatee can
only be the object of tribute. The poems belong to the Countess, and she
bestows them on her brother; they are “theise dearest offerings of my hart”
(line 78, emphasis mine). In other words, the Countess claims Sidney’s
own text and then returns it to him in altered, or “amended,” form. The
Psalms are “monuments” (line 71) to Philip that must be “framed” by the
Countess in her brother’s absence:

Immortal monuments to thy faire fame,

…though not compleat, nor in the reach of thought,
…howe on that passing peece time would have wrought
Had Heav’n so spar’d the life of life to frame
…the rest? (lines 71–75)

The poem underscores the absence of Philip and, in so doing, asserts

a different presence: the text itself, which in turn assures the continua-
tion not of Philip himself but of his “ever praised name” (line 77). Both
Philip’s bleeding body and his unfinished Psalter are contested objects
and spoils of war. The Countess claims her bleeding brother from the
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 133

battlefield so that his “Angell spirit” (as the title indicates) might preside
over her project: “Yet here behold, (oh wert thou to behold!)/this finish’t
now …” (lines 22–23). His unarmored and wounded body is a figure for
her own “wounds” (line 19) of grief, but it is also powerfully Other, dis-
tinctly alien, a violated thing that belongs to the battlefield. The speakers
of “Astrophel” and “The Doelful Lay” struggle to lay claim to Sidney as a
“dear” figure—he is “dearest unto mee,” they both insist. The Countess
struggles with Sidney’s body and text, both “incomparable,” both ulti-
mately claimed by herself. In other words, her “wounding lynes” (line 81)
claim Philip’s wounded body.
Sidney’s militarized and wounded body figures prominently in The
Phoenix Nest elegies, as well. Matthew Roydon’s “An Elegie, or friend’s
passion, for his Astrophill,” draws on the same mythology of the hunt as
Spenser’s “Astrophel.” The title immediately raises questions about the
relationship between an “elegy” and a “friend’s passion”: is a “friend’s
passion” an alternative to the “elegy” or mode of it?41 Roydon’s self-
presentation as a “friend” foreshadows Greville’s own assertion that an
intimate friend is in the best position to memorialize a departed subject.
As the elegy was published anonymously, Roydon’s identity remains
obscure; he is simply a “friend,” a member of a community of friends
of Sidney and simultaneously a figure that is privileged to belong to this
group. The term “passion” encompassed many meanings in the sixteenth
century, from the physical suffering of a martyr or of Christ, to physical
suffering more generally, to a range of strong emotions such as anger,
zeal, desire, hate, fear, and violent love (as well as fits or outbursts of these
emotions).42 “Passion” is also a literary term. From the tenth century, the
term “passion” referred to narrative accounts of the sufferings of Christ
on the cross and the suffering of saints, and, from the sixteenth century,
to a literary composition marked by strong emotion. All of these meanings
have in common an engagement with physical affliction: “passion” is both
the affliction itself and the means by which the affliction is communicated
or represented. Likewise, in the third Phoenix Nest elegy (“Another of
the same, excellently written by a most worthy gentleman”), the speaker
establishes elegy as “the son of rage”:

Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,

And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,
Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find
Salute the stones that keep the limbs that held so good a mind. (lines 37–40)
134 S. HARLAN

The “most worthy gentleman” who penned this elegy was likely Dyer.43
He asserts that his “rhyme” is not the product of “skill” but rather of “rage.”
The elegist must always negotiate an awkward relationship between prais-
ing one’s friend and displaying one’s own poetic skill. Like Roydon, Dyer
is engaged in an exercise in passion. Roydon’s use of the term “passion”
reminds the reader of Sidney’s reputation as a Protestant martyr, but it is not
Sidney’s passion that is in question in this first elegy. Rather, by rendering
his “passion” a “friend’s passion,” Roydon deemphasizes the Christian reso-
nances of the term and situates his own “passion” in the realm of masculine
friendship. Roydon will suffer with Sidney, as will the grieving figure in the
elegy that presents a report of Sidney’s death.
Roydon’s elegy begins with silence: “As then no wind at all there
blew/…/The garnished tree no pendant stirred;/No voice was heard of
any bird” (lines 1, 5–6). This peaceful scene is disrupted with the appear-
ance of an almost hysterical figure, a mourner “groveling on the grass”
(line 44). The speaker takes this figure for a “stone” (line 45) until he stirs,
at which point he resembles a corpse dragging himself out of his grave:

At length I might perceive him rear

His body on the elbow end;
Earthly and pale, with ghastly sheer,
Upon his knees he upward tend,
…Seeming like one in uncouth stound
…To be ascending out of the ground. (lines 49–54)

This creature sighs, cries, and then speaks with “trembling sound” (line
61): “Such were the accents as might wound/And tear a diamond rock
in twain” (lines 63–64). These wounding words are addressed to “you”:

‘You knew (who knew not?) Astrophil:

(That I should live to say, “I knew”,
And have not in possession still!)
Things known permit me to renew:
…Of him you know his merit such
…I cannot say, you hear, too much.’ (lines 85–90)

The cadaverous man’s use of the term “you” refers to a commu-

nity of mourners and to the elegy’s speaker (the anonymous “friend”),
who is “compassionate of [his] woe” (line 79). This figure is defined by
grief—“O grief, that lyest upon my soul/As heavy as a mount of lead”
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 135

(lines 73–74)—and this grief places him in a privileged position to speak

“wound[ing]” lines. The community to which he speaks “knew” Sidney,
and indeed the rhetorical, parenthetical question “who knew not?” would
seem to indicate that everyone knew Sidney. The speaker of the second
elegy (likely written by Ralegh)—“An epitaph upon the right honourable
Sir Philip Sidney, knight, Lord Governor of Flushing”—also draws atten-
tion to the communal nature of mourning in his movement from the first
person to “our” and to “worthy hearts” that entomb Sidney:

Nations thy wit, our minds lay up thy love;

Letters thy learning, thy loss years long to come;
In worthy hearts sorrow hath made thy tomb;
Thy soul and sprite enrich the heavens above. (lines 49–52)

Sidney is “our Scipio” and “Scipio, Cicero and Petrarch of our time”
(lines 57–58, emphasis mine). The slippage in both poems between know-
ing Sidney, which engaged from the first moments of Roydon’s elegy in
his characterization of the elegy as a “friend’s passion,” and owning Sidney
suggests that both are necessary for the work of mourning to occur. Sidney
must be claimed in order for him to be mourned, and this act of claiming is
linked to social relations and intimacies. The friend professes that, “‘I can-
not say, you hear, too much’” (line 90). It is a convention of the pastoral
that nature mourns the death of the shepherd. But the “general sorrow”
(line 205) to which Roydon refers, and which resurfaces throughout these
elegies, points to a grief that overflows these very conventions. Indeed, the
stone-like man in Roydon’s elegy is described as “incontinent” (line 61).
He has much to say about Sidney as a singular poet—“Did never Muse
inspire beneath/A poet’s brain with finer store” (lines 159–60)—and as
a singular militarized figure. The narrative of the grieving man is itself
a military spoil, brought back from the battlefield and bestowed on his
listening audience.
In his three-stanza narrative of Sidney’s wounding, the grieving figure
describes Sidney’s arming:

‘Then Pallas afterwards attired

Our Astrophil with her device,
Whom in his armour heaven admired,
As of the nation of the skies:
…He sparkled in his arms afars
…As he were dight with fiery stars.’ (lines 163–68)
136 S. HARLAN

Pallas is a Greek titan of war, a militant model that engages the classi-
cal past. However, the poem refers to “her” device, which suggests that
it may be Athena who “attires” Sidney in his armor. Athena accidentally
killed Pallas while they were practicing with their spears; as a sign of her
grief, she put Pallas’ name before her own and became “Pallas Athena.” If
“Pallas” refers to her, it also nostalgically recalls a story of death and loss.
As a figure for heroic endeavor, Athena is a fitting god to outfit Sidney for
his military exploits. As with the great warriors of classical tradition, the
“device” of armor is passed from god to mortal, and Sidney becomes an
object of “admir[ation].” He is admired by “heaven” and also implicitly,
by Roydon, by the grieving man, and by the elegy’s reader. His status
as an armored, militarized figure allows for and assures this admiration.
The armor signifies Sidney’s worthiness. It embodies—in the literal sense
of providing a body for—the abstract qualities assigned to him in all the
elegies: bravery, nobility, virtue, and ability. In full military dress, Sidney
is admired not only by the nation of England, but by “the nation of the
skies,” as well.
In his glinting armor—“‘He sparkled in his arms afars/As he were dight
with fiery stars’”—Sidney rivals the Roman gods, as well. Like Athena,
Mars is a classical spoil, deployed by the poet in the service of Sidney’s
own mythology:

‘The blaze whereof when Mars beheld

(An envious eye doth see afar)
“Such majesty”, quoth he, ‘is seld;
Such majesty my mart may mar;
…Perhaps this may a suitor be
…To set Mars by his deity.” (lines 169–74)

The “blaze” of Sidney displaces the blaze of Mars. Sidney’s “maj-

esty”—embodied by his blazing armor—is exceptional (“seld”) and
threatens the power of Mars. In Dyer’s elegy, Sidney is characterized as
a “spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined” (line 14,
emphasis mine). Although Dyer does not mention Sidney’s armor, his
shining “virtue” invokes his military dress. The elegies construct Sidney as
a fetishized, armored warrior: a quintessential military figure, a Mars that
shines for all to see.
The Phoenix Nest elegies are silent on the subject of Sidney’s unarmored
thigh and on the specifics of his wounding. In Roydon’s elegy, the Phoenix
Sidney is wounded by a “flame and bolt” of thunder sent by Mars:
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 137

‘In this surmise he [Mars] made with speed

An iron cane, wherein he put
The thunder that in clouds do breed;
The flame and bolt together shut
…With privy force burst out again,
…And so our Astrophil was slain.’ (lines 175–80)

The “spectacle” (line 229) of Sidney’s wounding and death is indeed

spectacular, a festival-like scene of flashing lights and thunder bolts.
Roydon’s “iron cane” is certainly a musket, and as such it bears a compel-
ling relationship to Sidney’s “sparkl[ing]” armor (line 167). The notion
that Sidney was the victim of Fortune (a convention that is repeated in
many of the elegies) is here literalized as a violent encounter between
god and man. In this encounter, god has a weapon—the “iron cane”
that shoots thunder—that is capable of penetrating Sidney’s magnificent
armor. This homoerotic encounter foreshadows Greville’s own obsession
with the relationship between Sidney’s armed, yet vulnerable, body and
the musket shot that kills him. Several of the narrative accounts of Sidney’s
wounding and death, which preceded the publication of The Phoenix Nest,
provide information about the battle and Sidney’s wounding. There is no
mention of Sidney’s thigh in George Gifford’s account—Sidney receives a
“deadly stroke” and determines that “God did send the bullet”—but there
is in Edmund Molyneaux’s 1588 Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys,
the father and the son in Holinshed. Molyneaux writes very precisely about
the location of Sidney’s wound:

And so consequently going forward in other services, at an encounter with

the enemy not far from Zutphen, where he that day most valiantly served
(for he bare the invincible mind of an ancient Roman, who ever where he
came made account of victory) he received hurt by a musket shot a little
above the left knee, which so brake and rifted the bone, and so entered the
thigh upwards towards the body, as the bullet could not be found before his
body was opened.44

His description of the wound as “a little above the left knee” in “the
thigh upwards towards the body” is precise. In Sir Philip Sidney (1587),
George Whetstone provides an elegiac account of Sidney’s wounding:

A musket shot his stately horse then slew;

He, horsed again, the fight did soon renew;
138 S. HARLAN

But Fortune, that at his renown did spight,

A bullet sent that in his thigh did light.45

Like Molyneaux, he notes the location of the wound—“in his thigh”—

and, several lines later, the medical challenge it posed: the “wound was
deep and shivered the bone.” Like Greville, Whetstone seems to have
been concerned with accuracy and truth in his report of the circumstances
of the battle. He likely delayed publishing his elegy because he wanted
to get first-hand information from his brother Bernard, who was at the
battle. Roydon focuses on Sidney’s armored and shining body. Ralegh’s
elegy chiefly attends to Sidney’s illustrious life and refers to his death con-
ventionally as a “fall” (line 54). Ralegh invokes the image of the wound
only in relationship to his poetic enterprise: Sidney’s virtues are “wounded
by my worthless rhyme” (line 59). The title of his elegy indicates that it
is an “epitaph.” He is thus concerned with characterizing Sidney’s glori-
ous life rather than his death, and this characterization takes the form of
an inscription that, like Lant’s etchings, possesses the capacity to wound.
The three Phoenix Nest elegies reckon with military violence in dif-
ferent ways. The cadaverous man in Roydon’s elegy provides a narrative
of the battlefield, and nature reacts with conventionally excessive grief
and sadness. The text controls the horrors of the scene of wounding by
rendering it a report within the elegy itself; Roydon must report to his
reader what the grieving man reported to him. The grieving man produces
Sidney as an object of mourning for Roydon, the reader, and the natural
world. The news of Sidney’s death quite literally disrupts nature—“This
word ‘was slain’ straightaway did move,/And nature’s inward life-strings
twitch” (lines 181–82)—and results in instantaneous mourning:

The bending trees expressed a groan

And sighed the sorrow of his fall;
The forest beasts made ruthful moan;
The birds did tune their mourning call. (lines 187–90)

The groans, sighs, and moans with which nature expresses its loss are
replaced by the poet’s own words and, in the final lines of the poem, by
silence, tears, and an assertion that he cannot continue: “And here my
pen is forced to shrink,/My tears discolours so mine ink” (lines 233–34).
In the end, grief destroys literary production in a Johnsonian manner:
where there is grief, there cannot be poetry. The grief-stricken reporter
can speak, but the poet-speaker professes that he cannot. The “friend’s
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 139

passion” of this poem is divided between these two mourning figures, and
both claim this “passion” and the right to narrate his death. May likewise
notes that Dyer’s own passion—which, like the Countess of Pembroke’s,
culminates in an impulse toward self-slaughter—is personal: “Dyer’s lines
convey a sense of pathos that transcends the emotional reserve characteriz-
ing so much Elizabethan lyric poetry.”46 The many struggles that occur in
these elegies—between god and man, between Fortune and Providence,
between speech and silence, between military violence and pastoral con-
ventions—point to the central struggle of the elegists to reckon with
Sidney’s absence and to render him present as a militarized object of
mourning. And they all cope with absences: the absence of Sidney and the
absent scene of his wounding. Ralegh and Dyer efface the scene of battle
entirely. Dyer’s elegy ends with an invocation of Sidney’s tomb: “And
endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,/Go seek that
hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find/Salute the stones that keep the limbs
that held so good a mind” (lines 38–40). This potentially “never-ending”
and “endless” grief is controlled by a militarized gesture: a salute.

TRIUMPHANT SCROLLS: THOMAS LANT’S SEQUITUR

CELEBRITAS & POMPA FUNERIS AND THE PROCESS
OF MOURNING

Sidney died on October 17, but news of his death at Zutphen did not
reach England until November 2, at which point it became clear that a
funeral must be planned.47 Thomas Lant’s 1588 illustrated roll is one of
the most reliable records of this event, which took place several months
later on February 16, 1587.48 Like the elegies, the scroll establishes an
intriguing relationship between mourning and military conquest, loss and
gain. I am interested in how Lant’s Roll deploys two related processional
discourses—the Roman triumph and the Roman scroll or volumina—in
the practice of mourning and memorializing a lost subject. Early mod-
ern English heraldic funerals frequently drew on the iconography of the
Roman triumph, but Sidney’s “triumph” is unique in how it memorializes
his military death. Crucially, his triumphal funeral displaces, or replaces,
the absent scene of his military wounding, a scene that so occupied the
writers that marked his death with prose and poetic tributes. In other
words, the symbolic violence of the triumphal funeral here replaces the
actual military violence that produced the funeral.
140 S. HARLAN

As in ancient Rome, military triumphs and death bore an intimate

relationship to one another in early modern England. As Mary Beard
notes, “… if death in battle robbed the victor of the triumphal ceremony he
deserved, then the funeral might have to substitute.”49 Sidney was hardly
victorious, but his funeral nonetheless establishes him as such, if problem-
atically. I do not propose to offer an exhaustive account of the Roman tri-
umph here; this complex and varied ceremony has been well documented
by others.50 The Roman triumph encompassed many kinds of ceremonies
that changed over the course of the city’s long history. But I would like to
examine how the central elements of the triumph—chiefly the parading
of spoils—are deployed in the service of a figure that was perceived by his
mourners as singular and exemplary. Beard describes the Roman triumph
as a lavish performance in which spoils played a crucial role:

To be awarded a triumph was the most outstanding honor a Roman general

could hope for. He would be drawn in a chariot—accompanied by the booty
he had won, the prisoners he had taken captive, and his no doubt rowdy and
raucous troops in their battle gear—through the streets of the city to the
Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, where he would offer a sacrifice to
the god. The ceremony became a by-word for extravagant display.51

George Puttenham describes the social function of “Triumphals” in his

discussion of “poeticall rejoysings” in The Arte of English Poesie (1589):

And they be of diverse sorts and upon diverse occasions growne. One & the
chiefe was for the publike peace of a countrie, the greatest of any other civill
good … An other is for a just and honourable victory achieved against the
forraine enemy. A third at solemne feasts and pompes of coronations and
enstallments of honourable orders. An other at jollity at weddings and mar-
riages. An other at the birth of Princes children … And as these rejoysings
tend to divers effects, so do they carry diverse formes and nominations; for
those of victorie and peace are called Triumphall, whereof we ourselves have
herefore given some example by our Triumphals, written in honor of her
majesties long peace.52

The slippage here between “victory and peace” is striking. It is this

very dialogue between the battlefield and the realm of the civic that the
triumph foregrounds.
The triumphal iconography of Sidney’s funeral was also informed by
Petrarch’s Trionfi, which were extremely popular in sixteenth-century
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 141

England. The mid-fourteenth-century Trionfi were translated by Henry

Parker and Lord Morley, and Mary Sidney translated the Trionfo della
morte in terza rima.53 The subject of the poems is the progress of the
human soul, and the Trionfi depict a series of related triumphs, each of
which vanquishes the former. Petrarch’s treatment of ordered procession,
the role of memory and fame, and the place of military spoils and armed
figures in triumphs resonates with the many representations of Sidney’s
triumphal funeral. The poem is divided into five parts: “The Triumph
of Love,” “The Triumph of Chastity,” “The Triumph of Death,” “The
Triumph of Fame,” and “The Triumph of Time.” The last three sections
are most relevant to Sidney’s funeral, and all were widely illustrated in
early modern Europe. As D.D. Carnicelli notes:

Another sign of the popularity of the poem was the extraordinarily far-
reaching impact it had on European art during the Renaissance: an enor-
mous number of paintings, frescoes, miniatures, tapestries, faiences, enamels,
and medals were based wholly or in part on the Trionfi, and a great many
prominent artists—Mantegna, Signorelli, and Titian among them—turned
to the Trionfi for inspiration.54

Carnicelli also reminds us that many such illustrations accompanied

early modern editions and translations of the Trionfi and that most of the
authors who were inspired by Petrarch’s Trionfi “were far more familiar
with iconographical representations of the poem than they were with the
poem itself.”55 The magnificent tapestries of The Triumph of Death over
Chastity and The Triumph of Fame over Death at Hampton Court Palace
are two such representations. These sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries
depict crowded processions that prefigure Sidney’s triumphal funeral. In
the text of “The Triumph of Death” and in its illustrations, the figure of
Chastity is a militant and “mooste gloryouse Ladye”:

This most noble and mooste gloryouse Ladye,

That nowe is a spirite and in the earth doth lye
And somtyme was the high pyller of valour,
Turner from hyr warre with laude and honour,
Gladde to have overcomen an enemy so great
That with his wyt turneth all men under fett.
With none other armour she dyd this deade,
But with a chast hart at the tyme of nede.56
142 S. HARLAN

This armed female is both victor and spoil. She tells Death that, “Onely
the spoyle that thou shalt have/It is my chast body unto the grave.”57 In
“The Triumph of Fame,” the participants are described as:

Men of hyghe valure armed full bryght

As unto the Capitall they went full ryghte […]
Agaynst these enemies that Italy dyd invade,
Armed in bright stele they no dreade hadded.58

This militancy is integral to the triumph. The term “array” appears

throughout the text: the militant female figure of “The Triumph of
Death” is “mooste perfytely arayde/With youth and beautye …” and the
“good kyng Robert of Cecyll” of “The Triumph of Fame” is described as
processing “in that arraye,/Vallyaunt and free and constant away.”59 The
term “array” refers to the arrangement or order of military forces, as well
as to the display of military force. But “array” also refers to attire or dress.
The “array,” or order, of the figures in the Trionfi bears a relationship to
the “array,” or dress, of these warlike figures. Dress is a crucial element of
triumph. From Petrarch onwards, the triumph had the status of a genre,
and this generic history informs early modern English appropriations of
the form.
Hundreds of people participated in Sidney’s nostalgic triumphal funeral,
and thousands witnessed it as spectators. The ceremony marked the return
of Sidney from war. The triumph negotiated a relationship between the
battlefield and the city and was, in the words of Anthony Miller, “a lim-
inal ceremony”: “It is literally so, since it was the only occasion when a
military imperator and his army were permitted to cross the pomerium,
the religious boundary of the Roman city. It is metaphorically so, since it
marks the boundary between war and peace, military power and civil rule,
and partakes of both.”60 The triumph also positions itself on the border
between order and disorder. The ordered and controlled nature of the
procession reasserts the order associated with peace.61 As triumph, the
funeral resists the disorder of death, and Lant’s rendering of the ceremony
underscores this very fact. The second plate of the scroll depicts the arrival
of the procession, and Sidney’s coffin, at St. Paul’s. On this plate, Lant
notes, “Here followeth the manner of the whole proceeding of his ffu-
nerall which was celebrated in St Paules the 16 of ffebr 1586 with the self
same state and order as the Mourners were marshaled by Robert Cooke
alias Clarencieulx Kinge of Armes” (emphasis mine). The early modern
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 143

heraldic funeral reinforced social order in a time of unrest and distress.

Celebration must be ordered and regulated; it must be controlled. As
Nigel Llewellyn argues, state funerals insisted upon the “continuity of the
social body in the face of Death’s subversive power.”62 Likewise, the tri-
umph turns away from the activity of war (even as it draws on its iconogra-
phy) and reasserts civil rule and civic life. Many of the accounts of Sidney’s
death dwell on the disorder of war and, more particularly, on the disor-
der that led to Sidney’s death in battle. The triumph controls violence
and regulates it as a form of spectacle and entertainment. Military objects
are rendered decorative; on the battlefield, a musket is used to uphold
the power of the state: in a procession, it performs the same function
symbolically. Sidney’s funeral was not technically a state funeral,63 but it
nonetheless appropriated—or spoiled—the practices of such funerals and
performed his aristocratic status and his place in state power structures.
His relationship to the crown was not without its trials and tribulations.
He was thus a spoil from these struggles within the English aristocracy and
monarchy as well as from the war with Spain. His image as the quintes-
sential Elizabethan courtier and gentleman was politically useful, even in
death. His funeral may have served as a means of shoring up support for
Elizabeth’s support of the Dutch cause.64 In a letter to the Walsinghams,
Leicester wrote that, “I think that none of all hath a greater loss than the
Queen’s Majesty herself,” and Lord Buckhurst wrote to Leicester that,
“even her Majesty and the whole realm besides do suffer no small loss
and detriment.”65 But grief was nonetheless transformed into an effective
display of state power and of Sidney’s place within this structure.
Sidney’s funeral was not unique in drawing on the imagery of the Roman
triumph. In Samuel Purchas’ account of Anne of Denmark’s 1619 funeral
in his Microcosmus, he hesitates to characterize Anne as “Death’s trophy”:

I say not that this was Death’s trophy, the prince of whatsoever is mortal in
princes; and that all those Blacks, in all degrees, did there perform a ceremo-
nial … suit and service, accompanying her funeral (nay, Death’s triumphal)
chariot, both it & them suited in Death’s livery; and all the spectators no
less by their presence presenting Death a homage, than obsequious duties to
the exequies and memory of that worthy and glorious name: this I say, that
Death could not then forbear, in the bust and pompous celebration of his
late exploits, but (as fearing the vulgar would conceit, that greatness might
seem to insult over him by such state and magnificence) proves an actor, and
makes this funeral show a true tragedy and funeral.66
144 S. HARLAN

Here, Death’s “exploits” render him worthy of “homage,” but Anne’s

status as magnificent spoil threatens Death’s absolute power. The Christian
notion of the triumph of Death strains against another Christian appropri-
ation of the Roman triumph, which insists on the subject’s entry into the
Kingdom of Heaven as a form of triumph. Sidney is not “Death’s trophy”
in Lant’s Roll; he is rather spoiled by man. As a processional ceremony,
the triumph underscores process. Bruce B.  Lawrence and Aisha Karim
have argued that violence, too, is a process: “cumulative and bound-
less.”67 I have maintained that Sidney’s violent demise hovers behind,
and before, his triumphal funeral. The triumph is a return to a scene of
battle—a return to the past—for it invokes the very battle or war that it
celebrates even as it asserts a nation’s newfound state of peace. Mourning,
too, is about return. To mourn, one must look backwards and remember a
departed subject. In Sidney’s case, the “porous boundaries of each violent
act” to which Lawrence and Karim allude allow for this mourning to take
place. Both actual and symbolic violence are apprehended as process, and
violence-as-process is contained by the triumphal procession as well as by
the Christian process of attaining immortality. The processional nature of
the early modern heraldic funeral was in part intended to represent the
Christian man’s movement through life, toward death and toward entry
into the Kingdom of Heaven. The funeral is a form of biography.68
The mourning of Sidney involved two separate but related acts of spoil-
ing: first, the spoiling of Sidney in military triumph and, secondly, the
spoiling of the military triumph in Lant’s Roll. I turn now to this second
processional discourse: that of the scroll. Anthony Miller underscores the
relatedness of these two discourses: “The Roman ceremony [of the tri-
umph] itself displayed pictorial and written representations of cities and
forts, regions and rivers: it was in a sense a book, unrolling in processional
form like the scroll on which a Roman book was written.”69 As a proces-
sional form, the scroll is particularly suited to recording a triumphal event.
As the triumphal funeral harnesses the violence of war, so the scroll har-
nesses the figurative violence of the triumph itself and, in turn, dictates
a particular type of mourning. Lant’s Roll is a form of visual and textual
trophy, or spoil, from England’s perceived Roman past that spoils Sidney
for his early modern mourners. Like the funeral itself, the scroll establishes
Sidney as an ideal object to be memorialized and mourned. Lant’s Roll is a
record of a memorial (the funeral), but it is also a memorial in and of itself.
It depicts and participates in mourning.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 145

Lant’s Roll—also called Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris and The
Funeral Procession of Sir Philip Sidney—is ten meters long and comprises
a series of copper engravings that measure between 19.5  ×  38  cm. and
20  ×  34  cm.70 There are several extant copies of the scroll, including a
version housed at the Anne S.K.  Brown Military Collection at Brown
University and a version at the British Library, which is reproduced by
Early English Books Online. The British Library roll totals 29 plates,
numbered one to twenty-nine with a final, unnumbered plate at the end
of the series. It is missing the first plate, which depicts the transport, or
“convenient passage,” of Sidney’s body back to England by ship and is
presided over by a portrait of Lant himself. The Brown version comprises
28 copper plates; it is missing plate 30—or the “worthie Knight” plate,
which contains a eulogy—but it also contains extra plates. According to
Peter Harrington, curator of the Anne S.K.  Brown Military Collection,
the Brown roll is likely an earlier set of engravings than the British Library
roll. It also contains armorial bookplate of the Marquess of Bute and a
pair of portraits of Sidney not native to the initial document.71 Captions
throughout the scroll indicate the names and professions and/or ranks
of the mourners; these are printed in letterpress text rather than standard
black letter type. (The Brown roll has fewer annotations than the British
Library roll, which contains annotations on virtually every plate.) The
typeface lends a manuscript quality to the printed scroll, which in turn
imbues it with an aura of the authentic or original.
The roll represents the collaborative efforts of two men: it was drawn
by Lant and engraved by Theodore de Brij. The original drawings are lost.
Lant was a draftsman and an officer of arms at the College of Arms in
London. He was acquainted for some years with the man whom he would
later memorialize. In the engravings, he describes himself as a gentleman
servant in Sidney’s household. Lant became connected with Sir Philip
Sidney through Lord Henry Cheney, to whom he served as page, and he
joined the Sidney household around 1582 and accompanied Sidney to the
Low Countries in 1585. After Sidney’s death, he joined the household of
the secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and it was during this time
that the engravings were made. De Brij traveled to London in 1586 and
probably met the person who commissioned the engravings through Sir
Walter Raleigh’s circle; Sidney and his family also spent time with this
group.72 The scroll is considered the most reliable record of the funeral.
There are two other extant records of the event: the account in Stow’s
146 S. HARLAN

Annals or a generall Chronicle of England, which is likely based on Lant’s

scroll rather than the funeral itself, and Lea’s list of mourners, which
is almost certainly an earlier text than the scroll and thus records the
names of the mourners who were likely to attend rather than those who
necessarily did.73
Lant’s use of the phrase “here followeth” in his declaration of the
scroll’s content on plate 2 immediately establishes the processional nature
of the text (“Here followeth the mourners of the whole proceeding of his
funeral”). The scroll ends with a short, dedicatory passage or eulogy to
Sidney, whom Lant characterizes by his military sacrifice, his dedication
to the Protestant religion, and his loyalty to “his Prince.” Lant contin-
ues that, “For his witt, learning, and knowledge in divers languages he
was much admired,” and indeed the scroll itself encourages admiration
not only of Sidney’s exemplary self and the exemplary funeral, but also
of Lant’s superior ability to represent these things. Roman scrolls often
recorded military exploits. Trajan’s column in Rome, for example, depicts
the unrolling of two scrolls that record his victories.74 The information
contained in such scrolls legitimates the military subject and asserts his
superior status. And so although the scroll focuses on the funeral itself, it
also offers an account of Sidney’s past military exploits on the first plate:

The most honorable and thrice renowned Knight Sir Phillip Sidney (of whose
singular vertue and witt all ages will speak) being sente by hir Majesti into the
lowe countries, was made Lo. Governour of Ulishing. He arrived there the
18 of No. 1585 wher he was most honorablye received. He was Colonell of
all the Dutche regiment in Zealande and Captayne of 200 foote, & 100 horse
Englishe. In ffebr. He attempted the surprising of Steenbergen in Brabant,
wherein he had prevailed, but for a suddeyne thawe. In Julye following 1586
throughe his wisdome and pollicie a Towne in fflaunders called Axell was
won. In Sept at the releeving of Zutphen he charged the enemy thrice in one
skirmish, and in the last charge he was wounded with a musket shott, whereof
he died at Arnhame the 17 of Octo from whence he was brought by water to
Ulishing, where he was kept eighte dayes for his convenient passage.

The rest of the text narrates the funeral itself, providing a linguistic
account that sets up the viewer-reader’s expectations for the scroll’s illus-
trated account. The text is rendered in Latin on the left-hand side of the
plate and in English on the right.75 Linguistic translation is only one of the
many translations this text performs. It also translates a large-scale event
and a large-scale personage into a suitable medium: the scroll.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 147

Unlike some of the elegies and Greville’s Life, Lant’s Roll does not
dwell in great detail on the circumstances of Sidney’s wounding and
death; this plate provides a concise narrative of Sidney’s military exploits.
Of Zutphen, we learn simply that “he was wounded with a musket shott”
but are not told of his removal of his thigh armor prior to his wounding.
Lant communicates the basic facts of several battles; he focuses on where
and when certain events took place, but he does not interpret these events
or attempt to lend them significance. But in both the text on plate 1 and
the text of the final “worthie knight” plate, Lant describes the militaris-
tic elements of the funeral, including the clothing that various mourners
wore, the display of Sidney’s heraldic arms, and the firing of shots, which
recalls Fortinbras’ firing of shots at the end of Hamlet. The opening plate
reads: “The Burgers of the towne followed mourning, & so soone as he
was imbarcked, the small shott gave him a triple vollye then all the greate
Ordynance about the walles were discharged twise, & so tooke their leave
of their wel beloved Governoure.” And the final plate reads: “So when
the sermon was ended ye offerringe and other sermons finished and his
body interred ye soldiers in ye churchyard did by a double volye give unto
his famous life and death a Marcial Vale.” Like the martial music of the
marching band, the sound of shots invokes the battlefield. It also draws
attention to the anachronistic quality of triumphal discourse: the musket
that killed Sidney is hauntingly integrated into an antique form.
Lant’s own narrative frames the illustrated funeral. In both the opening
and closing texts, he provides essentially the same information about the
event, including the path that the funeral took from the Minorities to St.
Paul’s. The first plate describes the return of Sidney’s body to England:

He was landed at Tower Hill, London the 5 of the foresaide moneth and
carried to the Minorites, where he was kepte until the 16 of February fol-
lowing on which daye he was solempnelye carried thorowe London to St
Paules churche (which is expressed in the next leafe, with the Modell of the
Hearse) and there interred.

Sidney’s body was first transported from Arnhem to his house

in Flushing, where it lay in state for eight days. As Frederick S.  Boas
recounts in his biography, Sidney’s body was “then escorted by the gar-
rison to the waterside with the mourning burghers following. It was
embarked in a vessel that had belonged to him, The Black Pinnace,
whose sails and tackling were throughout black, and which landed at
148 S. HARLAN

Tower Hill on November 5th. From there his body was carried to the
Church of the Minorities.”76 This process was attended by military fan-
fare: the garrison fired a triple volley, and “great guns on the walls were
twice discharged.”77 The final plate repeats this information but adds
information about the “throngs” of mourners and their tearful reactions
to the passing hearse:

He was caried from the Minorities (which is without Aldgate) along the
cheefe streets of the Cytye unto the Cathedrall church of St Paules ye
which streets all along were so thronged with people, that ye mourners had
scarcely rome to pass. the houses likewise weare as full as they might be of
which great multitude there wear fewe or none that shed not some tears as
the corps passed by them.

In other words, the first plate gestures forwards by indicating what is

“expressed in the next leafe,” and the final plate looks backwards to both
the funeral itself and to the scroll. Although the streets of London and
the spectators are unrepresented in the scroll, they are present here; both
narratives underscore the place of the city and its citizens in the funeral.
Stow’s account of the transport of Sidney’s body and the pathway of the
procession is generally the same as Lant’s: “On the fifth of November he
was landed at the Tower wharf, and conveyed to the Minorities without
Aldgate, on the east side of the City of London, from whence, he on the
fifteenth of February next following, was conveyed to Saint Pauls Church
in London …”78 Stow then lists the participants in the procession; unlike
Lant, he makes no mention of the city streets crowded with mourners.
Both Stow and Lant attend to the role of the geography of the city of
London in the funeral. London’s streets harnessed and controlled the pro-
cession. As Vanessa Harding notes, “… the spaces within which funeral
rituals and burial took place had an important effect on their form and
experienced meaning …”79 The city in part generates the procession’s sig-
nificance. In his seminal study of early modern English civic pageantry,
David Bergeron characterized events such as royal entries and progresses as
“entertainments” and “a type of drama.”80 Likewise, Newman reminds us
of the extent to which early modern courtly spectacle performed “illusions
of idealizing compliment and dynastic fantasy.”81 Royal progresses also cel-
ebrated a glorious present and future under a strong monarch, whether
Elizabeth or James, and they marked particular military events such as the
departure of soldiers to battle and their return.82 The elaborate triumphal
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 149

arches that were constructed for these events recalled the triumphal arches
through which victorious Roman generals marched and underscored the
dependence of such entertainments on Roman military iconography.
As Gail Kern Paster notes:

Rounded triumphal arches were the symbol for ancient Rome, and the
architects of civic pageants used them to suggest how their cities presented
the rebirth of Roman power and magnificence just as stage architecture used
them to dignify their tragic scene. The growing use of the triumphal arch in
Renaissance festivals also testifies to the power of classical nostalgia.83

Sidney’s funeral dramatizes just such a “rebirth of Roman power” even

as it acknowledges the Roman triumph as part of a lost past accessible only
though militantly nostalgic recreation. The city of London played a crucial
role in this nostalgic process. As with all royal progresses, Sidney’s funeral
moved through geographical space: it progressed from a beginning point
to an ending point through the streets of London. The scroll recreates or
reproduces movement, but it does not present the city itself. Pictorially,
the funeral is extracted from its unique and particular geography, and only
the depiction of St. Paul’s in the second plate situates the viewer-reader
in a city space.
An engraving is an appropriate form for a text that is preoccupied with
military violence. The scroll was printed from copper plates. In Chap. 1,
I argued that the Tamburlaine plays dramatized the relationship between
two kinds of “plate”: armorial plates and the “plate” used in banquets.
Here, the engraved “plates” of Lant’s Roll invoke plate armor and, more
specifically, Sidney’s absent armor on the battlefield. His armored, wounded
body is also invoked by the scroll’s medium of engraving. Engraving is a
form of violence exercised upon an object, for one must cut deeply into a
copper plate in order to produce image and text. As Jonathan Goldberg
has argued, “the scene of writing” possesses “fields of violence”:84

At a basic level … writing begins with a tool of violence, the knife or razor,
and it produces the point of the quill as another cutting edge. A material
sphere is opened by those tools, one that circulates through the violence of
the instrument, one that shapes the world.85

Goldberg’s observations might be extended to engraving. The “violence of

the instrument” invokes other, absent forms of violence. One is reminded
150 S. HARLAN

of Mary Sidney’s “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip
Sidney,” in which her “penn’s impressions” perform a similar violence:

To which theise dearest offrings of my hart

…dissolved to Inke, while penn’s impressions move
…the bleeding veines of never dying love:
I render here: these wounding lynes of smart
…sadd Characters indeed of simple love. (lines 78–82)

The impression of pen on paper produces lines that are themselves

“wounding.” The text is thus wounded and wounding and, as such, it
situates itself in relationship to Sidney’s absent body. The Countess’s
wounding lines invoke the wounded body of her brother in much the
same way as de Brij’s engravings perform a form of cutting or wounding
on an inanimate surface that embodies an absent, militarized body. In
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton advises melancholics to view
curiosities in Wunderkammer-like cabinets, including the “cuts” of Durer
and Goltzius.86 In other words, the “cuts,” or engravings, of Goltzius
are imagined as objects displayed with other, often metallic, curiosities
in these collections. The many individual “cuts” necessary to produce an
engraving also produce the engraving as a type of cut.
Engraving is also uniquely suited to mourning. The caption on plate
16 refers to Sidney’s “corps”: “The corps was covered with velvet and
caryed by 14 of his yomen. The corners of the Paule were houlden by 4
Gentlemen his deer lovinge frende. The Banrole were caryed by 4 of his
neer kynredd.” The copper plate is another form of violated “corps.” Like
Sidney, the plates are also absent, for it is what they produce—the paper
scroll—that circulates as a memorial. But these absent plates nonetheless
participate in the activity of mourning, for engravings can be reproduced
indefinitely; this is certainly a form of continuance in the face of death.
In rendering Sidney’s triumphal funeral in engravings, Lant and de Brij
create an endlessly reproducible Sidney for posterity. De Brij engraves and
en-graves Sidney. As a Netherlandish Protestant, his national and religious
identities—paired with his anti-Spanish sentiment—rendered him an
appropriate man for the task. De Brij was associated with New World illus-
trations in a classicizing vein; these illustrations constitute a type of spoil,
for they lay claim to both antiquity and to new, exotic lands. Further, his
skill is no less than a trophy of the Netherlands itself, what Derek Keene calls
a “material expression” of London’s culture of consumption.87 In other
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 151

words, the English were engaged with the Low Countries not only
militarily but also materially. Keene notes that from the 1560s onwards,
“significant numbers of immigrants from the southern Netherlands arrived
in London as part of a wider Protestant diaspora from that region.”88 De
Brij’s skill finds its expression in this most English of scrolls.
The scroll, itself a spoil, also depicts spoils of war and myriad forms
of military dress. As was the case for all heraldic funerals in early modern
England and on the continent, particular groups of people were arranged
in an orderly fashion for the procession. Sidney’s funeral begins with a
group of 31 poor men, marching two by two; the number of men rep-
resents Sidney’s age when he died. The presence of these “poor men”
underscores the dependence of the lower classes on the charity of the aris-
tocracy; this was typical of the heraldic funeral.89 Indeed, in Greville’s Life,
Sidney’s famous act of generosity of giving his water bottle to a “poor sol-
dier” exemplifies not only his character but also this very social reality. But
militarized groups quickly replace the poor men; the poor are displaced by
the iconography of the battlefield. The fourth through sixth plates depict
the following: “The officers of his foote in the lowe Countreys,” which
includes “Sargents of the band” who play fifes and drums, a military ban-
ner or “Ensigne trayled,” and “Lieutenant of foote,” among others. The
group entitled “Officers of his horse,” includes “Two corporalls,” several
trumpet players, a flag or “Guidon trayled,” and the “Lieutenant of his
Horse.” These figures carry military objects: lances, flags, musical instru-
ments, and swords.90 The weapons and musical instruments are virtually
interchangeable; one imagines that these martial instruments would have
sounded very much like what one heard when marching into battle.91
In a triumph, weapons’ potential for destruction is neutralized; they are
subsumed into civic life and take on an entirely symbolic value. Here,
lances and flags are quite literally dragged along the ground. I am par-
ticularly intrigued by the “Ensigne trayled” and “Guidon trayled.” The
larger “ensigne” and the smaller “guidon” are both rolled up and dragged
behind the marchers. The text on the second plate of the scroll also notes
that the funeral involved “Ensigns trayling on the grounde,” and the scroll
ends with another trailing “ensigne,” as well as a group of men who carry
shields, swords, and muskets. A military banner typically displayed the
arms or device of the person in whose honor it was carried; the more
important the personage, the larger the banner. Banners were common in
early modern English civic, religious, and political processions and pageants.
In their earliest form, banners represented patron saints, and they were
152 S. HARLAN

Fig. 2.1 Plate from Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris, or Lant’s Roll, drawn by
Thomas Lant and engraved by Theodore de Brij, 1588

carried into battle. Later, guilds and city companies appropriated the
banner; in other words, these military objects were rendered civic.92 The
banners in Lant’s Roll reproduce the form of the scroll itself. The objects
also resemble one another physically: all are illustrated texts of sorts, and
all may be rolled up. In order to see the “ensigne” and the “guidon,” one
must of course unroll the scroll, and so the scroll arguably displaces these
military objects in honoring and memorializing Sidney. Although one can-
not see the images on these banners, one can see the scroll itself.
On plate 15, the heralds carry various items of Sidney’s clothing,
including a sword and shield, elaborate helmet, spurs, and a tunic held
aloft on a pike (Fig. 2.1).
Each herald is dressed in an elaborate, armor-like tunic that covers the
chest and upper arms, and each carries only one item. The heralds are
followed by the King of Armes. In displaying these items, the heralds
present an objectified, fragmented Sidney: a man who now exists only
as the sartorial traces he leaves behind.93 These objects are paraded as
both trophies and memorials; they invoke the absent scene of the battle of
Zutphen and Sidney’s broken body, tucked away in the coffin. They also
resonate with the objects in plate 13, which depicts the knights of Sidney’s
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 153

acquaintance, each of whom is identified by name: Sir George Farmer, Sir

George Bowser, Sir William Hatton, Sir Robert Stapleton, Sir Edward
Waterhouse, Sir Thomas Parrot, and Sir Frances Drake. They are followed
by a figure flying a triangular flag, “The Barbed horse,” and two plates
later, “Five harrolds and theyr names, carrying the Hatchemente and dig-
nitye of his knighthoode” and “William Seager, alias Portcullis” (or mem-
ber of the College of Arms). A “hatchemente” is an armorial ensign, often
a square tablet that displayed the armorial bearings of a deceased person.
This object was frequently affixed to one’s dwelling-place. Sidney’s coat
of arms, or blazon, is the sign of his knighthood. Here, these objects are
wrenched from their military context and presented in the realm of the
civic. As the text on the opening plate indicates, “The hearse was covered
with velvett & most bewtifully adorned with Escouchions of his Armes.”
As was the case with Roman triumphs, military dress plays an important
role in this procession.
Crucially, the triumph draws on military iconography and tradition
even as it attempts to efface the past violence of war it marks and nostalgi-
cally celebrates. The defeat at Zutphen produces a unique triumphator:
one who is also a spoil of war. The ceremony thus establishes Sidney as
a strange and almost impossible figure, for he is both victor and spoiled
object. His funeral spoils him from the scene of his defeat in order to
establish him as an ideal object of mourning. His coffin underscores his
absence; the object displaces the subject. Indeed, the funeral’s reliance on
triumphal imagery belies an anxiety that Sidney’s coffin may be no more
than so many other miscellaneous objects displayed in triumph through-
out history. As both triumphator and spoil, Sidney is an ambivalent and
contradictory figure.
The spectator is reminded of the past battle by the presence of Sidney’s
“Phisition and Chirurgion,” who appear after the “Conductors of his ser-
vannte” and before the “Steward of his House” and “Esquiers of his kin-
dred and friende to the number of 60.” These figures walk ahead of the
coffin (Fig. 2.2).
Behind the coffin, we see the representatives of the states of Holland,
foreigners who participate in this most English of ceremonies and honor
Sidney’s foreign service. Sidney’s “Phisition and Chirurgion” stand out
in this procession of mourners as figures who were actually present at
Sidney’s death. The doctor and surgeon are ostensibly honored for the
part they played in attempting to save Sidney; they will also play a sig-
nificant role in Greville’s Life. Here, those that minister to the body are
154 S. HARLAN

Fig. 2.2 Plate from Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris, or Lant’s Roll, drawn by
Thomas Lant and engraved by Theodore de Brij, 1588

unique figures of mourning. The early modern heraldic funeral always

hid the corpse of the subject it honored; often, in fact, the body of the
deceased had been buried long before the funeral took place.94 Sidney is
protected from view by a stately coffin covered in velvet, but he is present
at his own funeral and serves as a memento mori. The doctor and surgeon
remind the viewer-reader of the presence of Sidney himself. As Aries out-
lines, from the thirteenth century in Europe, the dead body was encased
in a coffin; by the Renaissance, it was customary to encase the coffin itself
in a catafalque, as was the case in Sidney’s funeral.95 The luxurious black
fabric that conceals Sidney’s coffin directs the viewer’s attention not to
the body beneath—which is removed from the viewer by the coffin and
the catafalque—but to the arms of Sidney, the symbol of his status as a
militarized subject. Sidney’s remains occupy an ambiguous position in his
heraldic funeral and in the scroll itself. In his analysis of the “obligation
to the corpse” in Greek epic and drama, Robert Pogue Harrison asserts
that, “… the corpse, or remains thereof, possesses a kind of charisma … in
many cases the event of death remains unfinished or unrealized until [the
corpse is] disposed of ceremonially (as in the case of Hector). I speak of
death here as the completion, not extinction, of life, for we have seen that
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 155

a person can perish yet not die in the full human sense.”96 Harrison’s dis-
tinction between “perishing” and “dying” is useful in approaching Lant’s
Roll, the first panel of which attends to the return of Sidney’s body to
England. As Sidney died abroad, so he cannot be truly recognized as
deceased without a funeral that reclaims him from foreign lands.
Lant’s Roll looks backwards to the moments of Sidney’s wounding and
death and forward to his future fame as a figure “of whose singular vertue
and witt all ages will speak” (as the opening plate indicates). This militant
nostalgia enables the active construction of the subject as famous and as
worthy of fame. Fame here takes the form of speech; one speaks of singu-
lar figures after they are dead. Texts such as the scroll must communicate
a mourning public what exactly they are to “speak” of a departed subject.
The “worthie knight” plate also underscores the scroll’s engagement with
speech: “This worthy knight Sir Philip Sidney, in the cause of his god and
true religion, and for the honor of his Prince & countrey, spared not to
spende his blud as you have harde.” This reference to what the reader has
“harde” refers to the first plate as well as to other texts and stories that
marked Sidney’s bravery after his death. The phrase “as you have harde”
refers to both “you” the singular reader and a collective “you” that shares
a desire to honor and memorialize Sidney.97 The scroll’s strong emphasis
on verbal, rather than textual, mourning and memorializing of the subject
recalls the elegies, in which speech and song are also imagined as polyvocal
and communal, both in the sense of shared among peoples and generative
of communities. The viewer-reader may have “harde” orations, songs, or
general discussion or gossip about Sidney or they may have “harde” the
songs William Byrd wrote for the funeral—“O, that most rare breast” and
“Come to me, grief forever”—in which case this line refers to the event
itself. Like the funeral, speaking of Sidney is a shared activity. The scroll’s
sentiments are to be shared by all, including its future readers or view-
ers. These figures, too, are part of the “whole proceeding” referred to
in the passage on the plate depicting St. Paul’s, for the practice of read-
ing the scroll is also a process. The scroll is an ideal medium in which
to represent a procession, for the viewer must himself “proceed” through
the text. He is thus a belated participant in the process of memorializing
the absent subject.
In the sixteenth century, there were two continental engraving tradi-
tions for works depicting processions: the ribbon and the frieze. In a rib-
bon series, “the cortege is portrayed in a winding, ribbon-like movement
or in a series of layered rows usually confined to one print, but sometimes
156 S. HARLAN

spread over several which must be seen in succession.”98 In a frieze series,

the procession is depicted over a series of sequential prints.99 Lant’s Roll is
a frieze, and it was displayed as such when John Aubrey encountered it in
the late seventeenth century:

When I was a boy 9 years old, I was with my father at one Mr. Singleton’s
an Alderman & Wollen Draper in Glocester, who had in his parlour over
the Chimney, the whole description of the Funerall engraved and printed
on papers pasted together, which at length was, I believe, the length of the
room at least; but he had contrived it to be turned upon two Pinnes, that
turning one of them made the figures march all in order.100

Like Greville, Aubrey was an exemplary early biographer. His descrip-

tion of and reaction to the scroll raises several questions about how this
object is apprehended by its viewer-reader. The funeral historian Nigel
Llewellyn notes that Lant’s Roll was “intended to be displayed as a mov-
ing image.”101 Indeed, Mr. Singleton has the scroll arranged “upon two
Pinnes” for this very reason; such a device allows the figures to “march all
in order.” Aubrey imagines the scroll’s figures as animated by this motion.
By turning the two pins at the same time, he brings the mourners to life
by providing them with the ability to “march.” As Aubrey unrolls the
scroll, he witnesses figures progressing in a line, and this progress takes a
certain amount of time.102 The amount of time it takes is, of course, deter-
mined by Aubrey’s own viewing-reading practice, and this time displaces,
or replaces, the time over which the actual funeral took place. Aubrey
does not view the entire scroll at once, as one would if one stretched it
out across the floor. Rather, the funeral is revealed to him seemingly as it
occurs. As Lant does not represent city spaces (with the exception of St.
Paul’s) or the funeral’s onlookers, so the procession exists in non-specific
space and time.
Aubrey is also impressed by the scale, or size of the scroll, which he sug-
gests is “the length of the room at least.” He repeats the term “length”
twice in this short passage, which underscores the extent to which this
object dwarfs not only the space that contains it but also the subjects who
apprehend it. Aubrey apprehends the scroll as a continuous and linear
unfolding, and he is himself involved in this unfolding or unrolling.
The editors of Language Machines note that, “The scroll … is a technol-
ogy that depends upon a literal unwinding in which the physical proxim-
ity of one moment in the narrative to another is both materially and
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 157

symbolically significant. One cannot move easily back and forth between
distant points on the scroll.”103 Generally speaking, it is a sequential rather
than random-access format such as the codex and the book. It certainly
encourages a reader to read from left to right (in this case) and not to
jump from one place to another, but it does not necessarily lock one into
a set reading practice. Aubrey’s assertion that the scroll is “the length of
the room at least” suggests that he may have unrolled it in its entirety, in
which case it would not be difficult to move between distant points. How
much of the scroll he saw at once would depend on how far apart the pins
were positioned. Perhaps he viewed the scroll approximately one panel
at a time; perhaps he spread it out on the floor. It is in part his physical
involvement with the document that generates the phenomenon he deems
“marching.”104
Aubrey’s experience with Lant’s Roll emphasizes the essentially visual,
or pictorial, nature of the document, but the scroll is nonetheless a “whole
description,” as well. Thus far, I have used the term “viewer-reader” to
underscore the scroll’s insistence on the interrelatedness of these activi-
ties in apprehending the scroll. Jacques Ranciere reminds us of “… the
knowledge concerning typography and iconography, the intertwining of
graphic and pictorial capabilities, that played such an important role in the
Renaissance… This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative
logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between
the sayable and the visible.”105 Lant’s Roll arguably places emphasis on
the “visible” in the project of mourning and memorializing, but the “say-
able”—what has been said and will be said about Sidney, as well as the
scroll’s captions and texts—negotiates one’s relationship to the visible and
control one’s interpretation of the document. Lant’s use of text belies an
anxiety regarding the capacity of the image to speak.
The scroll’s captions establish a correspondence between the document
and the funeral itself. The first caption indicates, “Here followed so many
poore men as he was years oulde.” The pairing of the words “here” and
the past tense of “followed” invokes the past funeral—specifically, a loca-
tion in London and a specific part of the procession—as well as to a loca-
tion on the scroll. Insofar as the caption communicates information about
what happened at the funeral (mourners “followed” other mourners), it
is descriptive and narrative. But the text also guides the viewer-reader of
the scroll—look down here and this is what you will now see—and helps
him to properly apprehend it. And thee captions remind one of the
non-present presence, of that which one cannot see: Philip Sidney himself.
158 S. HARLAN

The next caption indicates: “These represent the officers of his foote in the
lowe Countreys.” As is the case with the “so many poore man as he was
years oulde,” the “officers” are also placed in relationship to Sidney: they
are “officer of his foote in the lowe Countreys.” These figures “represent”
Sidney’s officers in two senses: they are, of course, pictorial representa-
tions and they are possibly representative of a larger (and absent) group. It
is also possible that Lant chose to represent fewer figures in the scroll than
were present at the funeral. In either case, the term “represent” establishes
an interdependence between the scroll’s textual and pictorial material.
Michel Foucault characterizes the relationship between Magritte’s famous
caption—“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—and the pictorial representation of
the pipe above as “a subtle and instable dependency.”106 He further notes
of the caption that, “The statement is perfectly true, since it is quite appar-
ent that the drawing representing the pipe is not the pipe itself.”107 Lant’s
captions underscore the representational nature of the scroll.
Crucially, Lant emphasizes not the particularity of the participants but
rather their essential similarity to one another.108 Aubrey apprehends the
mourners simply as “the figures”; in other words, they are united in their
shared status as non-specific “figures” with no important distinctions from
one another. The “figures” in the procession represent similitude relayed
indefinitely along the length of a series. The captions differentiate this
long, seemingly endless line of participants from one another. For Roland
Barthes, the caption renders “explicit” that which it identifies:

The caption … by its very disposition, by its average measure of reading

appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation.
It is impossible however … that the words “duplicate” the image; in the
movement from one structure to the other second signifieds are invariably
developed. What is the relationship of these signifieds of connotation to the
image? To all appearances, it is one of making explicit, of providing a stress;
the text most often simply amplifying a set of connotations already given in
the photograph.109

Although Barthes’ focus is twentieth-century journalistic photogra-

phy, his interest in the limitations of duplication vis-à-vis the relationship
between the caption and the image is relevant to Lant’s Roll. The posi-
tion of the scroll’s captions above the images creates a layered effect: the
scroll is visually divided into a textual banner across the top and a pictorial
one across the bottom, yet these two banners are mutually dependent.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 159

The viewer of the scroll may not have been present at the funeral itself.
What Barthes refers to as the caption’s capacity to “mak[e] explicit” or
“provid[e] a stress” is therefore necessary, for the pictorial elements of
the scroll do not reveal themselves to the viewer-reader independently of
the captions. The mourners’ identities were crucial in a heraldic funeral.
These identities are communicated to the viewer-reader primarily through
the captions, which both render the figures recognizable and, by their
very presence, remind one that they may be unfamiliar or unknown to
the figure who apprehends the scroll. The captions are paratextual, both
part of and apart from the procession whose members they identify.
As Gerard Genette argues, paratexts influence how a text is apprehended
by its reader;110 George Stanitzek refers to this as a text’s “first contours,
its manageable identity so to speak.”111 The “manageable identity” of this
text bears a relationship to the identities of the subjects it represents. These
identities (one’s profession, rank, membership in various groups, etc.) are
predominantly social; they situate the figures in early modern English
society as well as in the more localized social world of the scroll itself. The
captions establish a relationship not only between image and text but also
between the captions themselves; the captions’ seriality underscores the
figures’ participation in the shared activity of the procession. These short
pieces of text thus bind the individual panels of the scroll together and
assure its wholeness, its status as a “whole proceeding.” It is this whole-
ness that Aubrey underscores with his reference to the “whole description
of the Funerall.” “Description” here is not purely linguistic; on the con-
trary, it relies on both text and image.
The scroll’s seriality bears an important relationship to the practice of
mourning. Aubrey perceives the scroll as ordered. As he notes, by turn-
ing the pins, he is able to make the figures “march all in order.” Aubrey’s
reference to “order” suggests two things: first, that the scroll organizes its
elements (or that it is not disordered), and secondly, that the scroll pres-
ents information in a particular order, which is to say a progression from
one moment or point to the next. The mourners’ positions and actions are
prescribed and controlled. On the second plate, Lant outlines some of the
participants in the ceremony:

And to solempnize the same there followed nexte unto the mourners the
Lord Maior; Alderman, and Sheriffe of the cittye of London, ryding in
purple. After them the company of Grocers of wch he was free and Lastlye
certayne younge men of the cittye marrying by three and three, in black
160 S. HARLAN

cassockes, with their their shott, pikes, halberde, and Ensigns trayling on the
grounde, to the nomber of 300 who so soone as he was interred, honored
the obsiquy with a loude volley. This worke was first drawne and invented by
Tho Lant Copper by Daniel Theodore de Brij in the Cittye of London 1587.

This description places the figures in relationship to one another. Lant’s

repetition of “after” and “next” underscores the serial nature of the event
as well as the process of reading or viewing the scroll. Crucially, however,
for the viewer to move from one figure to the “next,” he must proceed
in the opposite direction of the mourners. The scroll depicts a proces-
sion from right to left; one reads from left to right. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines a “proceeding” as “the action of moving forward or
onward; advance” and as “an ordered company of people moving along
together; a procession.” This scroll requires the viewer-reader to “pro-
ceed” backwards; the scroll is a backwards-looking form and, as such,
it encourages the work of mourning, which is also backwards-looking.
Lant’s scroll also requires the viewer-reader to look backwards to his or her
Roman past and to the texts, objects, and practices associated or identified
with this past. Viewing the scroll encourages cultural memory. Mourning
and memory coincide in this document; they rely on and mutually support
one another.

ABSENT ARMOR AND THE ABSENT FRIEND: ACCESSING

THE BIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECT IN GREVILLE’S 1652 LIFE
OF THE RENOWNED SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

The place of memory in mourning and memorializing receives its most

complete exploration in Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney,
also titled A Dedication to the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, for Greville had
to look backwards from a far more distant point than either the elegists
or de Brij and Lant. Begun at least three decades after his close friend’s
death and not published until 1652 (Greville left the manuscript at his
death in 1628), the text provides the most famous narrative of the sup-
posed circumstances of Sidney’s heroic wounding and death. Greville pays
particular attention to Sidney’s casting aside his thigh armor, an act that
exposes his body, and, in complex ways, himself to his biographer and
reader. I am interested in how this absent object—Sidney’s missing thigh
armor—allows one to access the absent, memorialized subject: a subject
who is himself an imaginative and nostalgic construction. Greville’s Life is
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 161

an attempt to remember a lost or absent subject, but it is also about the

act of remembering and about the limitations of memory—what Greville
refers to as his “drooping memory.”112 The text is also a meditation on
an author’s relationship to his subject, both personally (as a friend) and
generally (as a “biographer” of sorts). As in the elegies and in Lant’s Roll,
here Sidney is an absent object that signifies in a way utterly distinct from
a present object and that bears a unique relationship to nostalgia and to
longing. This sense of nostalgia is in part informed by his untimely death,
and as Gavin Alexander notes, the literary responses to this death drew
on the classical rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, or not finishing what you
started. Alexander maintains that, “Sidney is himself a figure of incomple-
tion.”113 This engagement with the missing and the broken is relevant to
Greville’s narrative.
Greville’s account of Sidney’s disarming adheres to Thomas Wilson’s
mandate in his 1553 The Arte of Rhetorique that, as in classical epideic-
tic rhetoric, the author of a biographical account ought to place particular
emphasis on “The tyme of his [subject’s] departure, or death.”114 Greville is
most certainly up to the task. To him, Sidney’s death is far more important
than his life, and Greville prefers the company of the dead. As he outlines in
the opening lines of the Life, he retreats into the “memory of dead men” in
order to escape the dangerous presentness of the modern world:

The difference which I have found between times, and consequently the
changes of life into which their natural vicissitudes doe violently carry men, as
they have made deep furrowes of impressions into my heart, so the same heavy
wheeles cause me to retire my thoughts from free traffique with the world, and
rather seek comfortable ease or imployment in the safe memory of dead men,
than disquiet in a doubtfull conversation amongst the living. (1)

Greville imagines the composition of the Life as an attempt to with-

draw—or “retire”—from the world, to absent himself from “conversa-
tions amongst the living,” and to engage in another type of conversation:
a conversation with himself and with the dead. To converse is both to keep
company with and to communicate with; it implies reciprocity, dialogue,
and social interaction. For Greville, “conversation amongst the living”
causes “disquiet,” and he undertakes a flight from the noise of everyday
human interaction and conversation. In order to escape “disquiet,” he
must create a quiet space apart, a space identified with the act of writing.
His engagement with “safe memory” assures a “comfortable ease” that
162 S. HARLAN

stands in stark contrast to the anxiety, or “disquiet,” that comes from an

engagement with the present and the living. In absenting himself from
the world of the living, he fulfills a fantasy of connectedness with the dead
and establishes himself—and, ultimately, Sidney—as an isolated object of
inquiry and reflection. In other words, both Greville and Sidney are absent
figures in this narrative, and it is in part this shared status as absent that
allows for the intimacy Greville establishes between them, an intimacy that
allows him to reflect on his own biographical undertaking and on how
objects figure into this undertaking. He imagines his project as one of
nostalgic repetition and casts himself in a line of great thinkers descending
from the Greeks:

For my own part, I observed, honoured, and loved [Sidney] so much;

as with what caution soever I have passed through my dayes hitherto
among the living, yet in him I challenge a kind of freedome even among
the dead. So that although with Socrates, I profess to know nothing of
the present; yet with Nestor I am delighted in repeating old newes of the
ages past. (3)

To write the Life is not to create, but rather to repeat—and to return

to the past. To repeat “old newes” is to make it new news again, and the
“delight” this process generates in Greville and, presumably, in his reader,
is a sort of euphoria of return not unlike the return offered by Lant’s
Roll. Greville counts himself as “amongst” the dead and looks to them for
“pregnant evidence” of Sidney’s worth:

Here I am still enforced to bring pregnant evidence from the dead,

amongst whom I have found far more liberal contribution to the honour
of true worth than among those which now live and, in the market of
selfnesse, traffic new interest by the discredit of old friends; that ancient
wisdom of righting enemies being utterly worn out of date in our modern
discipline. (19)

He devotes many pages in the Life to others’ accounts of Sidney’s supe-

rior character, but his use of the first person throughout the text positions
himself as the chief authority, which is assured by his unique intimacy with
Sidney. It is this question of intimacy with and access to one’s biographi-
cal subject that primarily concerns Greville in the chapters I examine here.
Lorna Hutson observes that “friendship articulated in literature tends to
be, reflexively, about literature,”115 and indeed it is the connection between
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 163

the intimacy of male friends and the production of art that Greville
explores in his account of Sidney’s death. My focus here is not the familiar
question of Renaissance “self-fashioning” as Stephen Greenblatt defines
it, but rather the fashioning of the self by another. 116 In other words, how
is the self-fashioned in the absence of the self, and what problems attend
this activity?
Greville’s euphoria of nostalgic return is informed by his strong sense
of friendship between himself and Sidney, but the Life is not about friend-
ship per se; it is about how friendship can be metaphorized as access. As
Greville’s most important friend, Sidney lives on as a result of his virtue in
accordance with Cicero’s promise regarding good friends in De Amicitia.
Cicero writes of Scipio as an absent presence:

he who looks upon a true friend, looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of
himself. Wherefore friends, though absent, are at hand; though in need, yet
abound; though weak, are strong; and—harder saying still—though dead,
are yet alive; so great is the esteem on the part of their friend, the tender
recollection and the deep longing that still attends them … For me, indeed,
though he was suddenly snatched away, Scipio still lives and will always live;
for it was his virtue that caused my love and that is not dead.117

Cicero’s “deep longing” allows him to conceptualize a friend’s immor-

tality. His assertion that an absent friend is “at hand” suggests that mem-
ory may render the absent friend so corporeally or materially real that
he may be touched, and that the act of writing—the site of which is the
hand—in turn allows for this friend to be “at hand.” As in the elegies,
the friend’s absent body is rendered present in the textual body that the
author creates and manipulates. Cicero’s notion of the friend as a double
or “image” of oneself finds a later expression in Michel de Montaigne’s
and Francis Bacon’s essays on the subject of friendship. Bacon agreed with
“the ancients, to say, that a friend is another himself,”118 as did Montaigne,
who maintained that, “In the friendship I speak of they [the friends] mix
and blend one into the other in so perfect a union that the seam which has
joined them is effaced and disappears.”119 For Montaigne, an ideal friend-
ship is self-annihilating insofar as one can no longer distinguish oneself
from one’s friend; it follows that the absence of this friend is thus either
logically impossible or would constitute the very absence of oneself. For
Bacon, as for Cicero, one’s friend is responsible for assuring that “care”
of one’s life “will continue after him.”120 Bacon continues on the subject
164 S. HARLAN

of the “confined” body, which resonates powerfully with Greville’s own

fixation on Sidney’s body in the account of his death:

A man hath a body, and that body is confined to a place; but where friend-
ship is, all offices of life are as it were granted to him and his deputy, for he
may exercise them by his friend. How many things are there which a man
cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself! A man can scarce
allege his own merits with modesty, much less extol them; a man cannot
sometimes brook to supplicate or beg; and a number of the like. But all
these things are graceful in a friend’s mouth, which are blushing in a man’s
own.121

According to Bacon, the friend allows for two things to take place:
first, he allows for the liberation of the physical body from its confine-
ment in time and space; and second, he gives voice to that which one
desires to “say or do himself” but cannot. In other words, he speaks for
his friend. As in the passage from Cicero, Bacon is concerned with the
presence and absence of the figure of the friend: a man is only fully pres-
ent in the presence of his friend. He is less himself when by himself. Bacon
assigns a powerful—indeed, virtually unlimited—agency to his “deputy,”
the friend. I dwell at some length on these treatises of friendship because
I believe they inform the problem of absence that faces Greville in his
account of Sidney’s death. But unlike these treatises, which seek to efface
the line between one subject and another, Greville’s account of Sidney’s
death acknowledges the limitations of access to the absent friend and the
limitations of his own biographical “office” more generally. The anxiety
that attends the figure of the absent friend, so strenuously and effectively
denied or silenced in these treatises on friendship, is foregrounded in
Greville’s text as he grapples with the significance of Sidney’s absent body,
absent armor, and absent self.
Sidney’s armor, or lack thereof, plays a central role in this account as
the material embodiment of militant nostalgia. I would like to place this
compelling object (the absent armor) in relationship to the presentation of
Sidney (the absent friend) by his biographer and to the anxiety of access
to one’s subject that preoccupies Greville. Armor is an absent presence: as
a hollow shell, it registers the presence of the human body beneath, but it
also stands quite literally on its own as a would-be body with a void at its
center. As a protective form of clothing, it limits access to this body beneath
and therefore must be stripped off by the biographer. Sidney frequently
engaged in acts of literary self-fashioning, whether as Astrophil, Philisides,
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 165

or the persona of the Defense of Poesie. Edward Berry notes that, “Sidney’s
self-images are both historical and fictional, and in mediating between two
realms they represent a response to the Renaissance notion of imitation,
which considered the creation of imagined selves a means of construct-
ing real ones.”122 Early modern life-writing was likewise an imitative genre
insofar as it encouraged the reader to imitate the behavior of the biographi-
cal subject in question. The Life constitutes one of many attempts after
Sidney’s death to mythologize him and construct him as an ideal states-
man, English gentleman, courtier, shepherd-poet, chivalric knight, subject
of Queen Elizabeth, and Protestant martyr.123 Greville was certainly not
alone in his attempt to memorialize his friend, but the Life is unique in its
attention to, and treatment of, Sidney’s wounding as a metaphor for the
challenges and limitations of a biographical undertaking or “office.”
As I have noted, the title of the text is uncertain as the few extant copies
of the text are alternatively titled The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney
and A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. Although the text is not a cohesive
“biography,” it has undeniable biographical elements. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the terms “biography,” as
the history of the lives of individual men, dates from the late seventeenth
century. In 1683, Dryden used the term “biography” to refer to the work
of Plutarch.124 Of the text’s many concerns and focuses, the account of
Sidney’s death conforms most easily to what we now think of as a “biogra-
phy,” which may explain the fact that this account provides the raw mate-
rial for virtually all the accounts of Sidney’s death in later biographies. The
word “dedication” is also suggestive. To dedicate a text to someone is to
set this person apart from others, to elevate him above others. Further,
the assumed worth of the person to whom a textual object is dedicated
in turn renders the object more valuable and/or authenticates it. Thus if
one dedicates a text to a friend, the worth of both the text and the friend
increases. In its earliest use, the term “dedication” had religious connota-
tions: to “dedicate” something was to set it apart as a sign of devotion to a
deity or to a sacred purpose, and a dedication was accompanied by solemn
rites. Dedication can only occur in speech or writing. It is an act entirely
dependent on language, and it exists only in language.
Sidney is both Greville’s chief subject—in other words, that parts of this
text can be read as a biography or a “life” of an extraordinary individual—
and simultaneously an addressee, or recipient of the text, along with the
text’s other readers, who are encouraged to view Sidney’s behavior in the
moments of his wounding and death as heroic and worthy of emulation.
166 S. HARLAN

The biographer’s didactic impulses—or his desire to provide his audience

with a model of behavior—are in conflict with another demand: that
the biographer establish the uniqueness of his chosen subject. Greville is
influenced by the tradition of medieval saints’ lives or sacred biography in
England, a genre defined by three chief goals: to convince fellow believers
that a person was holy and worthy of veneration; to provide the Christian
community with models of behavior that were worthy of emulation; and
to characterize the saint as an imitatio Christi, one who lived his or her life
according to the model of Christ.125 He draws on these paradigms, but he
acknowledges a tension between the mandate to present one’s subject as
both uniquely holy and exemplary, or able to be imitated, as well as imi-
tating the first and unique and exemplary figure: Christ himself. In other
words: can one be uniquely heroic and also patterned on another nostalgic
heroic model?
This tension between the unique and the reproducible is engaged from
the moment of Sidney’s arming for battle. As in Homer and Virgil, Greville
attends to the details of the arming of the heroic Sidney, who “remem-
bers,” in this moment, the arming of great men before him and acknowl-
edges himself as part of this lineage: “When that unfortunate stand was
to be made before Zutphen, to stop the issuing out of the Spanish Army
from a streict; with what alacrity soever he went to actions of honor, yet
remembering that upon just grounds the ancient Sages describe the wor-
thiest persons to be ever best armed, he had compleatly put on his …”
(128). Sidney remembers accounts of “the ancient Sages” in the moment
that he arms himself: he remembers not what he has witnessed or experi-
enced but rather what has been “described.” Greville’s account of Sidney’s
arming constitutes one entry in a history of texts that dwells at length
on the figure of the armed hero’s body, as did the Tamburlaine plays.
Sidney’s act of remembering reproduces, or reasserts, the connection
between one’s personal worth and one’s armor that defined, among oth-
ers, Achilles and Aeneas: “… the Ancient Sages describe worthiest persons
to be ever best armed …” In other words, one’s worth establishes one as
worthy of a suit of armor, and the armor in turn legitimates one or renders
one worthy. Greville’s reference to the “unfortunate stand” that awaits
the armored Sidney also echoes Paul’s Biblical account of the warfaring
Christian who dons the armor of the righteous: “Wherefore take unto
you the whole armour of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil
day, and having done all, to stand./Stand therefore, having your loins girt
about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness …”126
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 167

(emphasis mine). As a material object that protects the body, the suit of
armor allows one to quite literally “stand”—that is, it renders one stiff
and upright. As a symbolic system that protects the soul, it enables one to
withstand the forces of evil. Sidney’s impending “stand” is literally (rather
than metaphorically) militaristic, and his “compleat” armor establishes
him as a uniquely heroic figure and as an aesthetic object.
In Chap. 14, Greville writes of his text that, “Now for the severall
branches, or discourses following; they are all Members of one, and the
same imperfect body, so as I let them take their fortunes (like Essayes)
onely to tempt, and stir up some more free Genius, to fashion the whole
frame into finer mould for the worlds use” (154–55). In other words, the
Life, like Sidney’s armored body, possesses a “frame,” and the material
contained therein may be used as a “mould” or model for future heroic
or noble behavior. But this promise is not absolute, for although Greville
maintains that Sidney provides a “patterne” that might be followed (224),
he also writes of Sidney as a phoenix whose ashes may not “produce
his equall” (136). The forward-looking aspect of Greville’s biographical
project—the presentation of Sidney as both unique and exemplary—poses
problems for him, but he is confident in his ability to look backwards.
Sidney’s life and death are legitimized not by the truth of Greville’s
account (which is certainly in question) but rather by Sidney’s alliance,
thanks to his clothing, with classical heroes and chivalric knights. It is
Sidney’s armored body that arrests Greville’s, and the reader’s, gaze in
this account. Newman reminds us that early modern dress “… was less a
signifier of class or degree, as commentators on fashion and social histori-
ans have usually claimed, than a signifier of difference itself …”127 Sidney’s
armor is a system of signs that, while casting him in a tradition of armored
bodies, also differentiates him from both the common footsoldier and the
ordinary man—and indeed, from the ordinary reader. A suit of armor is
both unique and effacing of the unique; it is made for an individual and
often bears family crests or blazon, and yet one armored body is essentially
the same as the next. Armor thus underscores the reproducibility of the
human body and simultaneously its particularity. As such, it is a metaphor
for the biographical subject himself: a subject that is both uniquely heroic
and paradoxically exemplary and therefore reproducible.
Greville outlines the goals of his biographical project or “office”: “Now
whether this were a desperate cure in our Leaders, for a desperate disease;
or whether misprision, neglect, audacity, or what else induced it, it is no
part of my office to determine, but onely to make the narration clear, and
168 S. HARLAN

deliver rumor, as it passed then, without any stain, or enamel” (129).

“Rumor” in the sixteenth century encompassed several meanings: first,
an unsubstantiated statement or report circulating in a community; sec-
ond, an uproar, tumult or disturbance; and third, and most importantly
for the passage here, talk or report of a person in some way noted or
distinguished, as in Shakespeare’s Henry 6, Part 1 when the Countess of
Auvergne says of Talbot, “Great is the rumour of this dreadfull Knight,/
And his achievements of no lesse account” (2.3.7). Greville’s desire to
“deliver rumor,” or Sidney’s proper reputation and renown, “without
any stain, or enamel” implies an acknowledgment of the existence of
another version of Sidney’s reputation in circulation. Greville seeks to
replace this flawed version with a correct one—to construct and dissemi-
nate a true and just portrait of his now long-deceased friend. He suggests
in this account that reputation or “rumor” is not constructed over time
but rather in crucial or key moments, such as the moment of death, when
the self can be seen clearly, without “stain,” the diminishment of one’s
heroism, or “enamel,” the exaggeration of this heroism. Greville informs
his reader that he is not interested in the motivation behind the military
actions that placed Sidney in range of the enemy’s muskets; rather, he is
in the business of clarifying a “narration” by stripping off those elements
that cloud or obscure it. This is no less than a duty or a moral obligation.
Greville is compelled to write the Life. The text is a form of observance:
something that marks and honors the life of another and also observes or
watches another.128
Although this account reads like a first-hand report, Greville was not
present for Sidney’s wounding or his subsequent medical treatment. It
is likely that Greville based his account on Gifford’s text. As Katherine
Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten note, Gifford was the first of two
ministers whom Sidney named in the codicil to his will and was “cer-
tainly present at Sidney’s death,” but his authorship of the text is by no
means certain.129 Greville’s account of Sidney’s wounding, a narrative of
the destruction of the subject, is thus itself a construction based on report
and on research. It is part of Greville’s project to deny or erase the second-
hand reality of this narrative and to place himself, the biographer, in inti-
mate contact with his subject. I have argued that this narrative is about
absences: Sidney’s absent armor and Sidney as an absent friend. It is also
about Greville’s absence from the scene of Sidney’s wounding and death.
Like Greville, Gifford is a friend of Sidney’s, and this friendship com-
pels, or “moves,” Gifford to produce a narrative that memorializes his lost
friend and assuages his grief and the grief of others. He writes:
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 169

The loss of a worthy man, enabled and qualified every way for the defense of
religion, his country, and prince, as it is great, so can it not but work much
grief in all good minds, especially in those where the bonds of nature and
friendship were fast knit and tied. Yet this grief is greatly assuaged when it is
well known that the party so well beloved hath received no damage by death,
but by many degrees hath bettered his estate: which moves me, being with Sir
Philip Sidney for the space of seventeen of eighteen days before his death, and
even unto his last breath, to write, for the comfort of those who did dearly
love him, a brief note, not of all—for then I should write a large book—but
of the most special things whereby he declared his unfeigned faith, and special
work of grace, which gave proof that his end was undoubtedly happy.130

Gifford has two goals in his “brief note”: to provide “proof that
[Sidney’s] end was undoubtedly happy” and to cast Sidney as a Protestant
martyr. His focus is therefore not on Sidney’s wounding, but on his death,
which he presents as consistent with a Christian “good death” as laid out in
the ars moriendi of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.131 As Malcolm says
of the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, “Nothing in his life/Became him like
the leaving it” (1.4.7–8). According to accounts such as this one, the same
might be said of Sidney. Gifford places Sidney in an intimate relationship
to God, not—as is the case with Greville—with himself. On his deathbed,
Sidney gains a renewed faith and devotion to God and repents his past sins.
His deathbed speech and actions are deeply conventional, and yet Gifford
assigns him singularity. He writes that Sidney “[gave] thanks to God that
he did chastise him with a loving and fatherly correction, and to his singular
profit, whether he should live or die.”132 That God grants Sidney “singular
profit” suggests that he is a unique figure despite his status as yet another
practitioner of the ars moriendi. This ambivalence resurfaces in Greville’s
account, where his attention to Sidney’s armor, an object that figures only
marginally in Gifford’s text, allows him to engage with this problem.
Greville’s positioning of Sidney in a glorious history of armored war-
riors is also ambivalent. This account departs from classical, Biblical,
and chivalric accounts of arming, for Greville’s emphasis is on disarm-
ing: Sidney arms himself only to promptly undress.133 The hero is thus
engaged not in an act of self-preservation or self-protection but rather
self-exposure. Greville maintains that Sidney takes off a crucial piece of
his armor—his “Cuisses” or thigh armor—in a gesture of camaraderie and
generosity toward another:

meeting the Marshall of the Camp lightly armed (whose honour in that
art would not suffer this unenvious Themistocles to sleep) the unspotted
170 S. HARLAN

emulation of his heart, to venture without any inequalitie, made him cast
off his Cuisses; and so, by the secret influence of destinie, to disarm that part,
where God (it seems) had resolved to strike him. (128)

The French “cuisses” refers to both the piece of armor that protects the
thigh and to the thigh itself. Sidney’s missing “cuisses,” or thigh armor,
thus allows for the exposure of his “cuisses,” his actual thigh or Achilles
heel. Crucially, Greville underscores Sidney’s disarming of his thigh as a
willed act—not an accident, as it may have been in actuality—in opposi-
tion to the unpredictable, unaccountable, and accidental nature of the
military maneuvers that define the battle.134 The result of his ill-advised
action is as follows:

Thus they go on, every man in the head of his own Troop; and the weather
being misty, fell unawares upon the enemie, who had made a strong stand to
receive them, near to the very walls of Zutphen; by reason of which accident
their Troops fell, not only unexpectedly to be engaged within the levell of the
great shot, that played from the Rampiers, but more fatally within the shot of
their Muskets, which were layd in ambush within their own trenches. (128)

The battle of Zutphen was disorganized, chaotic, and utterly forget-

table as a military enterprise—save for the death of Sidney—and Greville
attends to this chaos. Here, he refers to “accident” and the “unexpected,”
to soldiers who are “unawares” of what awaits them; this is a far cry from
the “secret influence of destinie” and divine influence of the former para-
graph. Sidney’s wounding is both accidental and providential (in other
words, a fall of man), a tragedy that could have been avoided and an
event that was dictated by “the secret influence of destiny” as well as God,
who apparently had his eye on Sidney’s thigh. However, it is necessary
that Greville render deliberate Sidney’s disarming in order that this action,
unlike all other actions and events in this account of the battle, may con-
tain significance. He thus assigns motivation to Sidney: he sees that his
comrade is “lightly armed” and resolves to eliminate any “inequalitie” by
removing his thigh armor. Greville asserts that “the unspotted emulation
of his heart … made him cast off his Cuisses,” which suggests that Sidney
is both an active participant in his wounding and death (i.e. he chose to
remove this piece of armor) and that he is a passive victim of the desires
of his heart, which compel him perform certain actions. According to
Greville, Sidney’s removal of his thigh armor is resolute and moral, which
is not the case in other contemporary accounts of Sidney’s disarming.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 171

Thomas Moffet, the tutor of the young William Herbert, suggested that
Sidney was neglectful in arming himself because he was in a rush to aid an
endangered comrade. He maintains that Sidney “[hastened] to the rescue
of the embattled Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, who had neglected
to put on the armour for his left thigh.”135 Sir John Smythe posited that,
“Sidney may have been following the continental fashion of abandoning
heavy armor.”136 Like Moffet and Smythe, Greville attempts to read and
interpret Sidney’s action and to guide his reader to do the same. He main-
tains that Sidney “disarm[s] that part, where God (it seems) had resolved
to strike him.” In disarming himself, Sidney exposes himself, both to his
biographer and to the reader. To disarm someone is to deprive him of
power, to injure him; the disarmed subject is at the mercy of another.
According to Greville, Sidney fixates on his wounded thigh and missing
armor. While recovering from his surgeries, he invents a song—“La cuisse
rompue”—about his wounding:

Here again this restless soul of his (changing only the aire, and not the cords
of her harmony) calls for Musick; especially that song which himself had
intitled, La Cuisse rompue. Partly (as I conceive by the name) to shew that
the glory of mortal flesh was shaken in him: and by that Musick it self, to
fashion and enfranchise his heavenly soul into that everlasting harmony of
Angels, whereof these Concords were a kinde of terrestrial Echo: And in this
supreme, or middle Orb of Contemplations, he blessedly went on, within a
circular motion, to the end of all flesh. (138)

“Rompue” is the adjectival form of the French verb “rompre,” which

means to separate something into two or more pieces, or to break or rup-
ture by force or violence. The separation here is twofold: Sidney separates
his cuisses (or thigh armor) from his cuisse (or actual thigh), and the result
is that his thigh bone is separated from itself in the sense of broken or
ruptured. The “cuisse” of the song thus refers to both his body and the
piece of armor that should protect that part of the body. Of course, the
piece of thigh armor that Sidney removed is not itself shattered or divided;
wherever it is, its wholeness stands in stark contrast to Sidney’s broken
bone. But “rompre” also connotes a break in the sense of an interruption,
as the interruption of silence with a song. John Gouws makes a case for
what might have been an “appropriate” deathbed song:

Although the allusion is lost on us, it is tempting to speculate that the song
in question might be Sidney’s translation of Psalm 6 … Not only is this, one
172 S. HARLAN

of the Penitential Psalms, appropriate to Sidney’s situation and mood (as

described by both Greville and Gifford), but lines 7 to 17 uncannily invite
one to think of his condition at that time.137

Seth Weiner also argues that it would have been “appropriate” for
Sidney to select a psalm:

How appropriate that this re-dedication of one’s vital energies should find
poetic expression in a penitential psalm. And how fitting that a psalm should
mark the point where a man about to die chooses to view literal facts of his
life (his broken thigh, for instance) in terms that rescue them from vanity by
revealing their final meaning.138

Both critics consider the meaning or significance of the psalms to

Sidney and how the knowledge of this song may help the reader to
understand Sidney’s psychological state. Katherine Duncan-Jones sug-
gests that the song might have been a sonnet from Du Plessis Mornay’s
De la verite or a “conventional lyric, with a setting by Byrd, which is
attributed to Sidney in a manuscript belonging to a Fellow of All Souls
called Robert Dow.”139 But this is all speculation; the song does not sur-
vive. But Sidney himself resists assigning meaning to his broken thigh; it
is simply a broken thigh. The thigh functions as a synecdoche; it stands
in for Sidney, the subject of the song and the biography. This song is
Sidney’s own narrative of his wounding, an isolated moment when he,
not Greville, controls how his story is told, and a moment to which we
do not have access.
As the song’s title is in French, so the song may also have been. Indeed,
this song is an exercise in translation: in titling the song “La cuisse rom-
pue,” Sidney translates his experience into French and translates, or trans-
forms, himself into an object: his broken thigh. He may also transform his
wounding and death into dark comedy, for the song’s title does not sound
exactly penitential. But Greville nonetheless refers to these moments as
the “last scene of this Tragedy,” self-consciously employing theatrical lan-
guage as a means of guiding his reader’s interpretation. Sidney becomes
a tragic figure in the Aristotelian sense—a victim of fate and Providence
and man who misjudged the situation in which he found himself—and in
the more traditionally Christian sense: a man whose “flaw” of profound
generosity and bravery brought about his fall. Greville’s theatrical meta-
phor casts Sidney’s action of removing his cuisses as a performance; it is an
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 173

action performed for his military audience in the text and for his readerly
audience. Like the saints whose tragedies medieval saints’ lives narrated,
Sidney is rendered exemplary. Greville’s fixation on Sidney’s unarmored,
wounded thigh—and indeed his almost complete reduction of Sidney to
this unarmored, wounded thigh—dramatizes what Alan Bray has charac-
terized as “the uncompromising symmetry” of the masculine friend and
the “sodomite” in early modern England.140 Ultimately, Greville’s fixation
on the thigh becomes most dramatic in his narrative of Sidney’s surgery.
Greville attempts to control a range of generic possibilities and harness
them in the service of the twinned projects of biography and dedication.
The scene of wounding also owes much to allegory. Maureen Quilligan
persuasively argues that, “allegory is (and always has been) the most self-
conscious of narrative genres” due to its “very particular emphasis on lan-
guage as [its] first focus and ultimate subject.”141 She further characterizes
allegory as “obsessive,” for one “never knows where to stop; the process
of interpretation can go on indefinitely, as it is in fact supposed to…”142
Like the trials of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight, whose armor has been tested
by others but never used by him, Sidney’s wounding and his song belong
to the genre of allegory.143 As I have argued, the elegists also rely on alle-
gory even as they acknowledge its limitations in their enterprise of mourn-
ing. Sidney’s wounded thigh embodies, as allegory does, the Protestant
military principles with which Greville identifies him; allegory objectifies
the abstract as Greville objectifies his subject. Sidney struggles against his
biographer’s desire to generate allegorical meaning, but in his death, he
relinquishes control, and Greville claims the last word.
The violation of Sidney’s body is both horrific and orgasmic; Sidney’s
deliberate and meaningful removal of his “cuisses” allows Greville access
to him as a subject in a violently eroticized encounter.144 For Greville, the
piercing of Sidney’s exposed thigh with the musket shot is a metaphor
for his own biographical project, which necessitates access to Sidney’s
unique interiority, here imagined as his “soul” and “spirit.” He fixates on
Sidney’s “cuisse rompue”—his removed or separated thigh armor as well
as his wounded thigh—in order to explore the demands and limitations of
his own biographical art. Like the bullet that penetrates Sidney’s exposed
thigh, Greville must penetrate the armor of his biographical subject—he
must expose this subject to himself and, crucially, to his reader. By violat-
ing Sidney’s body, he claims, or spoils, the erotic violence of the elegies’
female mourners, both Mary Sidney’s vision of freshly bleeding wounds
and Venus’ self-spoiling in “Astrophel.” Greville is aware of the dangers of
174 S. HARLAN

exposing Sidney and, simultaneously, of the tantalizing potential for access

that such exposure offers. He describes Sidney’s wounding as follows:

Howsoever, by this stand, an unfortunate hand out of those forespoken

Trenches, brake the bone of Sir Philip’s thigh with a Musket-shot. The horse
he rode upon, was rather furiously choleric, than bravely proud, and so
forced him to forsake the field, but not his back, as the noblest, and fittest
biere to carry a Martiall Commander to his grave. (129)

Although Sidney is wounded by a bullet rather than in hand-to-hand com-

bat, Greville’s use of the term “hand” suggests physical contact between
Sidney’s wounded body and the “unfortunate hand” of his aggressor, a
nostalgic vision that eliminates the musket. As Joel Fineman argues of
Shakespeare’s sonnets, epideictic rhetoric points out its subject as if by
hand.145 Likewise, Sidney is literally handed his death, and his fame, by the
anonymous hand that reaches out of the trenches. Epideictic rhetoric is
the rhetoric of praise or blame; it can be complimentary or aggressive. The
hand in the trenches that seeks to violate Sidney is a double, or reversal,
of Greville himself, whose project is to praise and flatter Sidney. Greville
“fashions” Sidney by focusing here on one small element or part of his
fashion: his thigh armor. The military nature of his dress is uniquely suited
to the process of fashioning the subject, for war provides the “moulds”
that one emulates in order to achieve “greatness.” Greville asserts that,
“… greatness is not dead every where; and … war is both a fitter mould
to fashion it, and stage to act it on, than peace can be …” (132). Indeed,
this “unfortunate hand” virtually touches Sidney’s unprotected thigh. As
an armored subject, Sidney’s body is protected and closed, save for a small
exposed piece of flesh. The physical closeness that Greville establishes
between Sidney’s exposed body and the “hand” that wounds him stands
in for the physical proximity that is no longer present between himself and
Sidney. In rendering Sidney’s body present through the absence of his
thigh armor, he draws attention to Sidney’s own absence.
Greville’s eroticism in the Life is not confined to this account. In his
later account of the downfall of the Earl of Essex—particularly, the seizure
and perusal of his private letters—Greville notes that, “[Essex’s] letters to
private men were read openly, by the piercing eyes of an Atturnies Office
…” (158). Like the “hand out of those forespoken Trenches” (129) which
fires the bullet that penetrates Sidney’s exposed thigh, the searching and
curious eyes of the “Atturnies Office” pierce Essex’s textual body. Access
to and interpretation of the subject is thus imagined in terms of piercing into
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 175

or penetrating the textual or corporeal body of the subject. In Essex’s case,

this activity is undertaken by an unspecific and hostile group of strangers;
in Sidney’s, by a single intimate friend. In both Sidney and Essex’s cases,
the “private” is rendered public in an act of violent exposure. Greville is
careful to note that those men who were “let loose to work upon” Essex
were interested in slandering him while Greville is interested in paying
tribute to Sidney. But the method remains the same, and it is only in a
violent encounter with the body of one’s subject that one may gain access
to that which is “private” or interior. Greville’s desire for his lost object,
Sidney, is dramatized as an encounter that allows him to claim, or spoil,
him as a biographical subject.
Greville’s account of Sidney’s lengthy medical treatment is also an occa-
sion for him to reflect on his newfound access to Sidney and on his own
biographical art. He repeatedly uses the word “art” in reference to the prac-
tice of the surgeons who tend to Sidney’s wound. He refers to the surgeons
as “Artists” (133) and notes that the “principal Chirurgions of the Camp
attended for him; some mercenarily out of gain, others out of honour to
their Art” (130). He also notes that Sidney “obedient[ly] postur[ed] …
his body to their Art” (133), and that he instructed them to “freely use
their art, cut, and search to the bottome” (130, emphasis mine). Placed in
intimate contact with his surgeons, Sidney becomes their “friend”: “But if
they should now neglect their Art, and renew torments in the declination
of nature, their ignorance, or over-tenderness would prove a kind of tyr-
anny to their friend, and consequently a blemish to their reverend science”
(131). Greville’s own friendship with Sidney allows him access to Sidney’s
interiority—his thoughts, desires, and secrets—and the surgeons’ friendship
with Sidney allows them access to his body. Sidney’s command to “search
to the bottom” mirrors Greville’s own desire to access and explore Sidney’s
exemplary interiority. The depth of his material body is a metaphor for his
psychological depth, here imagined as his “spirit” and explored through the
prayers and confessions he engages in before death. This interiority—what
is at “the bottome” of Sidney—is imagined as located deep in his body, as
is the bullet that wounds him. Greville returns to the “piercing” nature
of “art” when he distinguishes Sidney’s thoughts regarding mortality from
“artificial probabilities” and from those of “erring artificers”:

Shortly after, when the chirurgeons came to dress him, he acquainted

them with these piercing intelligences between him and his mortality, which
though they opposed by authority of books, paralleling of accidents, and
176 S. HARLAN

other artificial probabilities, yet moved they no alteration in this man who
judged too truly of his own estate, and from more certain grounds than
the vanity of opinion in erring artificers could possibly pierce into. (134–35,
emphasis mine)

He distinguishes between artificers, or the artificial, and the “art” that

the surgeons—and Greville himself—practice. Greville’s use of the word
“art” in reference to surgery differs from a contemporary understanding
of the term; it comes from the Latin ars, which denotes the practice of a
specialized skill or trade. Thus the art of surgery becomes akin to the art of
biography as its own specialized skill or ars. Joan Rees notes in her biogra-
phy of Greville that, “… there is, in fact, more detail in Greville’s account
of the weeks when Sidney lay dying than there is for any other period in
Sidney’s life …”146 It is in dwelling on Sidney’s wounding and death that
Greville is able to make Sidney signify, to imbue him with meaning. Greville
can only access Sidney’s “spirit” (136) or “soul” (138) via his body:

Here the first mover stayed the motions in every man, by staying himself.
Whether to give rest to that frail wounded flesh of his, unable to bear the
bent of eternity so much affected, any longer; or whether to abstract that
spirit more inwardly, and by chewing as it were the cudd of mediation, to
imprint those excellent images in his soul; who can judge but God? (136)

Despite Sidney’s deathbed confessions, prayers, inquiries into “the

immortality of the soul” (137), and acceptance of his “brother-hood in
Christ,” (137) he is not subject to God but rather subject to Greville and to
Greville’s desire to see that which is “inward.” Greville identifies the prob-
ing doctors not so much with the process of healing as with the process of
exposure. They are most closely identified with Greville’s own project of
bio-penetration.
Although the doctors fail to heal the ailing Sidney, Greville establishes
Sidney himself as a nurturing and healing figure. The “water bottle” story,
as it is often called, has become the most famous anecdote of Greville’s
narrative. Sidney’s later biographers consistently return to this story. This
moment is itself a spoil, extracted from Greville’s text as the most repre-
sentative of Sidney’s character or self. Wounded, bleeding profusely, and
“forced” from the field by his “choleric” horse (129), Sidney calls for
water but then hesitates:

but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor Souldier carried
along, who had eaten his last at the same Feast, gastly casting up his eyes
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 177

at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he
drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, Thy necessity is
yet greater than mine. And when he has pledged this poor souldier, he was
presently carried to Arnheim. (130–31)

By giving the water to the dying soldier, Sidney echoes his earlier action
of giving up his thigh armor. In both cases, he is identified with a chiv-
alrous tendency to embrace lack—of water and proper protection—as a
means of self-effacement. Paradoxically, Greville uses these moments in
order to underscore Sidney’s goodness, generosity, and bravery. These
various absences render Sidney more powerfully present. In asserting his
status as equal to, or the same as, all that surround him, Sidney sets himself
apart and renders himself as object worthy of veneration, emulation, and
memorializing.
Greville’s focus on military trophies at the end of the chapter returns
his reader to the questions of the role of armor in memorializing. Of
an offer by the “States of Zealand” (144) to bury Sidney’s body at the
expense of their government, Greville asks his reader to engage in an act of
imaginative construction: “Which request had it been granted, the Reader
may please to consider, what Trophies it is likely they would have erected
over him, for posterity to admire, and what inscriptions would have been
devised for eternizing his memory” (144–45).147 Stallybrass and Jones
remind us of the power of clothes in early modern Europe to act as “mate-
rial memories” and “memories of identity itself.”148 The hypothetical and
unrealized trophies over Sidney’s grave would celebrate his military prow-
ess and cast him as a victor rather than a victim. This particular public
celebration of Sidney, and the trophies to which Greville alludes, never
materialize, but his biography takes their place in “eternizing [Sidney’s]
memory.” Greville cannot produce a public memorial of such magnitude,
but he possesses the “good will of a private, and inferior friend” (145).
Like Lant’s Roll, Greville’s absent trophies would establish Sidney as an
ambivalent figure: both spoil and triumphator. They would provide a
means of reckoning with his death by casting it as a Christian victory over
death and attainment of immortality. This process of attaining immortal-
ity is likened to the process of memorializing; the former is dependent on
the latter. The trophies aid in “eternizing” the memory of Sidney and also
Sidney himself. These memorials are thus backwards-looking—insofar as
they encourage memory—and forwards-looking to the promises of the
Kingdom of Heaven. But questions of nationalism resurface here. The
“States of Zeeland” want to keep Sidney’s body and to bury him in what
178 S. HARLAN

Spenser referred to as “forreine soyle” in his elegy. Greville’s hypotheti-

cal scenario presents an alternative to Sidney’s very English funeral that
must ultimately be rejected. Having fought with foreign troops in a for-
eign land, Sidney must be returned to England; he is his own trophy. For
Greville, a type of militant biography controls memory and mourning.
Before he dies, Hamlet asks Horatio to “tell my story” (5.2.378). Both
Hamlet and Greville’s Life ask who has the power to control narratives and
what place such narratives will play in mourning and memorializing lost
subjects. Of course, Hamlet the play becomes Hamlet’s story and memo-
rial: as Hamlet mourned his father, so the play ultimately remembers, and
mourns, Hamlet. Greville’s text is also a memorial. In the final moments
of the chapter, Greville turns his attention back to his biographical proj-
ect, asserting that he has failed to accomplish his goal. He writes, “I must
therefore content my selfe with this poor demonstration of homage; and
so proceed to say somewhat of the toyes, or Pamphlets, which I inscribe to
his memory, as monuments of true affection between us; whereof (you see)
death hath no power” (145). The text becomes a monument to Sidney,
a trophy in and of itself. The other memorials to Sidney—the absent tro-
phies—recall Sidney’s absent thigh armor and, in this moment, are also
displaced so that biography might perform its cultural work. Greville’s
Life helps to inaugurate the trophy’s replacement by text.

NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas (Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press,
2001), 2.
2. See Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1936), 42, for more on drama as a form of
monument. See also Anne Barton’s Introduction to Hamlet, ed.
T.J.B. Spencer (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 54.
3. Patricia Phillippy has argued that, “During the Reformation, the relation-
ship of the living to the dead underwent radical changes that influenced
not only liturgical and doctrinal approaches to the afterlife but also affec-
tive responses to the fact of death. Medieval piety emphasized the continu-
ity between life and death built upon the professed efficacy of intercessory
prayers to influence the location of the dead in the immortal topography
of hell, purgatory and haven … In the wake of the Reformation, however,
the outlawing of prayers and masses for the dead and dissolution of the
concept of purgatory virtually redefined the relationship of the living to
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 179

the dead and resulted in a widespread sense of powerlessness on the part

of the bereaved to influence the fate of their departed and anxiety
about facing the suddenly final sentence of the deathbed.” The “refor-
mation of affect” that she identifies had important implications for the
gendering of mourning. See Phillippy, Women, Death, and Literature
in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 8–9.
4. G.W. Pigman argues that praise is an important part of the early modern
elegiac mode (which classical and early modern writers consider branch
of epideictic rhetoric). See Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). He also notes of the
tendency to idealize the departed subject that, “Idealization is a defense
against the feelings of ambivalence which accompany most relation-
ships, and it is very difficult to recognize ambivalence, much less to
tolerate it” (46).
5. Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes Towards Death: from the Middle Ages to
the Present, trans. Patricia M.  Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1974), 66.
6. They also argue that, “The material survival of armor asserts the contin-
ued presence of an absence body or line of bodies and of their martial
status. Sometimes, the armor will be activated by, and in tun wtll acti-
vate, another body—the father’s heir, for instance. Sometimes, it was
hung up in the church as a memorial” (251). This question of lineage
and inheritance is, of course, important in a play so concerned with
political succession. For a discussion of clothing vis-à-vis questions of
ghosts and memory, see Chap. 10 “Of ghosts and garments: the materi-
ality of memory on the Renaissance stage.”
7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7.
8. Derrida understands the Ghost as a figure that haunts the present, some-
thing that emblematizes both repetition and first time (10). Harris posits
instead that, “But a theory of untimely matter that seeks to understand
how the past persists in and works through present objects might wish to
resist Derrida’s persistent characterization of the untimely as a ghostly
revenant. Latour’s toolbox, Serres’s automobile, and Shapin’s keyboard
are hardly ‘haunted’ by the specters of the past. How, one might then
ask, is the past alive in the matter of the present—in a way that doesn’t
assume its life to be merely spectral?” See Harris, 12.
9. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to
Yeats (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), 20.
10. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
(London: Reaktion Books), 20.
180 S. HARLAN

11. Ibid.
12. Michael Serres, Statues (Paris, Francois Bourin, 1987), 111. Latour bor-
rows this language in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine
Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
13. See Michael Neill, Issues of Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 36.
14. As Jonathan Dollimore notes, “The preoccupation with death probably
always involved problems of identity, but in the early modern period
they became more acute.” See Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in
Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 84.
15. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. J.P.  Hardy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 94.
16. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 19.
17. Sacks, 8–12. Swiss and Kent remind us that elegy was “dominant literary
form for expressing grief” (14) and that what constituted appropriate
expressions of grief was informed by wars “as emotionally devastating as
they were physically destructive” (13). Pigman defines elegy as “an
abbreviated process of mourning” (45).
18. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to
Heaney (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3.
19. See Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 11. John Hollander attends to the metrical form of the
elegy in Visions and Resonance (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1975), 200 and 268.
20. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard refer to “Mourning and
Melancholia” as a “specimen text.” See After Oedipus (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1993), 19. Freud’s well-known formulation is as follows: “The test-
ing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires
forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to
this object. Against the demand a struggle of course arises—it may be
universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido-position,
not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. This struggle can
be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being
clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis. The nor-
mal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its
behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried through bit by
bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time
the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one
of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is
brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from
it accomplished” (“Mourning and Melancholia,” in John Rickman, ed. A
General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud [New York: Anchor
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 181

Books, 1989], 125–26. See also Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
21. In his chapter entitled “The Art of Mourning,” George W.  McClure
notes of Italian consolation literature that, “The importance of this
Renaissance tradition lies not merely in its form but also in its content.
These writings articulate some significant cultural these and sensibilities
in Renaissance thought, as the consolatory genre was a forum for experi-
menting with certain emotions and for formulating certain ideas. First
and foremost, these writings represent a vital part of the humanist explo-
ration of the emotional world.” McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in
Italian Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 106.
22. For a survey of scholarship on the cultural position of grief in post-
Reformation England, see the Introduction to Speaking Grief in English
Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Margo Swiss and David
A. Kent (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002). Citing the
work of Heather Dubrow, Swiss and Kent note that, “In the most gen-
eral sense, bereavement signifies being ‘deprived’ (New Shorter Oxford
Dictionary), while grief is the reaction to the loss of what is valued.
Occasions for sorrow were to be found everywhere in early modern
England” (7). See also Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of
Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
23. Kay, Dennis. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to
Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 67.
24. For a more detailed discussion of ritual and the conventions of elegy, see
Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws
in Mourning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), particularly
Chap. 3: “The English Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context.” She notes
that, “Like ritual, elegies are sociable, uniting communities disrupted by
death, promoting civic values or negotiating loyalties and allegiances
within smaller societies” (2).
25. Margaret P.  Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 199), 59.
26. In 1954, John Buxton wrote rather colorfully that, “Needless to say, a
majority of the elegies on Sidney are pedestrian copies of verses equally
lacking in merit and biographical information. The quantity of them is
remarkable, and the quality, more often than not, despicable: it is a weary
task to plod through acres of muddy bucolics, to look across oceans of
tears that, unlike those of Crashaw’s Magdalene, are neither portable nor
compendious, or to flick over the pages of the classical dictionary in a vain
attempt to detect some point in yet another comparison.” See Buxton, Sir
182 S. HARLAN

Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London: MacMillan & Co

Ltd., 1954), 175.
27. Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their
Contexts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1991), 179.
28. Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England
(Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 53.
29. Sidney’s identity as soldier was a crucial part of his mythology. As Raphael
Falco reminds us, “The first volumes of elegies published by Oxford and
Cambridge in 1587, as well as the numerous commemorative verses of
the early 1590s, tended to characterize Sidney chiefly as a patron and a
soldier, and only incidentally as a poet” (1). See Falco, “Spenser’s
‘Astrophel’ and the Formation of Elizabethan Literary Genealogy,”
Modern Philology 91.1 (August 1993): pp. 1–25.
30. All citations from “Astrophel” are taken from The Yale Edition of the
Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand,
Ronald Bond, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
31. Gavin Alexander refers to the elegy as “… not all that well-judged.
Borrowing form Bion via Ronsard, Spenser aligns Sidney with Adonis,
both killed by a wound to the thigh. This requires hunting of animals to
be brought allegorically close to the war in the Low Countries, so that
Astrophel is depicted trapping huge quantities of wild beasts and then
slaughtering them, only to be brought low by an unexpected tusk. Only
the allegory thinks these beasts are men; Astrophel believes himself to be
a real shepherd and the beasts to be real beasts.” See Alexander, Writing
After Sidney: the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 70.
32. Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, Renaissance Women
Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke (New York: Penguin, 2000), 50. Katharine
Goodland reminds us that, “Women’s roles as caretakers of the body,
interpreters of the meaning of death, and embodiments of the commu-
nal memory were believed to harmonize human experience within the
cycles of nature and otherworldly power.” See Goodland, Female
Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 9.
33. Alan Stewart, Sir Philip Sidney: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), 320.
34. Celeste Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the
Elegy,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 (Spring 1986): 13–27.
Juliana Schiesari examines how male suffering has been culturally
“accredited” as melancholia whereas female suffering and grief have
been understood as “hysteria.” See Schenck, The Gendering of
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 183

Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in

Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Louise Fraudenberg calls for a “political reading” of the elegy and
attends to the “elegiac misogyny” that attempts to distance loss and
femininity. See Fraudenberg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in
Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2 (March 1990): 184.
35. Melissa Zieger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing
Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 11.
36. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics 7:4 (Winter 1977), 66.
37. Culler, 68.
38. Clarke, 50–3.
39. This moment also resonates with the old soldier in Henry V’s St. Crispin’s
Day speech, whose scars are imagined as wounds in the moment of nar-
rating the battle (as I will discuss in the next interlude).
40. Marjory Lang notes that that tears are “ultimately mysterious.” See Lang,
Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), 2.
41. All quotations from The Phoenix Nest elegies are taken from Sir Philip
Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989).
42. For more on early modern passions, see Reading the Early Modern
Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster,
Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
43. See Notes in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Duncan-Jones, 408.
44. See Appendix in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Duncan-Jones, 313.
45. See George Whetstone, Sir Philip Sidney (London, 1587).
46. May, 179.
47. Malcolm William Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1915), 388.
48. Most scholars of Lant’s Roll use the terms “scroll” and “roll” inter-
changeably, but “rolls” were generally a lesser version of the scroll. They
were used in early modern Europe for administrative documents, includ-
ing legal agreements, inventories, and accounts. Unlike scrolls, informa-
tion was generally written latitudinally, and rolls were frequently shorter
than scrolls. The scroll, like the codex, was a Roman invention; it was
used for scholarly texts, records, and political documents. In early mod-
ern England, scrolls were reserved for important documents. See Sander
Bos, Marianne Lange-Meyers, and Jeanine Six, “Sidney’s Funeral
Portrayed,” in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed.
Jan Van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (Leiden:
Leiden University Press, 1986).
184 S. HARLAN

49. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge and London: the Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 286.
50. Beard’s is the most recent work on the subject. See also Anthony Miller’s
Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture; Robert Payne’s
The Roman Triumph (London: R.  Hale, 1962); Andrew Martindale’s
The Triumphs of Caesar in the Collection of HM the Queen at Hampton
Court, esp. Chap. 4; H.S.  Versnel’s Triumphus: An Inquiry into the
Origin, Development, and Meaning of the Roman Triumph (Leiden:
E.J.  Brill, 1970); Michael McCormick’s Eternal Victory: Triumphal
Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jerome Carpocino’s
Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the
Empire, trans. E.O.  Lorimer (New York: Penguin, 1991); Richard
Jenkyns, ed., The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992). For the impact of the triumph on early modern
royal entries, see Roy Strong: “While the royal entry in the north entered
its most complex phase in the fifteenth century, it remained within the
mainstream of medieval tradition. But in Italy it took a quite different
direction. By the close of the fourteenth century, under the impact of
early humanism, there had already developed an appreciation of the clas-
sical triumph whose essence lay … in the procession itself, which was
developed into a highly symbolic vehicle” (Art and Power: Renaissance
Festivals 1450–1650 [Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1973], 44). For more
on the impact of the Roman triumph on early modern English culture,
see also Europa Triumphans, ed. J.R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly,
and Margaret Shewring (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004)
and Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity
(New York: Blackwell, 1988).
51. Beard, 1. She asserts that, “Most modern accounts of the ceremony
stress the militaristic jingoism of the occasion, its sometimes brutish cel-
ebration of conquest and imperialism. It is cast as a ritual which, through-
out the history of Rome, asserted and reasserted the power of the Roman
war machine and the humiliation of the conquered … But I shall argue
that the very ceremony which glorified military victory and the values
underpinning that victory also provided a context within which those
values could be discussed and challenged” (2). She further notes that
such triumphs were celebrated more than 300 times over the approxi-
mately 1000-year history of the ancient city of Rome. Harriet Flower
also notes that the Roman military triumph and state funeral were closely
related cultural practices. War veterans often marched in funerals parades
“as they had done in earlier triumphs,” which added to the “military
atmosphere” of state funerals. See Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic
Power in Roman Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 101.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 185

52. Quoted in Carnicelli, 55.

53. See The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke,
ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
54. Petrarch, Francis. Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Frances Petrarcke, ed.
D.D. Carnicelli (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 38.
55. Carnicelli, 46.
56. Carnicelli, 117.
57. Carnicelli, 119.
58. Carnicelli, 13
59. Carnicelli, 118 and 141.
60. Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs, 35.
61. William Ian Miller notes that, “Violence is understood to be disordering
and hence disruptive of established boundaries and established orders.”
See Miller, Humiliation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1993), 74.
62. Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death
Ritual c. 1500-c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books and the Victoria and
Albert Museum, 1991), 60. Llewellyn further maintains that, “The nat-
ural body, treated by the embalmer or perhaps even buried already, was
no longer the object of attention. Top families organized heraldic funer-
als entirely on the basis of rank to deny the challenge to the continuity
of the social body. In such cases, individuality, in the sense of personality
or character, was of little significance: the funeral commemorated the
person who had filled a certain rank” (60). Conversely, in his 1631 text
Ancient Funerall Monuments, John Weever asserted that funerals are
intended to distinguish people despite the bleak indifference of death.
See Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (London, 1631), 11. On “the
ideological importance of aristocratic funerals in feudal and Renaissance
England,” (19) see Ronald Strickland, “Pageantry and Poetry as
Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity in Sir Philip Sidney’s Funeral,”
ELH 57.1 (Spring, 1990) and Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living
in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002). On Queen Elizabeth’s use of the power of pageantry, see
David Bergeron’s English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (Columbia, SC:
The University of South Carolina Press, 1971).
63. Bos, Lange, and Six, 50.
64. As Boas, Lange and Six note, “It would not be so strange … to suppose
that Sidney’s funeral may not have been entirely free of propagandistic
purposes. Those in Leicester’s circle would certainly have been impressed
with the necessity of ensuring Elizabeth’s continued, and preferably
increased, support for the Dutch cause, and they were surely conscious
of the fact that the death of the popular Sidney and the magnificent
186 S. HARLAN

funeral ensuing could only serve to focus attention on the cause for
which he had given his life, and add weight to their plea” (51).
65. Frederick S. Boas, Sir Philip Sidney, Representative Elizabethan (London:
Staples Press, 1955), 188–89.
66. Quoted in Neill, 285. See also Neill on the triumph over death: “The
funeral procession itself helped to confirm those intimations, since while
it was structured as a demonstration of earthly order, its narrative move-
ment simultaneously mimicked the very teleological process that would
ultimately sweep this order away for ever: and against the elaborate
parading of degree so essential to its processional design, it set the level-
ing anonymity of mourning blacks, symbolically confounding the metic-
ulous hierarchy of costume enshrined in what Keith Thomas has called
‘the vestimentary system.’ Indeed the emotional power of the heraldic
funeral depended on its ability to contain, within its ceremonial enact-
ment of triumph over Death, the ominous lineaments of a triumph of
Death, so that Samuel Purchas could describe Queen Elizabeth’s funeral
as the spectacle of ‘Death riding in triumph on that wonder to men, and
miracle of women, our gracious Deborah’” (284).
67. On Violence, ed. Bruce B.  Lawrence and Aisha Karim (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007), 12.
68. See Neill’s argument that, “the funeral procession should constitute, in
effect, a kind of heraldic biography” (272). He refers to Chap. 27 of
William Segar’s Honor Military, and Civill.
69. Miller, Roman Triumphs, 5.
70. See the excellent multimedia project http://michaelharrison.ws/sidney/
for the entire scroll.
71. Harrington notes that these may be proofs. The Brown roll contains an
additional 41 or 42 numbered images not present in the British Library
set of plates, which is available on Early English Books Online.
72. For all contextual and biographical information, see Boas, Lange and
Six, 42.
73. Boas, Lange, and Six, 38. Lea’s list is also reprinted there.
74. Carpocino, 9.
75. Strickland argues the scroll’s use of translation indicates that Lant
intended the text to reach a broad audience: “On the one hand, the deci-
sion to address an audience unskilled in Latin was not an inevitable
choice—each of the universities, for example, published Latin-only col-
lections of elegies on Sidney. By including an English translation, Lant
situated his book in a discursive space more nearly centered between the
city and the universities, and between the merchant class and the aristoc-
racy, than the university collections” (27).
76. Frederick S. Boas, Sir Philip Sidney: Representative Elizabethan (London:
Staples Press Limited, 1955), 133.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 187

77. Mona Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950),
276.
78. John Stow, Annals or a generall Chronicle of England (London, 1631),
739.
79. Harding, 6.
80. Bergeron, 3–4. As many critics have noted, drama in early modern
England was not limited to the stage. It had a place in court and in the
streets of London. Stephen Orgel refers to court masques as “spectacles”
of the state designed to present “the triumph of an aristocratic commu-
nity” and to perpetuate the illusion or “image of the monarch.” See
Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: The University of California
Press, 1975), 40 and 42.
81. Karen Newman, “The Politics of Spectacle: La Pellegrina and the
Intermezzi of 1589,” MLN 101.1 (1986): 110.
82. Bergeron, 61.
83. Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens:
The University of Georgia Press, 1985), 127. Gordon Kipling also
attends to the extent to which Elizabethans viewed such civic pageants
as military triumphs in the tradition of the Caesar. See Kipling,
“Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry,” Renaissance
Drama 8 (1977): 38–9.
84. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English
Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73.
85. Goldberg, 74.
86. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New
York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 348.
87. Derek Keene, “Material London in Time and Space,” in Material
London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 55.
88. Keene, 62.
89. Strickland, 23.
90. As Harding notes, the experience of the onlooker (and what they could
see) depended on their position. She writes that, “The early modern
funeral, Catholic and Protestant, was a performance with concentric
circles of participation. Those who attended a funeral had a role both as
actor and as audience; some of the careful variations of service and
accoutrements could only be appreciated by those close enough to
observe them, while the ensemble of procession and attendance diffused
a message to a wider circle of onlookers” (235). This may certainly have
been the case with some of these objects.
91. Music is often associated with war in early modern English texts. In Much
Ado About Nothing (1588–89), Benedict says disdainfully of Claudio
that, “I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and
188 S. HARLAN

the fife; and now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe” (2.3.13–5).
Benedict also characterizes Claudio’s change in terms of clothing: “I have
known, when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see a good armor;
and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new dou-
blet” (2.3.16–8). Claudio has become a lover rather than a fighter: he is
a figure characterized by a preference for civilian music over the music of
marching bands and a taste for doublets over armor.
92. In her study of the Renaissance Florentine funeral, Sharon T. Strocchia
notes that “the trappings of chivalry and of the military profession”
struggled with representations of material wealth for precedence in these
lavish spectacles. See Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992),
153.
93. Of the “trace,” Engel notes that it refers not only to an artistic process
whereby one covers “the original and, guided by the bolder marks that
are still visible, [copies] anew the contours of the image or object one
desires to reproduce,” but also to “what is left behind an element (usu-
ally a radioactive one) as it decays—as it passes, little by little, into
another, and into a new state. This process of decay identifies the ele-
ment’s current presence and also delivers the image of its former states,
back to its point of origin—at least to one who sees the identifying ves-
tiges and recognizes its characteristic (though disintegrating) signature.”
See Engel, Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy
in Early Modern England (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts
Press, 1995), 12. This idea resonates with Harris’ discussion of palimp-
sests as traces that emblematize a complex temporality (see the
Introduction to Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare).
94. Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450
(London: Robert Hale, 1991), 111.
95. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf,
1981), 172. Of the position of the coffin in early modern funeral proces-
sions, Harding notes that, “The corpse and its accompaniment formed
the focus of the procession, perhaps two-thirds of the way back; honour
graded downwards in either direction. Placement in the funeral proces-
sion was crucial” (249).
96. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 147.
97. Lant records the number of people who participated in the funeral, as well
as noting the size of particular groups. John Stow also recorded the num-
bers of participants, how many people of particular class or rank were in
attendance, etc. Indeed, sections of Stow’s account of Sidney’s funeral
read much like the scroll appears; Stow’s list is seemingly endless.
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 189

98. Boas, Lange, and Six, 46.

99. It was customary to mount such sequential engravings on calico in imita-
tion of a frieze. See Sidney Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in
England (London: The British Museum, 1905), 39.
100. John Aubrey, Brief Lives (London, 1975), 280. This encounter is also
quoted in a letter of R. Brown to his employer, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–
1820). This letter is bound with Banks’ copy of Lant’s Roll in the British
Library.
101. Llewellyn, 65.
102. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974),
85–6, for how linearity binds writing to traditional notions of temporality.
103. See Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production,
ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (New York and
London: Routledge, 1997), 3. I am influenced by their twin arguments
“that material forms regulate and structure culture and those who are
the agents or subjects of culture; and … [that] new technologies redefine
and resituate, rather than replace, earlier technologies” (1). The editors
attend to the relationship between the Judaic scroll and the Christian
codex: “Christianity deliberately cut into the Judaic scroll to create a
discontinuous practice of reading. The story of the sacrifice of Isaac
would thus be read less in terms of its proximate narratives in Genesis
than as a prefiguration of the ‘Son’s’ crucifixion, the book’s technology
allowing for the rapid superimposition of the later narrative upon the
earlier” (3).
104. Roger Chartier discusses the physical involvement a reader must have
with a scroll in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences
from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995). He notes that the scroll required the use of both hands so that
reading required a “very full physical participation” (19).
105. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill
(London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 15.
106. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1983), 26.
107. Foucault, Pipe, 19.
108. B.H. Newdigate notes that, “… there seems to be no attempt to indi-
vidualize [the] features [of the mourners].” See Newdigate, “Mourners
at Sir Philip Sidney’s Funeral,” Notes and Queries 180.23 (1941): 399.
109. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image-Music-Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 26–7.
110. See Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane
E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
190 S. HARLAN

111. George Stanitzek, “Texts and Paratexts in Media,” Critical Inquiry 32.1
(2005): 32. On non-linguistic elements of a text and whether typeface
falls under this heading, see Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). McGann argues that,
“The text/paratext distinction as formulated in Seuils [Paratexts] will
not, by Genette’s own admission, explore such matters as ink, typeface,
paper, and various other phenomena which are crucial to the under-
standing of textuality. These fall outside his concerns because such tex-
tual features are not linguistic. But of course all texts, like all other things
human, are embodied phenomena, and the body of the text is not exclu-
sively linguistic” (13).
112. Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon
Press, 1907), 3. Hereafter cited in the text.
113. Gavin Alexander, “Sidney’s Interruptions,” Studies in Philology 98.2
(Spring 2001): 184–204, 185.
114. Thomas Wilson, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Peter E.  Medine
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 4.
115. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter (London and New  York:
Routledge, 1994), 3.
116. See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
117. Cicero, De Amicitia, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1923), 133.
118. Francis Bacon, “On Friendship,” in Essays, ed. John Pitcher (New York:
Penguin, 1985), 144.
119. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J.M.  Cohen (New York: Penguin
Books, 1958), 97.
120. Bacon, 144.
121. Ibid.
122. Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998), 15.
123. Springer notes that this armored body could be a means by which the
knight identified with Christ. However, this model opposes the classical
“ideology of masculinity based on a normative ideal of symmetry, auton-
omy, and closure”: “Through its inscriptions and iconography this
armour invokes the image of the sacred body and expresses an identifica-
tion with Christ that implies not the completion and perfection of the
human form but the prospect of its sacrifice and ultimate transcendence
… In this armor, the icon of the classical body is broken; the athlete-hero
becomes a passionate victim who aspires not to mastery but to martyr-
dom” (37). Sidney’s body is precisely this kind of victimized body; it is
his lack of “closure” that largely defines his wounding and death. See
also Zimmerman on the post-Reformation “ideological contestation”
(26) of the corpse vis-a-via Christ’s redeemed body and anxieties of the
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 191

human body as relic or idol, particularly Chap. 2: “Body Imaging and

Religious Reform: The Corpse as Idol.”
124. Plutarch, Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden and
ed. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, 1992).
125. See Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers
in the Middle Ages (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 91.
126. Ephesians 6:13–17, emphasis mine.
127. Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20.
128. He invokes the question of observing, in the sense of watching, several
times throughout the text, as when he writes, “For my own part, I
observed, honoured, and loved him so much …” (3). Jonathan Crary
distinguishes the spectator from the observer: “Most dictionaries make
little semantic distinction between the words ‘observer’ and ‘spectator,’
and common usage usually renders them effectively synonymous …
Unlike spectare, the Latin root for ‘spectator,’ the root for ‘observe’ does
not literally mean ‘to look at’ … observare means ‘to conform one’s
action, to comply with,’ as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and
practice. Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more impor-
tantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is
embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.” See Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 6. Sidney does indeed adhere to
the “conventions and limitations” of chivalry in the removal of his thigh
armor, an action that in turn allows Greville to undertake his biographi-
cal “office,” which has its own conventions and limitations. Both activi-
ties require observation in the sense of compliance. To read Greville as
an observing figure is crucial to understanding his fixation on Sidney’s
absent thigh armor and his resulting wound.
129. Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip
Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 161.
130. Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten, 166.
131. For more on this tradition and the rituals associated with it, see Chap. 2
of Aries, Western Attitudes Towards Death. See also Chap. 7 of Ralph
Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Houlbrooke explains that, “The
Christian form of the ideal of the ‘good death’, rooted in the Middle
Ages, survived throughout early modern times. It included certain
elements which transcended confessional and denominational boundar-
ies. The deathbed was seen as the supreme trial of faith. A successful
outcome, or what appeared to be one, was widely interpreted as an indi-
cation of the individual’s eternal fate. It left a good example to survivors,
192 S. HARLAN

reconciled them to their loss, and strengthened their own Christian

belief” (183).
132. Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten, 167.
133. Richard C. McCoy notes that later accounts of Sidney’s death, such as
Greville’s, became increasingly “romantically chivalric.” See McCoy, The
Rites of Knighthood (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1989),
76. McCoy provides an account of the evolution of chivalry from war-
fare to the courtly symbolism of warfare in the sixteenth century. For an
outline of the development of chivalry in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, see de Somogyi’s Shakespeare’s Theatre of War. Other
important texts on chivalry include Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the
Middle Ages (London: E.  Arnold, 1952); Arthur B.  Ferguson, The
Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington D.C.: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1986) and The Indian Summer of English Chivalry
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960); Richard Barber, The
Knight and Chivalry (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1995); Malcolm
Vale, War and Chivalry: War and Aristocratic Culture in England,
France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (London: Duckworth,
1981); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984); Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael
Jones (New York: Blackwell, 1986); and Sydney Anglo, Chivalry in the
Renaissance (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 1990).
134. As Falco notes, “There is a great deal of speculation as to whether Sidney
was a modern tactician or an outmoded grandstander as governor of
Flushing, where he received his fatal wound” (56). He cites the three
explanations outlined by John Buxton: “Sir John Smythe says that
Sidney was following a new Continental fashion of dispensing with heavy
armour to allow greater mobility. Thomas Moffett says that Sidney was
hastening to the rescue of Lord Willoughby de Eresby whom he saw
beset by the enemy, and had no time to put on his cuisses. Fulke Greville
says that Sidney saw Sir William Pelham riding into action without his
thigh armor and, since he disdained to go into battle better armed than
Lord Marshal, discarded his own” (56). See also Buxton, “The Mourning
for Sidney,” Renaissance Studies 3 (1989), 46.
135. John Gouws, “Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville’s Account of Sidney’s
Last Days,” in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, 68.
136. Gouws, 69.
137. Gouws, 66. The lines from the psalm that Gouws believes apply to
Sidney’s situation are as follows:

But mercy, Lord, let mercy thine descend,

For I am weak, and in my weakness languish;
 SPOILING SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: MOURNING AND MILITARY VIOLENCE… 193

Lord, help, for even my bones their marrow spend

With cruel anguish.
Nay, even my soul fell troubles do appal;
Alas, how long, God, wilt thou delay me?
Turn thee, sweet Lord, ad from this ugly fall
My dear God, stay me.
Mercy, O mercy, Lord, for mercy’s sake,
For death doth kill the witness of thy glory:
Can of thy praise the tongues entombed make
A heavenly story?

138. Seth Weiner, “Sidney’s Experimental Verse,” in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586
and the Creation of a Legend, 213.
139. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 298. The Du Plessis Mornay song is as
follows:

Since nature’s works be good, and death doth serve

As nature’s work, why should we fear to die?
Since fear is vain, but when it may preserve,
Why should we fear that which we cannot fly?
Fear is more pain than the pain it fears,
Disarming human minds of native might;
While each conceit an ugly figure bears,
Which were not ill, well viewed in reason’s light.
Our owly eyes, which dimmed with passions be.
And scarce discern the dawn of coming day,
Let them be cleared, and now begin to see:
Our life is but a step in dusty way.
Then let us hold the bliss of peaceful mind;
Since this we feel, great loss we cannot find.

140. Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in

Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan
Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 40.
141. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1979), 24 and 15.
142. Quilligan, 22.
143. See the opening stanza of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas
P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1978):
194 S. HARLAN

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

…Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
…Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
…The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde;
…Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
…His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
…As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
…Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. (lines 1–9)

144. P.E. Russell argues of Don Quixote’s own removal of his thigh armor
that, “… ‘quijote’ in Spanish means ‘thigh armor’, i.e. the piece of
armour that protects the leg from knee to thigh; this would immediately
be understood as a displacement image for the male sexual organ; the
knight, therefore, baptizes himself in a sexual way …” See Russell, Notes
and Queries 29 (1982), 545–6. By suggesting that Sidney is a second,
tragic Don Quixote, Greville appropriates a figure central to Spain’s lit-
erary heritage for his own (absolutely English) purposes. In other words,
in his narrative of England’s war with Spain, he claims a Spanish text as
a literary spoil of war.
145. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic
Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: The University of California Press,
1986), esp. 91–119.
146. Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554–1628: A Critical Biography
(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1971), 62–3.
147. However, Lant’s Roll indicates that representatives of Holland and
Zeeland were present at the funeral. Thomas Zouch cites a letter to
Philip of Spain from Don Bernardine de Mendoza that reads, “the States
of Holland earnestly petitioned to have the honour of burying [Sidney’s]
body at the national expense.” See Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and
Writings of Sir Philip Sidney (York, 1808), 284. George Whetstone also
mentions this offer in a 1587 poem (in Sir Philip Sidney, his Honorable
Life, his Valiant Death, and True Vertues (London, 1587, repr. as Frondes
Caducae, ed. A. Boswell, 1816), I. Several sources indicate that Queen
Elizabeth took on the expenses for the funeral, such as Anthony Wood’s
Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1691, I, 184), but the text of Lant’s Roll
indicates that Sir Francis Walsingham, Sidney’s father-in-law, paid for the
funeral. The text reads that Sidney was “interred by the appointment of
the right honourable Sir Francis Walsingham Knight … Who spared not
any coste,” and Bos, Lange, and Six argue that this was most likely the
case (49).
148. Jones and Stallybrass, 2.
 Interlude–Scatter’d Men: Mutilated
Male Bodies and Conflicting Narratives
of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare’s
Henry V

In Act 4 of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), the king gives his notorious

command to kill the French soldiers:

But, hark! what new alarum is this same?

The French have reinforced their scatter’d men:
Then every soldier kill his prisoners:
Give the word through. (4.6.35–38)

As John Sutherland and Cedric Watts note, “… there is sharp edito-

rial disagreement as to whether, following Henry’s order, the slaughter of
prisoners takes place on stage or off.”1 If this act of violence is performed
for the theatrical audience, the offstage “scatter’d” French troops produce
a gruesome onstage tableau of other “scatter’d” corpses. Although Henry
imagines the French army as “scatter’d” whole bodies, a reference to troop
formations, the term also suggests a more macabre understanding of how
Agincourt scatters men. In fact, Henry V displays a marked preoccupation
with dismembered and fragmented bodies throughout, and this preoccu-
pation becomes a means by which the text negotiates complex understand-
ings of performance, nationalism, and military violence. The fragments
that haunt Henry V also anticipate the Roman plays’ anxieties regarding
broken male bodies. At the beginning of Act 3, as the king rallies his

© The Author(s) 2016 195

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_5
196 S. HARLAN

troops unto the breach, he imagines a face that has been divided into its
composite parts:

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide. (3.1.9–15)

These rag-tag combatants are “eye,” “head,” “brow,” “teeth,” and

“nostril”—not the constructed, whole, armored body of the classical epic
tradition.2 By dividing the soldier’s body into its composite parts, the king
rhetorically arms his yeoman army: the soldier’s eyes are transformed into
brass cannons, and his head, a ship from which a cannon protrudes. They
become no less than “you noble English,/Whose blood if fet from fathers
of war-proof” (3.1.17–18). This reference to “war-proof” suggests that
that English army is legitimated by way of their fathers’ own participation
in combat. Masculine militancy is assured by the passage of time; it must
have a history. The soldiers’ strength and impenetrability have been tested
as armor is tested with a “proof mark,” or the dent of a bullet. And by
analogizing the soldiers’ fathers to an antique past—these figures are “like
so many Alexanders” (3.1.19)—the king invents a distant past and forges a
connection to it, suggesting that his soldiers’ lineage is regal and militant.
The ability to fight need not be learned; it flows in their veins.
Jonathan Baldo notes that memory in Henry V is “the larger, moveable
battlefield to which King Henry, England, and Elizabeth, England’s last
Tudor monarch, were repeatedly called to arms. Collective memory is an
extension of the kinds of power and even the brutality exercised in war.”3
Perhaps surprisingly given the early modern English stage’s fondness for
staging dismembering bodies, the dismembered bodies in Henry V are
rhetorical rather than actual.4 They are also sometimes comic, a phenom-
enon that directs our attention to the military conflict between England
and France as an exercise in “mocking,” to use the king’s term in Act 1,
and operates as an emblem for the play’s generic hybridity, which culmi-
nates in its romantic–comedic ending. But these broken bodies are also
the means by which two conflicting narratives of militant nostalgia in Act
4—Williams’ horrific vision of a recomposed, soldierly ghost of the Day of
Judgment and the king’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, in which he imagines a
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 197

soldierly host at future feasts that celebrate the victory—understand how

this war will be understood in the future.5 If the Epilogue is retrospectively
anxious about performatively “mangling” the past (Epilogue, 4), Williams
and the king ask the theatrical audience to consider the relationship
between national memories of war and mangled men. The play envisions
the dismantling of the corporeal body—not the prosthetic, or armorial,
body, as will largely be the case in Shakespeare’s Roman plays—and this
body cannot be recomposed. The rhetorically dismembered bodies of
Henry V thus raise compelling questions about whether Agincourt will
produce trophies that will operate as material memories of conquest and
victory.6
The relentless division of the English soldier’s body begins in the first
Choral speech, when he commands his audience to imagine one player
to represent many: “Into a thousand parts divide one man” (1.0.26). In
response to Gary Taylor’s argument that “The passage must mean ‘Suppose
each man represents a thousand,’” Baldo argues that, “Shakespeare’s figure
suggest diminution, not magnification.”7 The soldiers are likewise figured
as “the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt” (1.0.13–4):
helmets that anticipate the “four or five most vile and ragged foils” that
the Chorus bemoans at the beginning of Act 4 (4.0.50). This play cannot
represent combat to his satisfaction, but it engages what participation in
a battle can do to soldiers by linguistically breaking apart, or spoiling, the
male combatant’s body. The Chorus is anxious that synecdoche may give
rise to comedy in the insufficient staging of battles. He also establishes
a relationship between the staging of parts—or a mockery of history by
performance—and the potential mockery of the play by the audience as
“ridiculous”:

And so our scene must to the battle fly;

Where—O for pity!—we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt. Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mockeries be. (4.0.48–53)

This request—or command—concerns the body of the actor, which is

transformed into “four or five most vile and ragged foils” that stand in for
the historical army. Margaret Owens reminds us that, “In the early mod-
ern theater, the actor’s body is never ‘the thing itself,’ a purely spectacu-
lar, material object, but is always constituted at some level by language,
198 S. HARLAN

most obviously by the dialogue that frames and conditions the audience’s
response.”8 The actors’ bodies are replaced here by “ragged foils,” and
the body-as-weapon resurfaces throughout the play, a dynamic that recalls
Dido’s relics of Aeneas at the end of Dido, Queen of Carthage: objects that
stand in for a subject.

MAKING ENGLISH LIMBS AND METTLE

The king’s speech to his troops at Harfleur assures the Englishness of
their “limbs” in a play whose Scottish, Irish, and Welsh captains com-
plicate understandings of a cohesive English national identity.9 Graham
Holderness reminds us that the representation of Englishness in the the-
ater is unique:

The theater is the ideal medium for the representation of such an image of
national union, where a part is held to symbolize the whole: since a small
group of characters can symbolize a nation as well as they can symbolize an
army, and indeed can claim to be both at once. But a theatre which draws
attention to the fabricated character of its own dramatic strategies can both
present social reconciliation, and disclose the artificial character of the unity
it enacts. While the spectator may be excited by the fighting camaraderie of
his heroic body of men, the play insistently reminds him or her that such
camaraderie on the battlefield can signify the unity of a nation only in a
strictly limited and temporary sense.10

The king invokes this synecdochal body in his attempt to construct this
“unity of a nation” at Harfleur. He addresses the “good yeoman” in the
singular, implicitly pulling the troops together as a group based on this
shared quality:

And you, good yeoman,

Who 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)

By underscoring his army’s legitimate, English paternity, he envisions the

body as a collection of “limbs” that stand in for a whole.11 This fragmentary
bodily genealogy of “limbs” mirrors Canterbury’s fragmentary rhetorical
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 199

one in support of the king’s invasion of France in Act 1. His speech is like-
wise a composite construction: a performance that brings together smat-
terings of texts into a lengthy whole that fails to cohere and that will allow
for the war that will produce Williams’ fragmented soldiers. The king’s
Englishing of the troops occurs not only on the level of the corporeal, but
also by forging a relationship between the human body and land. The “met-
tle of your pasture” refigures the yeoman as soldier; the farmer possesses
the “mettle” of the armed combatant. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, “mettle” was an alternate spelling of “metal,” which suggests a
relationship between a strong and courageous character (“mettle”) and a
material (“metal”) associated with strength. As Floyd-Wilson points out:

Just like iron, people with mettle are not easily kindled, and neither are they
easily extinguished. They do not ignite with every little spark, but when they
blaze with valor, they burn long and steadily, without the self-consumption
of gunpowder. While “courageous” might describe a person’s disposition,
“mettle” is not a tendency towards certain emotions. Mettle pertains instead
to the physiological property that determines the initiation, experience, and
duration of an impassioned state.12

She argues that in Henry V, this English mettle contrasts with the
phlegmatic disposition of the dull and lethargic French Constable and
Dauphin, who admire—and are shocked by—their adversaries’ fiery states;
indeed, the Constable asks, “Where have they this mettle?” (3.5.15).13
The king situates this “mettle” not only in the body, but also in the land
of England. The English forces are fed by it, and so they have what he
calls in Act 4 “stomach to this fight” (4.3.35), yet another synecdoche.
Of course, the king’s insistence that the limbs of his army were “made
in England” is immediately challenged by the appearance of MacMorris,
Jamy, and Fluellen, anachronistic figures who also underscore the play’s
complex negotiation of militant nostalgia.14
Although in his speech to his troops at Harfleur, the king sees the
English soldier’s body as defined by “the mettle of his pasture,” at the
beginning of Act 2, the Chorus details another way that militant bodies
are constructed:

Now all the youth of England are on fire,

And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies.
Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man. (2.0.1–4)
200 S. HARLAN

Here, the soldier is reduced to a “breast,” which suggests not only

a corporeal breast, but the prosthetic breast of an armorial breastplate.
The “youth of England are on fire,” an image that invokes the forging of
militant bodies. The armorers “thrive” as a result of their labor—they are
active, living, and breathing in contrast to the passive, effeminate “silken
dalliance” that must be cast aside in time of war—and the soldiers do, as
well. “Honour’s thought” is embodied in the “breast” of the armored
body. (This shift away from “silken dalliance” also suggests a change of
scene: the court is replaced by the battlefield.) This understanding of war
as a costume change reappears at the beginning of Act 4:

Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs

Piercing the night’s dull ear; and from the tents
The armourers accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Gives dreadful note of preparation. (4.0.10–4)

In both of these instances, the Chorus attends to military prepara-

tions: the completing or finishing (“accomplishing”) the body of the
English soldier.15 This moment brings to mind Marcellus’ narrative of
Denmark’s preparations for Fortinbras’ impending invasion in Hamlet.
The production of “implements of war” is shadowy and secretive, and in a
play in which time is “out of joint,” (1.5.196) this labor joins day to night:

Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows.

Why this strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
What might be toward this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day,
Who is’t that can inform me? (1.1.73–82)

The Ghost’s armored body renders time disjointed; he represents the

prehistory of these militant labors (his encounter with Old Norway) and
their result (the impending invasion of Fortinbras). His spectral body
coheres. In Henry V, the “accomplishing” of the knights strives to gener-
ate a whole militarized body that will not be “scatter’d.” When employed
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 201

in reference to clothing, “accomplishing” suggests the action of fitting out

or equipping, but it also means more broadly “to bring to an end,” and so
there is a finality to this act of accomplishing; it anticipates the battle but is
also complete in itself. By virtue of their arming, these soldiers supposedly
become “knights”—a term that resonates with the representation of the
French forces as comically chivalric figures—but this knightly body fails to
materialize in the play.
In Act 3, Fluellen comically echoes the king’s speech to his troops at
Harfleur when he describes Bardolph as the combination of just so many
parts of a face: “His face is all bubuncles, and whelks, and knobs, and
flames o’ fire, and his lips blow at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, some-
times plue and sometimes red; but his nose is executed, and his fire’s out”
(3.6.101–05). In this premature elegy, Bardolph is reduced to a flaming
red nose, and then he himself is “cut off,” to use the king’s term—“We
would have all such offenders so cut off” (3.6.106)—a vision of execu-
tion that relies on the language of severing. Bardolph is also “cut off”
from the English army and from the king; his ties of alliance are bro-
ken. Lacking such an affiliation, which lends identity and legitimacy, his
life, too, must cease. In the home front space of Act 2, his flaming red
face is valued for its capacity to warm the dying Falstaff; it is a household
object. The Boy says, “Mine host Pistol, you must come to my master,
and you, hostess. He is very sick and would to bed. Good Bardolph, put
thy face between his sheets and do the office of a warming-pan. Faith,
he’s very ill” (2.1.81–5). In this scenario, he is part rather than whole,
and his face is transformed into something that may nurture the body
of another. Bardolph is not the only figure to be apprehended in parts.
We also learn that Pistol has a “manly heart” (2.3.3) and Nym, “vaunt-
ing veins,” (2.3.4) a pun that transforms “vein” in the sense of mood or
behavior to “vein” in the corporeal sense. In her affecting but nonetheless
comic reflections on Falstaff’s dying body, the Hostess recalls touching
his corpse as it lay in bed: she says, “So ‘a bade me lay more clothes on his
feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as
any stone. And then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all
was as cold as any stone” (2.3.21–5). Her bawdy quibble on “stone” and
“stones,” or testicles, echoes the obscene synecdoche of the Dauphin’s gift
of the tennis balls in Act 1, which the king transforms into “gun-stones”:

And tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his

Hath turned his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
202 S. HARLAN

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance

That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down,
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn. (1.2.282–89)

The corporeal body becomes a militant body, and the change of

“mock” from noun to verb enacts the war before it begins; this grammati-
cal shift is proleptic, quite literally transforming the object into an action
or a mode.16 Unlike the tragic handkerchief in Othello, an object to which
characters assign multiple and conflicting narratives as it circulates, the
king understands the tennis balls to possess only the militant meaning he
assigns them.17 To situate the origins of the war in failed comedy (or bad
joke) is to suggest that comedy is an important genre for treating national
history and war on the early modern English stage.18
The partial male body is also weaponized in the comic character of
Pistol.19 When he introduces himself to the king—“My name is Pistol
called” (4.1.63)—the king responds, “It suits well with your fierceness”
(4.1.64). The humor of 4.4, when Pistol encounters the French Soldier,
likewise depends on translation and mistranslation and on comedic threats
to cut up the human body, but in this scene violence is directed outward
and toward another human subject. To the French Soldier’s appeal for
pity—“Prenez misericorde! Ayez pitie de moi!” (4.4.12)—Pistol responds,
“Moy shall not serve, I will have forty moys,/Or I will fetch thy rim out
at thy throat/In drops of crimson blood” (4.4.13–15). This threat to
shove his hand down the French Soldier’s throat and pull out his internal
organs—or the rim of the belly—is only the first of several. Moments later,
he says to the Boy, “Bid him prepare, for I will cut his throat” (4.4.32).
The captured soldier converts Pistol’s body into pieces, and Pistol con-
verts these French pieces into English words, as Katherine did in her
English lesson.20 Pistol translates the Soldier’s question,“Est-il impossible
d’echapper la force de ton bras?” as, “Brass, cur!/Thou damned and luxuri-
ous mountain goat,/Offer’st me brass?” (4.4.16–20). As a figure for his
capacity to inflict physical pain, Pistol’s “bras,” or arm, stands in for his
whole body. He is all arm, reduced to an emblem of masculine agency,
militancy, and labor. His mistranslation of the term “bras” as “brass” refig-
ures the French Soldier’s appeal as an insult (a bribe), which legitimates
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 203

any violent retaliation he might undertake. But this scene controls its
potential violence. Ultimately, the French soldier falls to his knees and
thanks Pistol for his “mercy” (4.4.64), thus redirecting the audience’s
attention, or gaze, from his potentially cut throat to his knees, yet another
joint.
The French military leaders also rhetorically break apart the bod-
ies of English soldiers. In 3.7, the Dauphin says of his horse, “Would I
were able to load him with his desert! Will it never be day? I will trot to-
morrow a mile, and my way shall be paved with English faces,” to which
the Constable replies, “I will not say so, for fear I should be faced out
of my way: but I would it were morning; for I would fain be about the
ears of the English” (3.7.79–84). Here, he rejects the Dauphin’s brag,
converting it into a vision of a beating: “I would fain be about the ears of
the English.” The Dauphin’s reference to English faces recalls Bardolph’s
face and becomes an opportunity for a pun on military prowess—“to face
out.” As with the Dauphin’s material “mock” of the Paris balls, noun
becomes verb, object prefigures military action. The French disdainfully
invoke numerous other English body parts: Orleans says of the English
soldiers that, “… if their heads had any intellectual armour they could
never wear such heavy headpieces” (3.7.137–9). Grandpre’s line “Big
Mars seems bankrupt in their beggared host/And faintly though a rusty
beaver peeps” (4.2.41–2) reduces this emblem of masculine militancy to
a “rusty beaver,” thus recalling the first Choral speech’s reference to “…
the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt” (1.0.13–4). And
Grandpre recalls Nym’s “vaunting veins” with his assertion that, “There
is not work enough for all our hands,/Scarce blood enough in all their
sickly veins/To give each naked curtle-axe a stain …” (4.2.18–20). Even
the English jades are broken apart—they are heads, hides, hips, eyes,
mouths: “… their poor jades/Lob down their heads, drooping the hides
and hips,/The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes,/And in their
palled dull mouths, the gimbaled bit/Lies foul with chewed grass, still
and motionless” (4.2.45–9). The Dauphin exclaims of their own horses:
“Mount them, and make incision in their hides,/That their hot blood
may spin in English eyes …” (4.2.8–9). Unlike the captured French sol-
dier, whose engagement with a language of fragmentation is somewhat
unwitting, the witty banter of the French points to the physical effects of
combat on the male body, effects that will be imagined in another affective
register by Williams.
204 S. HARLAN

CONFLICTING NARRATIVES OF MILITANT NOSTALGIA

Ultimately, the dismembered body plays an important role in the play’s
fraught treatment of national memory as these body parts suggest an
engagement with the iconography of trophies and spoils. Henry V’s dark-
est and most troubling meditation on the mutilated male body comes from
Williams on the eve of the battle, and the king’s vision of the returned
soldier’s body in his St. Crispin’s Day speech is best understood in rela-
tionship to this dissenting voice. Both Williams and the king understand
memory in an anticipatory manner: they look to the future and to when
the war is concluded, considering how it will be remembered. Williams’
speech to the disguised king is not only a challenge to monarchical author-
ity and the right of the king to obligate his subjects to die in battle, but
also a powerful critique of the militant nostalgia upon which understand-
ings of nationhood are predicated. He envisions a spoiled and recomposed
body, but it is not an illustrious memorial. Rather, this haunting construction
is patched together from limbs that were “chopped off in battle”:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to
make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall
join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some
swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I
am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they chari-
tably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men
do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it;
whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

Although Williams looks to the future in imagining this construction,

the construction himself is a memorial one: he looks to the past, mourn-
ing what is lost. This dismembered soldierly body belongs neither to the
present nor to the immediate future, but to a distant future. It rises up at
the Day of Judgment to offer a non-narrative—a banal, communal death
stripped of heroism: “We died at such a place.” Whether severed limbs
would in fact rise from the dead on the Day of Judgment was an important
question from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the promise of reas-
semblage and wholeness might redeem the horrors of life. But Williams’
figure offers no such redemption. He narrates only death at “such a place”:
not a historically significant battlefield, but a place that does not even war-
rant description. His “we” is not the king’s “band of brothers,” (4.3.60)
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 205

but a nameless, faceless “we,” a composite positioned outside of national,

sanctioned systems of memorializing and set free to roam like an accusatory
vengeful ghost, “Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter
for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion
of subjection” (4.1.143–46). His plural here—“these men”—underscores
the transformation of men in combat into a grotesque and deformed body,
a hybrid construction that obliterates individual identity. As a distorted
figure comprised of the bodies of many unknown soldiers, this recomposed
soldier is an animated trophy, a spoil of war capable of haunting and curs-
ing. It is a failed trophy as it fails to memorialize Agincourt in a manner
than would enshrine it in a glorious national past.
Williams’ narrative stands in stark opposition to the King’s prolep-
tic vision in his St. Crispin’s Day speech. He imagines not a reanimated
corpse, but an old soldier who will celebrate the battle as a holiday in
perpetuity, assuring the transmission of approved, heroic narratives of war
from one generation to the next: “This story shall the good man teach
his son …” (4.3.56). This “story” is both the impending battle, in the
context of the play, and the play itself, in the context of the moment of its
performance. Before the battle, the King insists on the survival of his men;
their reduction to ghostly trophies is not a possibility. His future is not
Williams’ future, as it exists in the lifetime of his soldiers:

This day is called the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show
his scars, And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ (4.3.40–48)

In this scene, the soldier’s wounded body has healed, leaving only a
scar to prove one’s status as combatant and to assure one’s entrance into
the sanctioned national and communal memory of military conflict that
the play both performs and critiques.21 Indeed, Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day
speech is not so much about the battle itself as about remembering the
battle in the future.22 In the moment of narrating the significance of his
scars, the old soldier’s “scars” become “wounds” again, and the body
bleeds figuratively, bringing the past into the present in a controlled man-
ner and assuring the fame of the narrator.23 This model of temporality
206 S. HARLAN

stands in opposition to Williams’, for unlike the haunting trophy, the old
soldier participates in what Nick de Somogyi calls the “folklore of military
afterlife.”24 The victory of the English army is a foregone conclusion in
the St. Crispin’s day speech, as of course it is in the moment of the play’s
performance.25 And the soldier’s body is preserved rather than broken into
so many pieces. “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day” recalls Williams’
“We died at such a place,” shifting from a concrete yet geographically and
ideologically undefined place of death to the symbolic realm of holiday.
The old soldier’s memory may distort the past through exaggeration—
“He’ll remember with advantages/What feats he did that day …”—but he
need not fear distortion himself.
However, his acknowledgment in the St. Crispin’s Day speech that “Old
men forget; yet all shall be forgot …” (4.3.49) reveals an anxiety regarding
threats to memory, both personal and communal. The returned soldier
must not forget, but nor should he remember the suffering that Williams’
composite, ghostly soldier narrates: “… some swearing, some crying for
a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the
debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left” (4.1.138–41). This
is not an acceptable mode of militant nostalgia for the king. In respond-
ing to Montjoy before Agincourt, the king imagines his soldiers’ future
“fame” in vastly different terms. He envisions a landscape of decomposing
corpses that brings to mind Williams’ haunting vision:

I pray thee bear my former answer back:

Bid them achieve me and sell my bones.
Good God, why should they mock poor fellows thus?
The man that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast lived, was killed with hunting him.
A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves, upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work.
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed, for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven,
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France. (4.3.90–103)

Communal memory is assured here not by stories told by an old,

returned soldier at future holiday feasts, but by the “brass” panels affixed to
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 207

the headstones of dead soldiers. The soldier’s body is reduced to “bones,”

but it remains nonetheless perpetually “reeking,” a rotting corpse that
turns France into a boundless and teeming graveyard. The king’s curse
resonates with Williams’, as does his macabre language of memento mori.
He invokes “bones” in reference both to himself and to his troops. In the
first instance—“Bid them achieve me and sell my bones”—he prematurely
reduces himself to relics that will circulate in the future. Walsham notes
that, “Durability and resistance to decay are frequently defining features of
the relic: in medieval Europe the incorruptibility of a corpse was regarded
as a certain sign of sanctity and a seal of divine approbation.”26 But this
durability and resistance to decay is not extended to his troops, who will
“leave their valiant bones in France.” The king thus engages two modes
of militant nostalgia: the narrative (“Then will he strip his sleeve and show
his scars,/And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day …”’) and the
material: his body as relic and his soldiers’ marked graves. This final vision
of himself as bodily fragment is itself nostalgic, invoking as it does a pre-
Reformation saintly body. But the king’s transformation of himself into
a relic also strives to displace Williams’ vision of dismemberment and to
control how the body narrates the nation’s past military conflicts.

NOTES
1. This command has been the source of much confusion. Sutherland and
Watts remind us that, “Henry cannot have known at the point at which he
ordered the massacre of prisoners that the French cavalry were acting
simultaneously in such an unchivalrous fashion some miles to his rear. No
messenger has brought him the news—at least not that we know of. It was
motives of military prudence, not condign reprisal, that led him to give
the fell command, ‘Then every soldier kill his prisoners’” (113). The king
gives the command again at the beginning of the next scene, in response
to the killing of the boys (113–14), raising further questions not only
about motive, but about just how many bodies may be “scatter’d” across
the stage. See Sutherland and Watts, Henry V, War Criminal? & Other
Shakespearean Puzzles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108–16.
2. As R. Scott Fraser has argued: “In the Folio, the ambiguity surrounding
Henry’s claims is ironically reinforced by the Salic law speech—the only
justification for the war in the play. Given that this is uttered by Canterbury,
whose motives are now clear to us, we must immediately question its
veracity. Its very length and complexity assures that we hear it as duplicity
masquerading as truth.” See Fraser, “Henry V and the Performance of
208 S. HARLAN

War,” Shakespeare and War, ed. Ros King and Paul J.C.M.  Franssen
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 71–83, 74.
3. Jonathan Baldo, “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2
(Summer, 1996), 132–59, 133. Margaret Owens reminds us that, “In its
unflinching and graphic acknowledgment that human bodies constitute the
stages or props of political action, the history play worked to demystify the
discursive codes through which early modern England sought to naturalize
or even disavow its own tyranny of the body.” See Owens, Stages of
Dismemberment: the fragmented body in late medieval and early modern
drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 185.
4. Shakespeare’s spectacularly violent play Titus Andronicus from the late
1580s or early 1590s stages an enormous number of severed body parts as
a means of engaging with the classical tradition. Leonard Tennenhouse
reads Lavinia’s mutilated body “as synecdoche and emblem of the disor-
der of things” and further notes that, “What Shakespeare does stage, then,
is the fact of dismemberment as a highly self-conscious revision of classical
materials … The mutilation of Lavinia’s body simply reinstates her father’s
murder of his own son, the decapitation of her two brothers, her father’s
self-inflicted amputation, his dicing up of the emperor’s step-sons for their
mother’s consumption, and all the slicing, dicing, copping, and lopping
that heaps bodies upon the stage in Titus Andronicus.” See Tennenhouse,
“Playing and Power,” Staging the Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and
Peter Stallybrass (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 27–56,
32–3.
5. Kamps argues that Shakespeare is concerned as much with “character” as
“great men” in his late history plays, including Henry V and Henry VIII.
And in the case of Henry V, Williams is an important part of this phenom-
enon: “… in Henry V Shakespeare decides to give us a king who, his
ingenious manipulations and rhetorical brilliance to the contrary, is ulti-
mately incapable of transcending history, and all that entails. On the eve
of the battle of Agincourt, Henry V is unequivocally pulled down into that
history by the soldier Williams, and afterwards the King is unable to con-
ceive of himself as either God’s agent (à la Richard II) or as the crafty poli-
tician capable of transcending history’s material and ideological conditions
at will” (93).
6. Many critics have commented on the play’s negotiation of multiple genres,
as well on its dramatic shifts in tone. It is a history play that ends like a
comedy, with a scene of wooing and the promise of marriage, and it con-
tains a multitude of comic characters, from captains to common soldiers
to the clownish French. Certainly these comic figures ask us to question
what the play understands the formal features of an English history play to
be, as well as its ideological and historiographical position. Phyllis Rackin
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 209

outlines that, “In a very important sense, anachronism is built into the
entire project of history-making, since the historian always constructs the
past in retrospect, imposing the shapes of contemporary interests and
desires on the relics of a former age. Historiographical texts, however,
tend to restrain this anachronism, for they are written in the past tense,
that is, in a form that enforces the temporal separation between past his-
torical events and present historiographic representation. The texts of his-
tory plays, by contrast, are much less stable. Generic hybrids, they conflate
the absent past of historical representation with the embodied present of
dramatic performance.” See Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English
Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 94–5. I am also influ-
enced by her argument that in the history plays, “Shakespeare’s anachro-
nisms generally function as tokens of debasement” (104) and that these
plays are fundamentally driven by nostalgia; see Chap. 3: “Anachronism
and Nostalgia,” 86–145. As Nagel and Wood note of anachronism, “The
power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered
nor invented in the Renaissance. What was distinctive about the European
Renaissance, so called, was its apprehensiveness about the temporal insta-
bility of the artwork, and its re-creation of the artwork as an occasion for
reflection on that instability. The work of art ‘anachronizes,’ from the
Greek anachronizein, built from ana-, and “again,” and the verb chro-
nizein, ‘to be late or belated.’ To anachronize is to be belated again, to
linger. The work is late, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-
presents, and then late again when that re-presentation is repeated for
successive recipients” (13).
7. Jonathan Baldo, “‘Into a thousand parts’: Representing the Nation in
‘Henry V,’” English Literary Renaissance 38.1 (2008): 55–82, 69.
8. Owens, 16.
9. As David J. Baker argues, “The several British nationalisms that find an
often ambiguous articulation in Henry V trouble any sense of sturdy
Englishness the play might promote, and even disrupt … the exultant
rhetoric of England’s ideal king.” See Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare,
Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 24–25. Graham Holderness writes that, “… the emotion of
patriotism and the politics of nationalism always involve, in any given his-
torical situation, attachment to a particular sectional group, or class, or
‘team’, or army, which can be seen as bearing or leading the national des-
tiny. At the same time in every historical situation there is a larger, more
pluralistic and multiple, more complex and contradictory national collec-
tive which any sectarian nationalistic ideology must ignore, deny, or sup-
press. The most natural context for this operation to be successfully
conducted is that of war …” See Holderness, “‘What Ish My Nation?’:
210 S. HARLAN

Shakespeare and National Identities,” Materialist Shakespeare: A History,

ed. Ivo Kamps (New York and London: Verso, 1995), 218–38, 231. With
regards to the body, Maurice Hunt reminds us of the transformation by
Tudor writers of “the Pauline body of Christ into a metaphor for the ideal
nation state” and the subsequent fascination with the dismembered body
as emblematic of fracturing within the body politic. See Hunt,
“Dismemberment, Corporeal Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in
‘Cymbeline,’” Studies in Philology 99.4 (2002): 404–31, 405. And
Katherine Attie points out that the analogy between the body natural and
the body politic was such a pervasive and familiar trope by the early seven-
teenth century as to be almost a “dead metaphor” (497). See Attie,
“Re-membering the Body Politic: Hobbes and the Construction of Civic
Immortality,” ELH 75.3 (2008): 497–530. See also Sawday, who writes of
complex understandings of the Renaissance body that, “… the body had
always been available as a rich source of metaphors with which to describe
systems of government which were long held to be both organic (and hence
natural) and hierarchical. No longer was this the case. The easy familiarity
with which early-modern political commentators could point to the body
(mediated, it is true, by St Paul’s more communitarian model) as a demon-
stration of monarchical authority was now open to question” (29).
10. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), 154.
11. Claire McEachern notes that the nation was often personified in early
modern England and argues that, “Perhaps the most evident personifica-
tion of the coincidence of hegemony and collectivity is that of ‘Britian’
constructed in the four persons of Captains Fluellen, Gower, Jamy, and
Macmorris. The four parts of Britain have unified in a fight against the
greater evil of France; individual wills and Britain’s traditional regional
feuding are subsumed to greater purpose within a fantasy of national
(male) bondedness.” See McEachern, “Henry V and the Paradox of the
Body Politic,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps, 292–
319, 302.
12. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” in Reading the Early Modern
Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, ed. Gail Kern Paster,
Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: The University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 132.
13. Ibid., 136.
14. On the “unhistorical” uniting of the different domains of Britain into one
army, see Andrew Gurr’s introduction to Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 4.
15. I have explored the play’s broader treatment of military preparation in
“Militant Prologues, Memory, and Models of Masculinity in Shakespeare’s
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 211

Henry V and Troilus and Cressida,” in Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression

in Early Modern Texts (New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
16. Henri Bergson grounds the comic in the relationship between humans
and things. He writes: “The first point to which attention should be called
is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.
A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and
ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only
because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You
may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the
piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,—the human
caprice whose mould it has assumed.” See Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on
the Meaning of the Comic (Le rire, 1911), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and
Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1921), 3. He also asserts that, “We
laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing” (58).
17. The glove also traps Fluellen and Williams in conflicts that threaten to give
rise to actual physical violence. Eventually, the king’s mercy takes the form
of crowns that fill Williams’ glove and transform it into a prosthetic sev-
ered body part, allowing for the evasion of physical violence and a comic
conclusion to the scene that underscores forgiveness. The glove was a
particularly powerful object in early modern Europe in terms of its rela-
tionship to the human body. As Stallybrass and Jones note in an essay
dedicated to the accessory: “… detachable parts—rings, jewels, gloves, for
instance—continued to trouble the conceptual opposition of person and
thing, even as the concept of the fetish was forged to formalize such an
opposition. Gloves … not only materialized status, ‘gentling’ the hand of
the gentry, but also functioned as what [William] Pietz calls ‘external
organs of the body,’ organs that could be transferred from beloved to
lover, from monarch to subject, from master to servant. They this materi-
alized the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and
of things to become persons” (116). See Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing
the Glove in Renaissance Europe” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001):
114–32.
18. Lynn Hunt attends to how attention to the partial links the comic to
understandings of historiography: “… the comic is not necessarily the
pleasant, or at least it is the pleasant snatched from the horrible by artifice
and with acute self-consciousness and humility. In comedy, the happy end-
ing is contrived. Thus, a comic stance toward doing history is aware of
contrivance, of risk. A comic stance knows that there is, in actuality, no
ending (happy or otherwise)—that doing history is, for the historian, tell-
ing a story that could be told in another way. For this reason, a comic
stance welcomes voices hithertofore left outside, not to absorb or mute
them but to allow them to object and contradict. Its goal is the pluralistic,
212 S. HARLAN

not the total. It embraces the partial as partial.” See Hunt, The New
Cultural History: Studies on the History of Society and Culture (Oakland:
The University of California Press, 1989), 22. Caroline Walker Bynum
also suggests that, “Historians, like the fishes of the sea, regurgitate frag-
ments. Only supernatural power can reassemble fragments so completely
that no particle of them is lost, or miraculously” Bynum, Fragmentation
and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval
Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 14.
19. As Teague notes, “A property strongly associated with a particular character
may actually substitute for that character on occasion” (73).
20. The English lesson is a comic exercise in self-dismemberment in which
Katherine unknowingly translates her body into weapons. As T.W. Craik
reminds us in his edition of the play, her incorrect pronunciation of
“elbow” transforms the word into “bilbow,” (3.4.26) a type of sword
from Bilbow, Spain, her “arm” is “arma” in the Quarto edition, and her
“nails” become, in one instance, “mails” (3.4.40). See Henry V, ed.
T.W. Craik (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). Marjorie Garber
notes that, “Male portraits of the period, especially in Holland, displayed
a hand on hip as a sign of cultural or military power. The same configura-
tions can be found in Dutch group of corporate portraits, where artfully
disposed limbs could produce a literalization of the ‘joint-stock company.’
Women, by contrast—unless they were monarchs of allegories—kept their
elbows to themselves.” See Garber, “Out of Joint,” The Body in Parts, 29.
As both elbow and sword, Katherine’s “bilbo” renders her unladylike,
even hermaphroditic, and places her in dialogue with a figuratively cas-
trated, or ball-less, Dauphin. The reduction of her body to a series of
weapons anticipates her status as prop in the final wooing scene of the
play, in which the king will claim her as his sexual and romantic spoil even
as he assures her that time “can do no more spoil upon my face” (5.2.228).
The term “spoil” recalls his threat at Harfleur—“We my as bootless spend
our vain command/Upon th’enraged soldiers in their spoil/And send
precepts to the leviathan/To come ashore” (3.3.24–27)—and transforms
it into comedic form. See also Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s discus-
sion of imagery of rape in the wooing scene in Engendering a Nation: A
feminist account of Shakespeare’s history plays (London and New  York:
Routledge, 1997), 196–99.
21. Elaine Scarry has argued that the wounded body is bound up in a complex
temporality: “Injuries-as-signs point both backward and forward in time. On
the one hand they make perpetually visible an activity that is past, and thus
have a memorialization function. On the other hand they refer forward to
the future to what has not yet occurred, and thus have an as-if function. This
might be called their ‘fiction-generating’ or ‘reality-conferring’ function, for
 INTERLUDE–SCATTER’D MEN: MUTILATED MALE BODIES… 213

they act as a source of apparent reality for what would otherwise be a tenuous
outcome, holding it firmly in place until the postwar world rebuilds that
world according to the blueprint sketchily specified by the war’s locus of vic-
tory. That this function entails fictitiousness does not mean that it entails
fraudulence: what it substantiates is not untrue: it is just not yet true.” See
Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 121.
22. As Donald Hedrick argues, “In stirring rhetoric of imagined community
(Anderson), Henry pictures Agincourt’s battle already done, from the
future perspective of the victory’s anniversary, now familiar to a
Shakespearean audience reflecting this community …” See Hedrick,
“Advantage, Affect, History, ‘Henry V’” PMLA 118 (2003), 470–87,
471. Philip West also argues that, “Shakespeare was interested not only in
the language of war, but in the way it is shaped by the aftermath and the
telling of stories about the events of war” (104). See West, “Early modern
war writing and the British Civil wars,” The Cambridge Companion to War
Writing, ed. Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 98–111.
23. Paster outlines the connection between blood and identity in early mod-
ern England: “Like other kinds of ideologically overdetermined signs,
blood in early modern England was a discursive site of multiple, compet-
ing even self-contradictory meanings and the relationship between blood
and the individual body containing it was no less ideological than physio-
logical. In one’s blood were carried the decisive attributes of one’s cultural
identity. See Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 66. Jennifer Feather has also
examined the cultural tensions surrounding blood, which was seen as sta-
ble—and dictating rank, culture, and identity—as well connected to
humoral ideas of bodily fluidity. See Feather, “‘O blood, blood, blood’:
Violence and Identity in Othello,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in
England 26 (2013): 240–63.
24. Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1998), 187.
25. Here, we see a relationship between historical time and theatrical time.
Drawing on the work of Husserl, Matthew D.  Wagner maintains that,
“The theatre provides a venue for ‘bracketing’ time … Husserl’s philoso-
phy helps remind us that clock time is not necessarily—or perhaps even at
all—‘real’ time, in spite of its prominence in our day-to-day lives … It
seems more appropriate to propose that temporally speaking, the theatre
places us between phenomenological and objective time. It provides us
with a sharpened awareness of both, by shuttling us back and forth between
each, and, most significantly, by not reconciling the one with the other or
214 S. HARLAN

explaining one in terms of the other” (17–18). See Wagner, Shakespeare,

Theatre, and Time (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).
26. Walsham, 9. Her definition of a relic reminds us that these objects con-
nected the living to the dead by fragmenting the body: “At the most basic
level, a relic is a material object that relates to a particular individual and/
or to events and places with which that individual was associated. Typically,
it is the body or fragment of the body of a deceased person, but it can also
be connected to living people who have acquired fame, recognition, and a
popular following. Alongside these corporeal relics (skulls, bones, blood,
teeth, hair, fingernails, and assorted lumps of flesh) are non-corporeal items
that were possessed by or came into direct contact with the individual in
question” (9). This play’s engagement with relics resonates with Dido’s
insistence on that term at the end of Dido, Queen of Carthage.
 CHAPTER 3

The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem

of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra,
and Coriolanus

REMEMBERING ROME, PERFORMING ROME

At the end of Book 12 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is described as “stetit acer
in armis” or “ferocious in his armor,” a colossal and threatening force, a
man prepared to meet Turnus in battle. In spite of his rage, aggression,
and readiness to fulfill his charge to found Rome, Aeneas finds himself
moved by Turnus’s plea for his life and hesitates to strike him down. It is
only when Aeneas notices a particular object—the “luckless belt of Pallas”
that hangs on Turnus’s shoulder—that he resolves to kill his antagonist.
Virgil describes this crucial belt as a “memorial of brutal grief” (L. monu-
menta doloris), a “spoil” (L. spoliis) or trophy, and an “emblem” or “sign”
(L. insigne) of Turnus’s past victory over Pallas.1 Aeneas recognizes the
belt instantly; the “familiar studs” flash in the sun as Aeneas flashes in his
full armor. His eyes “[drink] in this plunder,” and he demands of Turnus,
“How can you who wear the spoils of my dear comrade now escape me?”
The sight of this object transforms Aeneas into Pallas; it alters his subjec-
tivity and compels him to avenge Pallas’s death not as himself but rather
as the victim—as Pallas. Aeneas’s assertion that, “It is Pallas who strikes
…” points to the transformative power of this material object. This line
also underscores the belt’s power to construct and deconstruct subjects
and to confuse the boundaries between them. This spoil transforms a
present subject (Aeneas) into an absent subject (Pallas) associated with or

© The Author(s) 2016 215

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_6
216 S. HARLAN

embodied in the object or spoil in question and, in so doing, both renders

him present and reminds Aeneas, and the reader, of Pallas’s absence. The
spoil tells a story about “the boy/whom Turnus had defeated, wounded,
stretched/upon the battlefield, from whom he took/this fatal sign to wear
upon his back,” and this story—if not Pallas himself—is embodied in the
object. Vladimir Nabokov notes that, “When we concentrate on a mate-
rial object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our
involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.”2 Aeneas’s encoun-
ter with Pallas’s belt inspires this very process. The belt’s violent history
inspires “rage,” “wrath,” and an act of violence in the present moment.
Its history, or the narratives that subjects attach to it, is the source of its
destructive power and its power as a memorial. The “act of attention”
(emphasis mine) to which Nabokov alludes is active, but his image of
“sinking into” the history of an object is disturbingly passive: the subject
is overcome, or overwhelmed, by the act of concentration. His interest
in the “situation” of an object resonates with Shakespeare’s Plutarchan
Roman plays, which engage with what happens when an object’s “situa-
tion” changes—whether this situation is its physical location or its owner-
ship or both. Like Pallas’s belt, objects in these plays are indeed situated
in particular ways, and as these situations change, so too do the objects’
meanings.
This spoil is the source and justification of Aeneas’s violence, the only
reason the text provides for this act of cruelty and destruction that the
project of nation-building demands. It is thus a forward-looking object
that assures the creation of a new and glorious nation. But it also looks
backward; it is a memorial of Pallas and of Aeneas’s “brutal grief.” The
spoil marks both death and the bereaved subject’s response to death.
Like the military paraphernalia paraded in Sidney’s funeral, Pallas’s belt
encourages memory and mourning in response to a past death in battle.
Here, however, memory and mourning are transformed into violence. As
an object that memorializes and justifies violence, the belt of Pallas looks
backward and forward in a way that the epic itself does, but the past (and
the absent subject of Pallas) can only be accessed through the fragmentary
or the partial. Aeneas’s whole and present armored body legitimizes his
status as founder of Rome and conqueror. The reader cannot see a whole
Turnus as Aeneas himself cannot, for his fixation on the trophy is an exer-
cise in reduction and focus: he reduces the masculine body of war to an
accessory. The belt is “familiar” to Aeneas; he recognizes it instantly and,
from this part, constructs a whole: an absent, “luckless” Pallas for which
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 217

the “luckless” belt stands. In other words, Aeneas’s rage allows him to
conceive of a whole (Pallas) where there is only a part (the belt) and he,
in turn, must violate Turnus’s own wholeness, must indeed spoil him in
turn. The spoil of Pallas allows for the spoiling of Turnus’s own body, for
in narrating a past act of violence, the object necessitates present violence.
Rome’s history begins with a belt.
Pallas’s belt represents one entry in a violent Roman history—and early
modern English history—that is narrated by the objects of war, as I have
argued. In this chapter, I will maintain that the treatment of the military
subject in Shakespeare’s Roman plays complicates early modern cultural
understandings of the material aspects of militant nostalgia. As in Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine plays, armor figures prominently in Shakespeare’s plays as
both a nostalgic symbolic system and a material object that is manipulated
and worn by players engaged in the performance of the past. This perfor-
mance engages problems regarding the limitations of memory that figure
in Henry V, but in the case of the Plutarchan Roman plays, the past is even
more distant, and the connection between England and ancient Rome is
one of the many enabling fictions upon which the “imagined community”
of early modern English nationhood was founded.3 As Lina Perkins Wilder
notes, “Generally, early modern memory theory adheres to the Aristotelian
idea that memory has two ‘motions’: the retentive function (memoria or
mnesis) and the searching function, reminiscentia or anamnesis, which is
usually translated as ‘remembrance’ in early modern England.”4 Here, I
am interested in the latter and in the limits these plays stage regarding
remembering the antique past. Garrett A. Sullivan reminds us that,

Understood as the ‘Renaissance,’ this period experienced a rebirth predi-

cated on the rediscovery of ancient texts that had putatively been forgotten
in the middle ages; the recollection of classical texts was crucial not only to
the humanist project but to the intellectual self-definition of those schol-
ars engaged in it. Printed and circulated widely in the Renaissance, such
texts (in the terms of a classical commonplace that achieved currency in the
period) triumphed over oblivion by re-entering both memory and history.5

The antique past—and its militant subjects—was bound up in under-

standings of memory, in both the theater and beyond.
In Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, armor often secures the identity
of the militant subject who wears it, an effect that resonates with that of
Pallas’s belt. In Act 1 of Hamlet, Horatio informs the audience that the
218 S. HARLAN

Ghost of King Hamlet is dressed in “the very armour he had on/When

he the ambitious Norway combated” (Ham. 1.1.59–60). King Hamlet’s
armor is uncorrupted and unaffected by the passage of time. His armor is
not similar to the armor he wore in the past; it is the “very” same armor.
In Horatio’s recognition and memory of the king’s armor, he authenti-
cates the Ghost and renders his immateriality material.6 King Hamlet’s
armor belongs to a past that must be narrated by the characters, and these
narratives secure and prove his identity. Shakespearean armor is frequently
associated with the notion of “proof,” as in Richard II when Bullingbrook
speaks to Gaunt:

Oh thou, the earthly author of my blood,

Whose youthful spirit in me regenerate
Doth with a twofold vigour lift me up
To reach at victory above my head,
Add proof unto mine armour with thy prayers,
And with thy blessings steel my lance’s point. (R2 1.3.69–74)

As I discussed in Chap. 1, “proof” refers to the condition of an object

that has stood a test of its power or strength, which in turn proves, or
establishes the truth or validity of, its invulnerability. Gaunt’s prayers and
blessings “add proof” to Bullingbrook’s armor and regenerate his spirit
and self. In Bullingbrook’s case, the subject possesses the capacity to per-
fect the object; in the Roman plays, the object displaces the subject.
This chapter examines representations of the armored Roman military
subject’s body in Julius Caesar (c.1599), Antony and Cleopatra (c.1606–
07), and Coriolanus (c.1608) alongside illustrations of military trophies
that circulated in early modern Europe in order to assert that Shakespeare’s
Roman plays underscore the difficulty—indeed, the impossibility—of ade-
quately presenting the Roman subject to his early modern audience. These
plays are invested in a perceived Roman militant past, but they understand
this past as distant, inaccessible, and in some ways inauthentic. In Chap. 1,
I argued that the presentation, or display, of a constructed military self is
crucial to understanding Marlowe’s treatment of war and the figure of the
military leader. Here, I argue that Shakespeare inherits a partial and objecti-
fied Roman military figure linked to trophies and armor, and that this figure
negotiates the early modern English playgoer’s relationship to his glorious,
unattainable Roman past. I am interested in how the object of armor com-
plicates the early modern English subject’s access to this Roman figure and
to his past, a past that is understood and constructed in accordance with
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 219

the Renaissance ideals of rebirth of classical culture, art, and learning. I will
examine the treatment of the armored body and the trophy in these plays
against early modern pictorial representations of trophies in order to dem-
onstrate how Shakespeare engages with the problems inherent in England’s
“fashioning” of its Roman past through “fashion”—that is, through the
stage property and costume of armor. Ultimately, these three plays drama-
tize a nostalgic military figure that is built out of stage properties that fail
to hold together.
The term “Roman plays” was first introduced by M.W.  MacCallum
in 1910 to designate those Shakespeare plays that are based on Plutarch
(Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus). For MacCallum,
early modern English plays about Rome were part of “the drama of Roman
national history,”7 a classical genre called fabula praetexta or, as Clifford
Ronan translates, “story of the fringe[-robed upper-class Romans].”8
More recent critics have modified MacCallum’s definition of what con-
stitutes a “Roman play.”9 In 1961, Maurice Charney maintained that the
use of Roman dress was one criterion for designating a play “Roman.” He
argued that a play’s costumes were more important than other criteria such
as “the Roman praise of suicide as an act of moral courage and nobility”
and the common source material of Plutarch.10 For Charney, dress estab-
lishes what it means to be Roman or to perform Rome: “The most strik-
ing link between the Roman plays is the use of ‘Roman’ costume, which
conveys the sense of the Roman past in strong visual terms.”11 He further
maintained that such period costume “help[s] to create a Roman illu-
sion …”12 In other words, these plays present the Roman military subject
as a figure upon which questions regarding history and national identity
locate themselves. My readings of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra,
and Coriolanus are predicated on an understanding that Shakespeare’s
Roman plays—like much non-Shakespearean Roman theater of the six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries—negotiate a relationship between
the early modern English subject’s perceived Roman past and his or her
contemporary moment13. I suggest that the performance of this past is
a deeply fraught project that consistently draws attention to the limita-
tions of what can be claimed, or reclaimed, from the past. These plays
dramatize the early modern inheritance of a failed or objectified Roman
military subject linked to trophies and armor, as do the myriad images
of spoiled and reconstituted male bodies that circulated in early mod-
ern Europe. Ruptures in the body of the Roman military subject reflect
ruptures between past and present, complicating and problematizing the
values of the English Renaissance vis-à-vis its glorious Roman past.
220 S. HARLAN

THE TROPHY: DESTRUCTION, RECONSTITUTION,

AND ABSENCE

These plays all engage the divided, fragmented military subject as a site
for cultural anxieties about the transmission of moribund militant models.
Before turning to the dramatic treatment of this figure, I will examine how
the divided military subject was represented in the visual arts more broadly
in the sixteenth century. Walter Benjamin has the following to say about
military spoils:

All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them … Whoever has
emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in
which the present rulers set over those who are lying prostrate. According to
traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are
called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious
detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an
origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.14

His revulsion to these objects is acute; he is repelled by the violence

the object represents. However, his use of the term “surveys” suggests
a distance—temporal, physical, or emotional—on the part of the viewer.
He draws attention to several crucial characteristics of the spoil: its capac-
ity to alienate the viewer (one “views them with cautious detachment”),
its removal from its point of “origin,” its status as a “cultural treasure,”
and its capacity to embody—as Pallas’s belt did for Aeneas—the “horror”
of its acquisition and subsequent display. The spoil is alienating precisely
because it encourages one to revel in the violence it memorializes and glo-
rifies. The “cautious detachment” that Benjamin calls for stands in stark
opposition to the spoil’s intended use and the reactions it encourages.
The viewer’s “detachment” assures that he will not be implicated in the
violence for which the object stands and allows him to see the object as
origin-less, as free from the “horrors” that would necessarily attach them-
selves to it if one “contemplated” further. Anthony Miller maintains that
when armor and weaponry are claimed as spoils of war and displayed in tri-
umphs, these objects are “pacified into harmless ornaments.”15 Certainly,
these spoils are pacified insofar as they cannot, and do not, inflict physical
harm beyond the battlefield, but the display of such objects arguably
constitutes a type of violence in and of itself: a violence against the viewer.
The military spoil gives rise to “horror” in the viewer; the horrors it nar-
rates constitute a horror for the spectator that “surveys” it. To survey,
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 221

in the sense of inspect or scrutinize, the spoil of war is also to survey

something else: a nation’s history of conquest. Acquisition and display are
therefore forms of violence. For Benjamin, the origin of the object cannot
be effaced, despite one’s greatest efforts at emotional or ethical detachment.
It cannot be absolutely pacified.
I will focus on a particular type of military spoil here: the trophy.
The spoil becomes a “cultural treasure” in part because it is stolen—and
its value is derived from its status as stolen. This act of theft is a sanctioned
and accepted practice, but when spoiled objects are removed from the
battlefield, it undergoes transformations in appearance and significance.
Pallas’s belt signifies differently for Pallas, Aeneas, and Turnus. Aeneas
is driven to rage by Turnus’s possession of the belt. Turnus’s claiming of
Pallas’s belt does not constitute a departure from accepted behavior, but
the act of spoiling horrifies and enrages Aeneas nonetheless. The spoil of
war that Benjamin describes is an ambivalent and paradoxical object: it is
owned and stolen, exciting and numbing, a treasure and a horror. It is also
an aesthetic object, and it engaged visual artists in the sixteenth century—
and Shakespeare—as such.
Trophies were part of the everyday military iconography of early mod-
ern Europe. They were used in pageants and royal entrances, and they were
a common subject of illustrations. The sixth plate of Andrea Andreani’s
series of chiaroscuro woodcuts The Triumph of Caesar (1599) depicts the
parading of spoils of war (Fig. 3.1).
These prints were imitations, or reproductions, of Andrea Mantegna’s
series of ten painted canvases of Caesar’s triumph.16 This sixth plate depicts
the parading of spoils of war: the very scene that opens Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar. The triumphal images in Andreani’s woodcuts impress
the viewer with their otherness; one “surveys” them—to use Benjamin’s
term—at an emotional and historical distance. The woodcuts are tightly
framed, which creates a sense of proximity on the part of the viewer, who,
like the viewer-reader of Lant’s Roll, becomes a spectator to the proces-
sion. In the center of the image is a trophy composed of the arms and
armor of defeated men. A helmet stands aloft a tall pike, and a breastplate
and large shield form the body. A man dressed in civilian robes carries this
object, which looms high above the heads of the subjects who participate
in the triumph. Behind this central trophy are other trophies: one to the
left and three to the right of the image. Each object possesses essentially
the same form: a helmet and breastplate hung aloft a pike. In the lower,
right-hand corner of the woodcut, another man carries a trophy; he is
222 S. HARLAN

Fig. 3.1 Andrea Andreani after Andrea Mantegna, plate from The Triumph of
Caesar, 1599

hunched down, fatigued. He appears to be either resting the pike on the

ground or preparing to lift it; his crouched posture draws attention to the
substantial weight of these objects. To wear armor is one thing; to carry it
is entirely another. Here, the object overwhelms the subject that carries it.
The trophies are an example of what Michael Serres calls “quasi-objects”
and “quasi-subjects.”17 They cannot be comfortably accommodated by
the term “subject” or “object”; they occupy a middle ground wherein
their object-hood suggests the presence of a subject and simultaneously
underscores its absence. The figures that occupied these suits of armor are
likely dead; only shells remain. This object looks backward to the violence
of the battlefield and forward to the promise of peace. But peace—or the
absence of war—can only be represented by the absence of the subject.
The trophy underscores several important absences. First, it points
to the absence of the enemy’s body, which is most fully registered in
the elimination of the human face, in the empty helmet that stands aloft
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 223

these structures. This is what Derrida refers to as the “specter” or “this

non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or
departed one.”18 He invokes the appearance of the armored ghost of
King Hamlet as the prime example of the phenomenon he identifies as
the “helmet effect”:

For the helmet effect, it suffices that a visor be possible and that one play
with it. Even when it is raised, in fact, its possibility continues to signify
that someone, beneath the armor, can safely see without being seen or with-
out being identified. Even when it is raised, the visor remains, an available
resource and structure, solid and stable as armor, the armor that covers the
body from head to foot, the armor of which it is a part and to which it is
attached. This is what distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nev-
ertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia
of power: the power to see without being seen. The helmet effect is not
suspended when the visor is raised.19

The “helmet effect” is defined by the power to see “without being

seen or without being identified.” Of course, Foucault locates power in
this type of observation. He maintains that, “The exercise of discipline
presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an appa-
ratus in which the techniques that make is possible to see induce effects
of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on
whom they are applied clearly visible.”20 For Foucault, the Panopticon, or
“perfect disciplinary apparatus,”21 accomplishes what the Ghost’s armor
accomplishes: it protects the observer from the gaze of the observed, and
it controls the object of its gaze. In other words, the crucial element of
the “helmet effect” is its effect. King Hamlet’s gaze from beneath his hel-
met objectifies the observed (Prince Hamlet) and asserts his own status
as father, as disciplinary force. The power of the Ghost is an effect of his
military dress: he can see his audience (both onstage and offstage), but his
audience sees only his material body (the armor), not his spectral body.
Access to the spectral body is denied. Likewise, Andreani’s triumphal tro-
phies suggest the presence of a spectral body and remind one that the
subject’s corporeal body is absent. For the early modern English subject,
the trophy is a form of memento mori. It remembers, and reminds one of,
death. It also forces the viewer into submission. The “helmet effect” that
Derrida identifies implies a power relationship between the viewer and the
viewed. By forcing Hamlet to fixate on his armored body, the Ghost forces
him to look at something that he cannot truly see.
224 S. HARLAN

The trophy was a popular subject of early modern European ornamen-

tal prints. The ornamental print was a category of prints that could be used
by other artists and craftsmen and that was essentially two-dimensional
in character. Travelers collected such prints in their specula as the images
promised access to a lost and antique world.22 These specula, or albums of
reproduced images, drew together images of, among other things, clas-
sical Roman art and architecture and miscellaneous objects such as fans,
vases and urns.23 Such images were souvenirs, for they memorialized not
only a particular voyage but also an unattainable past. For the early mod-
ern subject, ancient Rome was unavailable and yet perpetually sought.
The trophy thus also stands for an absent past. Ornamental prints often
represented in a state of wholeness what the early modern subject could
only see in a state of ruin. As anthologies, specula constituted new kinds
of wholes; they engaged with, and attempted to replace, a lost past by
collecting representations of its composite parts. In Mary Sidney’s closet
drama The Tragedy of Antony (1592), the chorus of Roman soldiers asks if
“wretched trophies” will narrate the past:

And shall thick in each land

Our wretched trophies stand,
To tell posterity
What mad impiety
Our stony stomachs led
Against the place us bred? (4.78–83)24

The trophies that testify to present civil strife may eventually narrate
this present as the past; they may “tell posterity” of the degradation and
dejection of the state. In other words, the fragmented and ruined may
allow future subjects to create a (whole) vision of the past, however violent
this past may have been.
Ornamental prints of trophies performed a function quite similar to
what Sidney’s chorus predicts, for they “tell” the early modern English
subject about their own violent inheritance. A sixteenth-century depiction
of a Roman trophy formerly credited to Enea Vico is an exemplary print
of this sort (Fig. 3.2).
Here, the trophy is depicted in isolation. Unlike Andreani’s woodcuts,
there are no subjects present, only arms and armor. Liberated from their
role in the military triumph, these trophies are simply decorative objects.
War is invoked and yet denied. The objects have no use value—they are
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 225

Fig. 3.2 Trophy formerly credited to Enea Vico, sixteenth century

simply to be appreciated as aesthetic objects. In Vico’s prints, arms and

armor are arranged on pikes and presented as if laid flat or hung on a
wall. Both prints depict a scattering of shields, bows and arrows, swords,
axes, helmets, and instruments (such as horns), as well as sculptural figures
(or busts) and animals (such as birds). Both also depict one complete
breastplate, which again points to an absent subject. Roman breastplates
were designed to reproduce the bare male chest; in illustrations such as
226 S. HARLAN

these, the Roman breastplates look like actual bodies.25 This clothing both
stands in for the human body and replaces, or displaces, it. Whereas the
trophies in The Triumph of Caesar were anthropomorphic, here they are
architectural. The masses of weapons and armor resemble pillars, columns,
and wall hangings. These prints also impress the viewer with their serial-
ity. Vico printed many images of trophies, and they are all essentially the
same. The trophy is both unique and endlessly reproducible, much like
the prints themselves. There are infinite numbers of possible combinations
of the arms and armor, but this variation results in an overall similitude. As
was the case with Lant’s Roll, the early modern English subject’s engage-
ment with his perceived Roman past is imagined in terms of the reproduc-
tive and the serial.
The trophy also registers the absence of a past for which the objects
stand. In other words, these prints point not only to the absence of the
subject, but also to an absent Roman past that can be figured only through
reconstituted semi-subjects. In her work on the fragmented bodies in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lynn Enterline notes:

That a poem fascinated with the fracturing of bodies should have been
passed down through the middle ages and into the Renaissance … predomi-
nantly in fragments, a reordered collection of pieces torn away from their
original arrangement, is one of the ironies of literary history that continues
to echo and ramify.26

This phenomenon of a “reordered collection of pieces torn away from

their original arrangement” underpins military iconography of the tro-
phy. The anonymous A Roman trophy, which was made by an unknown
engraver and published by Anthony Lafrery in the third quarter of the
sixteenth century, is a symmetrical, controlled, colossal, and statuesque
figure (Fig. 3.3).
This image is thought to represent a trophy that commemorated the
victories of Gaius Martius in 101 BC. The print represents a series of trans-
formations: first, a trophy is made of arms and armor, then this object is
translated into a stone sculpture, and then—after much time has passed—it
becomes an early modern print. The trophies of Marius that Pope Sixtus
V moved to Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome in 1590 were such statues.
Whether this image depicts these trophies isn’t clear, but it certainly repre-
sents a nostalgic vantage point on the classical past and an attempt to claim
it, in textual form, for the present. The Roman trophy appears immense.
Situated in the foreground of a distant landscape, the object appears
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 227

Fig. 3.3 A Roman trophy, unknown engraver, pub. Anthony Lafrery, third quar-
ter of the sixteenth century

immense. Winged figures at the base hold shields and are surrounded by
scattered military objects, including swords, helmets, and a breastplate.
The trophy is positioned on a platform. A draped cloth takes the place of
the chest; shields stand in for arms, and a closed helmet replaces the head.
228 S. HARLAN

Trophies such as this one bear a compelling relationship to the colossus,

another type of memorial and expression of militant nostalgia. In Act 5 of
Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra remembers Antony as a colossus:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. (Ant. 5.2.81–5)

Here, she invokes the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of
the ancient world, which depicted Apollo. Antony is transformed into an
immense, looming figure—a virtual force of nature whose power of speech
can “quail and shake the orb.” Her own speech is an act of memorializing
and an act of spoiling, for Cleopatra re-envisions, or reconstitutes, Antony
as an object of wonder, an aesthetic object to be admired. Antony’s
monument derives its power as a token of identity and as a reminder, or
memorial, from its massiveness and its supposed permanence. The sheer
conspicuousness of such a monument assures its enduring significance and
simultaneously draws attention to the absence of the subject it renders
monumental. But the monument’s materiality registers absence. Further,
this monumental and colossal Antony must be imaginatively constructed
out of its parts. The viewer can only see his “legs” or a “reared arm”—the
colossus in its entirety cannot be apprehended. Cleopatra’s vision displaces
the body of the actual Antony, whose botched suicide renders him not
colossal but rather portable (for he has to be hoisted up to her). In Henry
IV, Part I, Falstaff and Prince Hal draw on precisely the same image in
their bawdy banter. Here, again, only the legs of the colossus can be seen.
Falstaff says, “Hal, if thou set me down in the battle and bestride me, so;
‘tis a point of friendship,” to which Hal replies, “Nothing but a colossus
can do thee that friendship” (1H4 5.1.121–4). In both plays, the colossus
stands above the subjects that view it—it bestrides all that is below, stand-
ing over its viewers as a conqueror stands over the conquered. By looming
above these spectators, the colossus claims them as spoils of war. In Act 1
of Julius Caesar, Cassius says of Caesar:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. (JC 1.2.134–7)
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 229

Cassius’s characterization is more reserved than Cleopatra’s, for he only

compares Caesar to a colossus. Nevertheless, this vision of “petty men/
walk[ing] under his huge legs” describes precisely the activity that an early
modern surveyor of a colossus would engage in. In Lafrery’s trophies of
Marius, the angels that cluster around the base of the trophy provide a
corollary to the men who encounter a colossus. The colossus is intended
to inspire awe.
Nevertheless, as Jean Pierre Vernant notes, the word “colossus” was not
originally defined by size but by immobility.27 The colossus is “erected”
and cannot be moved; it is fixed in space and fixed in time. Colossal statues
were erected for subjects who disappeared, subjects for whom the perfor-
mance of funerary rites was not possible. Vernant argues that such colossal
figures were buried in empty tombs “as a substitute for the absent corpse”
of the dead person; they were also erected over empty tombs.28 Thus the
colossus “is not meant to reproduce the features of the dead man or to
create the illusion of his physical presence … The colossus is not an image;
it is a ‘double,’ as the dead man himself is a double of the living man.”29
A substitute necessarily draws attention to the absence of that for which it
stands. For the early modern English subject, who might view illustrations
of such colossus, these figures represented not only absent subjects but
also an absent culture. Giorgio Agamben argues against Vernant’s reading
of the colossus as a double or substitute:

The colossus is not … a simple substitute for the corpse. In the complex sys-
tem regulating the relation between the living and the dead in the classical
world, the colossus represents instead—analogously to the corpse, but in
a more immediate and general way—that part of the person that is conse-
crated to death and that, insofar as it occupies the threshold between the
two worlds, must be separated from the normal context of the living.30

The colossus represents the liminal and the dangerous: “that part of
the person that is consecrated to death.” Like the trophy, the colossus is a
figure for that which is unavoidably other, that which is always beyond the
subject that would seek to claim it. Agamben’s argument has implications
for his inquiry into the sacred, the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, and
the nature of political power. He maintains that homo sacer, not the colossus,
is a double.31
I will argue that, like the colossus, Shakespeare’s Roman military
subject cannot be perceived in his entirety by his “surviving devotee” or
audience. This militant Roman figure is simultaneously excessive and
230 S. HARLAN

non-whole, for he can only be accessed in parts. The colossus optically

distorts the viewer’s gaze and is itself optically distorted by this gaze.
The illustrations of the trophies of Marius attempt to perform what the
devotee’s eye cannot: to present the military spoil as whole and entire.
Likewise, this idea of distortion is central to the Roman plays’ treatment
of the figure of the armored figure. Stephen Greenblatt draws attention
to how the anamorphic registers absence in his analysis of the famous
death’s-head in Holbein’s 1533 portrait The Ambassadors. He argues that,
in contrast to transi tombs, which presented the body “both in its dignity
and in its disgrace,”32 Holbein’s portrait mystifies the viewer:

In “The Ambassadors,” such clear, steady sight is impossible; death is affirmed

not in its power to destroy the flesh, or as is familiar from late medieval lit-
erature, in its power to horrify and cause unbearable pain, but in its uncanny
inaccessibility and absence. What is unseen or perceived only as a blur is far
more disquieting than what may be faced boldly and directly, particularly
when the limitations of vision are grasped as structural, the consequence more
of the nature of perception than of the timidity of the perceiver.33

Limited vision draws attention to “inaccessibility and absence.” For

Greenblatt, Holbein’s anamorphic skull registers the inaccessibility
of death; death is beyond one’s sight and thus beyond one’s ability to
apprehend. Likewise, the ornamental prints of trophies both present and
withhold these objects from the viewer. They register the inaccessibility
of the early modern English subject’s perceived Roman past. Such prints
depict military spoils and are themselves spoils as they attempt to reclaim
for the early modern traveler lost objects from the past and, by extension,
the very past for which these objects stand. Reproductive prints promise to
“reproduce” the past, but the nature of the print—its depiction of spoils
of war—underscores the problems of the violence and distance, tempo-
ral and representational, in the early modern subject’s excavation of his
antique past. The prints are representations of, or substitutes for, a lost
actual trophy, and the actual trophy is itself a figure for the inaccessible
Roman past, a deformed and reformed material embodiment of militant
nostalgia. The trophy embodies the impossibility of accessing the absent
past and simultaneously the overbearing and continuing pressure of this
absent past on the present.
The early modern poetic work most closely associated with this phe-
nomenon of reflective, nostalgic tourism is du Bellay’s 1558 sonnet
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 231

sequence Antiquitez de Rome, translated by Edmund Spenser as Ruines

of Rome (1591). In Spenser’s rendering of du Bellay’s third sonnet, he
asserts that, “Rome now of Rome is th’onely funeral.”34 The sonnet is itself
a translation of an epigram by Janus Vitalis, a Sicilian priest, theologian
and poet under Leo X; Spenser’s version is thus twice removed from the
original, from a poem that is itself about standing at a remove from that
which one surveys. Spenser’s use of the term “funeral” bolsters the poem’s
mournful acknowledgment of Rome as lost, Rome as dead. Du Bellay’s
line reads, “Rome de Rome est le seul monument,” or literally “Rome of
Rome is the only monument” (in other words, the paradox that “Rome
is the only monument of Rome”). Spenser’s decision to translate “monu-
ment” as “funeral” (if it was indeed a “decision”—it is unclear how good
his French was) points to the connection between the funereal and the
monumental. In this sonnet, the monument is engaged in mourning a
loss. The sonnet’s opening lines draw attention to the problem of locating
Rome among its ruins:

Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,

And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all,
These same old walls, olde arches, which thou seest
Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call.35

In French, the “stranger” of the first line is a “nouveau venu,” or one

who has newly come to these “olde arches.” This poem is about searching
for something that cannot be located. The viewer hopes to find Rome by
seeing ruins of walls, arches, and palaces and by naming—or by “calling”
the city by its name, but the result is “nought” or “rien.” The new is for-
bidden access to the old. Leonard Barkan notes that this linguistic attempt
to create immediacy and presence (rhetorically, enargeia), or to “enunci-
ate,” is fraught with challenges:

As the poem engages in a vast cultural act of enargeia, it will make absent
things present and will overcome its own belatedness in relation to the
unobtainable material remains of antiquity; it will present these things
both as ruined and as (to use a Renaissance term) repristinated—that is,
like new. For du Bellay, it is not only that antique works are unprocurable
and that translation is itself a kind of plundering or profanation of classical
relics. Rome is the very name of what cannot be enunciated … Rome is
unfindable.36
232 S. HARLAN

Barkan points to the problem of locating Rome as a city, culture, and

system of values among its “material remains.” Antiquity is apprehended
through fragments, and one’s resulting image is thus necessarily fragmentary.
The “material remains” that I focus on here are the remains of mili-
tary clothing. Clothing can render one “antique,” and the “antique” is
linked to the fragmentary. In Act 2 of Antony and Cleopatra, Caesar says
of the masque that, “The wild disguise hath almost/Anticked us all” (Ant.
2.7.118–19). According to Caesar, to be disguised is to be “anticked”—in
the sense of associated with the comic or the clown-like—and also to be
“antiqued,” or to be taken out of your present temporal moment and
transplanted to the past.37 The word “antic” was not developed in English
from “antique” but was often spelled the same. The association of the two
terms came from the ascription of grotesque work to the ancients; “antic”
was originally applied to fantastic representations of human, animal, and
floral forms, incongruously running into one another, found in exhuming
ancient remains in Rome. The word “antick” (or “antik”) is also associ-
ated with the clothing of a jester, namely the motley, a patchwork con-
struction, a composite of other, destroyed and reconstituted garments.
Stallybrass finds this connection between the antique and the antic in early
modern theater records:

One striking feature of Alleyn’s list of costumes of the Admiral’s Men in

1598 is a list of “Antik sutes.” It is not entirely clear whether “antik” here
means antique or belonging to the jester … Perhaps “antik” means both,
since the list includes both cloth of gold and of silver and “will somers cote.”
Will Sommer was Henry VIII’s fool, so that, if the suit truly belonged to
him, it was both “antique” and “antic”.38

In the early modern English theater, clothing was often “antik” in the
sense of cobbled together from fragments. Of course, the theater medi-
ates between the linguistic and the visual: like the clown’s antic language,
his antic clothing need not, and cannot, cohere. In a jester’s patchwork
motley, the borders between pieces of clothing register the destruction of
formerly whole garments—the violent rips and tears that are necessary to
create a new sort of whole. As early as 1360, the “Dittamondo” of Fazio
degle Ubertii, which recounts the author’s visionary travels to Rome,
characterizes his tour guide as an old woman dressed in tattered garments:

A venerable matron in torn garments—Rome herself is meant—tells them of

the glorious past, and gives them a minute description of the old triumphs;
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 233

she then leads the strangers through the city, and points out to them the
seven hills and many of the chief ruins.39

This “matron in torn garments” tells her visitors of “old triumphs”

and, in leading them through the city, stages a touristic triumph of her
own. Fazio degle Ubertii’s matron moves as a triumphator through the
space of the city. It has been noted that Shakespeare’s Roman plays engage
with Rome “in architectural terms … The city is … a set of psychologi-
cally significant, visually symbolic, loci often placed in contrast with one
another—the Forum, the battlefield, the Senate house, the street, the
domicile. Each is a manifestation of Romanitas …”40 In other words,
like a military triumph, these plays attempt to imbue these architectural
spaces with the value of Romanitas. Each space allows for the display of
certain Roman values or characteristics; each space is in turn defined by
these values. The trophy, too, embodies aspects of Romanitas, of what
it means to be a militant Roman and what it means to be a subject in
sixteenth-century England. It asserts itself—and the subjects it deforms
and reforms—as both powerfully present and troublingly absent. As an
overdetermined object, it means everything and nothing. It is a material
reality and a void, an architecture of the subject in collapse.

TOO MANY TRIUMPHS: SPOILING THE ROMAN

SUBJECT IN JULIUS CAESAR
Julius Caesar dramatizes three military triumphs, and each triumph has
its own set of trophies and anxieties about the narratives that attend these
trophies. The play opens with the promise of a military triumph over
Pompey’s sons, but this triumph is a contested and debased event. The tri-
umph is to take place on a holiday as Flavius, one of several “Commoners,”
yells at his fellow men:

Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!

Is this a holiday? What, know you not
(Being mechanical) you ought not to walk
Upon a labouring day, without the sign
Of your profession? (JC 1.1.1–5)

Flavius responds to what he deems to be an unacceptable scene of

“mechanical,” or laboring, men who are not working, but rather eagerly
awaiting a display of armor and trophies. The “rude mechanicals” in
234 S. HARLAN

A Midsummer Night’s Dream shirk their manual and practical duties in

order to perform labor of an amateur artistic sort—the production of the
play Pyramus and Thisbe—and the common men on stage at the begin-
ning of Julius Caesar are also positioned as outside of their accepted roles
as workers: they are spectators to an anticipated performance. Flavius, a
tribune of the people, criticizes the commoners: “See where their bas-
est mettle be not moved” (JC 1.1.62). The “mettle” of these laboring
“mechanical” men is lead, the basest metal, not steel or iron: they are
improper or imperfect military figures insofar as their “mettle” is of a
low and common sort.41 As Floyd-Wilson notes, “Then and now, ‘mettle’
means the quality of one’s temperament and usually denotes a particularly
spirited and courageous nature. Mettle is rarely the property of the elite or
refined.”42 Here, more here. The term “mechanical” refers to the practice
of a craft, not to the labor of a military subject.
John Archer argues that the “artisanal language”43 of Titus Andronicus
points to a struggle between the work of a warrior and the work of a
craftsman.44 We see a similar tension in the opening moments of this play.
Flavius objects to the idleness of the craftsmen on a “labouring day.” The
labor performed in this scene is not that of the cobbler or carpenter but
that of the soldier; the military triumph is a debased form of labor with its
own set of products: military trophies. The triumphal “holiday” has been
“culled” out of a working day; the Cobbler explains that, “… we make hol-
iday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph” (JC 1.1.31–2). Holiday
must be “made” in the sense of created and participated in. According to
Mikhail Bakhtin, the freedoms and reversals sanctioned by carnival result
in a leveling of socioeconomic and political difference and the creation of
a heightened sense of community among participants.45 But, crucially, a
holiday must be state-sanctioned; it is precisely the unsanctioned nature
of the holiday in Julius Caesar that Flavius objects to in Act 1. The tri-
umph over Pompey’s sons is an ambivalent spectacle. On the one hand, it
requires spectators; on the other, the tribunes are at pains to discourage
such spectatorship and celebration. Murellus drives the others offstage in
a rant in which he condemns the commoners for their desire to see the
enemy paraded in triumph:

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?

What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! (JC 1.1.33–36)
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 235

Murellus’s questions draw attention to the questionable nature of the

triumph: its capacity, that is, to quite literally raise questions. His first
question—“Wherefore rejoice?”—returns us to Benjamin’s assertion that
the triumph embodies not the joy of victory but the “horror” of conquest.
He inquires into the spoils of the triumph—“What conquest brings he
home?/What tributaries follow him to Rome …”—but this is an anti-
inquiry. Like Benjamin, Murellus rejects the spoils of the triumph as con-
temptible. He absents himself from the crowd of spectators, and he rejects
this type of spectatorship because it is familiar:

O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,

Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout. (JC 1.1.38–45)

This triumph is both a reversal of former triumphs—now, Pompey’s

sons will be paraded when Pompey was formerly the triumphator—and
simultaneously a debased holiday.46 Like the military trophy itself, the tri-
umph is a reconstituted form, an event that recalls all former triumphs and
re-presents them in a new form that is both familiar and strange. Murellus
remembers the reverberation of the “universal shout” of the crowd; he
says that, the “Tiber trembled underneath her banks/To hear the repli-
cation of your sound/Made in her concave shores” (JC 1.1.46–8). The
“replication” that he refers to here is an echo, the return of a sound. But
an echo is also a repetition, copy or reproduction of sound: the sound
that it offers, or returns, is both the same and different form the original
sound. This echo is an apt metaphor for the triumph, which is itself a
“replication” of former triumphs. Murellus’s speech mediates a relation-
ship between the present and the past. The present triumph displaces for-
mer triumphs, but it accomplishes this through an act of replication that
necessarily invokes them, as well. The triumph in Julius Caesar assures the
continuity that Schwartz identifies with the copy, but it also engages with
the problem of uniqueness. As a replica, the triumph constitutes one entry
in a series of military pageants that serve as indications of national growth
and cultural dominance, but it cannot be perceived outside of these other
236 S. HARLAN

incarnations. The triumph is quite literally a dead metaphor, as are the

arms and armor, or “conquest,” (JC 1.1.33) that Caesar parades. That is,
these objects register the death and the demise of cultures, their destruc-
tion, and subsequent reconstitution as Roman.
Like the triumph itself, the spectators are distorted replications of their
former selves. Murellus’s account of Pompey’s past triumphs underscores
the spectators’ connectedness to the geography of the city, a space that
remains unchanged. But the spectators’ active involvement in past tri-
umphs—climbing up walls, shouting, and so on—is here nowhere to be
found. This triumph’s spectators are passive. These “mechanical” men
have rejected their active labors for passive spectatorship. They are involved
neither in the wars that have produced this triumph nor in the perfor-
mance of victory. Rather, they are simply objects, or “senseless things,”
as Murellus says. They are not, therefore, even acceptable spectators as
they lack the requisite functions of “sense,” as both reason and sensory
function, that spectatorship demands. The cobbler leads a group of men
through the streets in an alternate, pointless triumph that celebrates noth-
ing but rather serves to “wear out their shoes,” (JC 1.1.30) or spoil them,
thus bolstering his business. The cobbler’s triumph generates income, not
the abstract value of Romanitas. It is only in witnessing the rise of a new
triumphator that Murellus registers the triumph as a genre.
The spoils, or “conquest,” (JC 1.1.33) in this triumph are profoundly
contested objects that stand for a violent past that is already being memo-
rialized. Benjamin’s sense of the “horror” they represent is here subsumed
in pageantry and theatricality. Unlike the “historical materialist” of which
Benjamin speaks, the spectator in Julius Caesar is not asked to contemplate
the objects but rather to systematically deny their status as contested objects
which, in celebrating both loss and victory, engage in a discourse of paradox.
Flavius invokes another set of “trophies” in his exchange with Murellus:

Flavius. … Get you down that way towards the Capitol.

This way will I. Disrobe the images,
If you do find them decked with ceremonies.
Murellus. May we do so?
You know it is the feast of Lupercal.
Flavius. It is no matter. Let no images
Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. (JC 1.1.64–70)

Statues of Caesar have been decorated—or “decked with ceremonies,”

which included, according to Plutarch’s account, such objects as trophies,
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 237

scarves, and the laurel crown. Flavius commands Murellus to “disrobe”

the images, and the removal of these ceremonial, celebratory objects from
the statues is imagined as the removal, or stripping away, of the cloth-
ing that “decks” them. Murellus’s anxiety—“May we do so?”—is com-
pounded by the fact that it is the feast of Lupercal. Shakespeare combines
the holiday, which was in February, with the Caesar’s triumph, which was
in October of the former year. Lupercus was a deity associated with Pan
and the founding of Rome. Caesar’s triumph is thus linked to narratives
of nation-founding and becomes a symbol of the birth of imperial Rome,
or of its rebirth as such. Again, the triumph is a replication, a repetition of
the past. But the tribunes plan to dismantle the signs of the triumph, thus
disrespecting Caesar and questioning his status as triumphator. The “cer-
emonies” that adorn the statues are material embodiments of the rites of
military celebration, and Murellus is determined to destroy them. These
trophies embody the “guiltiness” (JC 1.1.63) and “ingratitude” (JC
1.1.56) of the spectators who admire them; they also embody the guilti-
ness of the military exploits that produced them. The trophy is established
as deeply problematic: it is both celebratory and murderous, constructed
and inevitably dismantled. As an embodiment of destruction, it may like-
wise be destroyed. The Cobbler professes himself “a surgeon to old shoes;
when they are in danger, I recover them” (JC 1.1.24–5). This action
of “recovering,” or mending, stands in direct opposition to the scene’s
engagement with the act of dismantling. The Cobbler fixes that which
is broken. The triumphator, on the other hand, nostalgically rejoices in
destruction and, in so doing, assures his own eventual destruction.
The military triumph represented a transition from war to peace and
the return of the general, and his army, to the realm of the civic. However,
this struggle between the spectators and the tribunes underscores the
impossibility of sublimating the violence of the battlefield in holiday
and ceremony. The trophies that adorn the statues of Caesar give rise to
civic disturbance. They do not stand for peace but rather represent an
encroachment of war into the space of the city. The tribunes clash with the
spectators and with one another. Flavius’s command—“Let no images/Be
hung with Caesar’s trophies” (JC 1.1.69–70)—denies the triumph’s spec-
tators, and the play’s audience, access to Caesar’s trophies. Of course, this
scene stages only spectatorship, not the triumph itself. Like many scenes
of military violence in Shakespearean drama, the triumph occurs offstage;
only the reaction to the triumph is performed. At the beginning of Act 3
of Henry V, the Chorus asks the audience to “Work, work your thoughts,
238 S. HARLAN

and therein see a siege” (H5 3.0.25). To envision the siege of Harfleur
constitutes a type of “work” on the part of the theatrical audience. In
Julius Caesar, the commoners shirk their daily labors in order to be spec-
tators to a form of entertainment, and the play’s audience is asked to do
precisely the same thing. The play and the triumph are related discourses.
Although the playhouse audience is denied access to the spoils of Caesar,
Julius Caesar offers another spoil: Caesar himself. In Act 3, Caesar’s mur-
derers parade him in the marketplace just as he parades his “conquest”
offstage in the play’s opening scene. This is the second triumph of the
play, and one is reminded of Murellus’s warning against the triumph. The
murder of Caesar is imagined as both the destruction of his triumphs and
its attending spoils. Brutus says:

Stoop, Romans, stoop,

And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords
Then walk we forth even to the market-place,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads
Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty.’ (JC 3.1.105–10)

The cry of “Peace, Freedom and Liberty” mirrors the “universal shout”
of the crowd in the opening scene and recalls Benjamin’s warning that
“horror”—here, the blood-soaked body of Caesar and of his murderers—
may be translated into its almost-opposite: peace. Caesar is spoiled on the
corporeal arms of his killers and on their military “arms,” or swords. He
is transformed into, or reduced to, a bloodied sword and paraded in the
marketplace. Antony also underscores the reduction of Caesar to a trophy
several moments later—the reduction to, as he puts it, “the ruins of the
noblest man” (JC 3.1.256). He, too, wants to display the body of Caesar
publicly:

Here is a mourning Rome, a dangerous Rome,

No Rome of safety for Octavius yet.
Hie hence, and tell him so. Yet stay awhile –
Thou shalt not back till I have borne this corpse
Into the marketplace. (JC 3.1.287–92)

As Caesar triumphed over Pompey’s sons in the play’s opening scene,

now Caesar is himself triumphed over. Rome is characterized as “mourning,”
but it is certainly mourned by its early modern theatrical audience in this
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 239

moment, as well. In Act 2, Brutus attempts to divorce Caesar’s “spirit”

from his potentially bloody body:

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,

And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit
And not dismember Caesar! (JC 2.1.168–9)

His reference to “dismember[ing]” Caesar recalls the “disrob[ing]” of

the images Flavius calls for in the opening scene. Caesar must be torn apart
so that the nation can be reconstituted, or rebuilt, in another form. As
Caesar’s triumph displaced Pompey’s former triumph, so this new Rome
will displace the old. In Act 1, as Cassius contemplates killing Caesar, he
recalls having saved his life:

Caesar cried, “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”

I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. (JC 1.2.111–5)

In this nostalgic narrative, Cassius establishes himself as a second Aeneas,

a replication of “our great ancestor” and a model of filial piety. But this
father-son relationship is warped and destroyed by the murder, and Caesar
becomes not Anchises but Turnus, both spoiler and spoiled. The murder
of Caesar produces a new text that replaces the Aeneid, a text written with
the blood of Caesar. Antony says, “And here thy hunters stand/Signed
in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe” (JC 3.1.205–07). His killers are
“signed” in his spoil, which is to say marked by his name or signature, a
distinctive or distinguishing piece of text provided by one’s hand, which
is also the location of physical violence. The hand kills and signs, and the
second of these activities allows for the killers to authenticate themselves
as one would authenticate a document. The murder of Caesar generates a
uniquely textual spoil; he is reduced to a bloody signature. Antony explic-
itly characterizes the murder of Caesar in terms of spoilage and reduction:
“O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?/Are all thy conquests, glories,
triumphs, spoils,/Shrunk to this little measure?” (JC 3.1.148–50). The
murder of Caesar is imagined as both his reduction to a trophy and, simul-
taneously, as the destruction of his trophies, the very objects that opened
the play. Caesar’s body replaces the spoils of the opening scene as the
240 S. HARLAN

play’s chief spoil. He is no longer an awe-inspiring, looming colossus;

he is now a “low” and shrunken thing, an object that mediates between
the present and the past for Antony and for the play’s audience. Antony’s
characterization of the murder as a form of condensation—“Are all thy
conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils/Shrunk to this little measure?”—also
points to the play’s engagement with the theater as a means of condensing
and collapsing. Antony’s question implies that the play itself has reduced
Caesar’s glory to a “little measure.” Alexander Leggatt refers to this phe-
nomenon as the “economy of the theatre, which brings great men to the
stage as life-sized figures exposed in ordinary daylight …”47 He invokes
H.A. Mason’s observation that performance is a form of telescoping; we
see such figures, Mason argues, “as it were, down the wrong end of the
telescope.”48 Brutus’s call to “bathe” in Caesar’s blood encourages Cassius
to envision the scene as a future theatrical performance:

Cassius. Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown?
Brutus. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport
That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust? (JC 3.1.111–6)

This invocation of future performances of the murder is weighed down

with rhetorical questions and doubt. Both men attempt to imagine their
actions replayed on the stage as “sport,” but they are unable to do so.
The repetition of the phrase “How many?” suggests that they do not
know the answers to the questions they pose, nor can they envision “states
unborn and accents yet unknown.” Although Cassius insists that the scene
is “lofty,” he nonetheless implies that the historical, lived moment is inad-
equate. Even at such a height, these players –in the sense of participants
and actors—are compelled to imagine future theatrical recreations of it.
Like the triumph in the play’s opening scene, such performances are repli-
cations: they are inauthentic, a form of “sport,” the sublimation of actual
violence in militantly nostalgic theatricality. The murder of Caesar will be
performed many times in the future, and such performances will produce
multiple Caesars, each a shadow of the “real” Caesar to which Cassius and
Brutus refer, who is himself a theatrical fiction. Caesar is rendered perpet-
ual in performance, but he is also always just beyond one’s reach, an object
that properly belongs to the past and can be presented only in replicated
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 241

form in the early modern English present. His blood on Pompey’s “basis,”
or the platform of a statue, is a composite image: his blood, the symbol of
Caesar’s status as real, drenches and disfigures the artistic representation
of a man who came before him. The future theatrical representations of
Caesar must necessarily be disfigured, as well.
This problem of access receives its most explicit treatment in the final
scene of the play when Antony provides Brutus with a unified and sta-
ble subjectivity not allowed to Caesar: “His life was gentle, and the ele-
ments/So mixed in him that nature might stand up/And say to all the
world, ‘This was a man!’” (JC 5.5.74–6). The disparate “elements” that
comprise Brutus are thoroughly “mixed”; his parts make up a whole.
Brutus’s unified temperament signifies a unified self. Caesar, on the other
hand, is a fragmented figure, spoiled by the conspirators. As in so many
Shakespearean tragedies, the final speech turns to burial rites and to a hope
for peace. Octavius’s speech leaves the play’s on- and offstage audience
with yet another set of spoils:

According to his virtue let us use him,

With all the respect and rites of burial.
Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie,
Most like a soldier, ordered honourably.
So call the field to rest, and let’s away,
To part the glories of this happy day. (JC 5.5.77–82)

Octavius calls for a rest from fighting and an evaluation of the day’s,
and the play’s, spoils. The soldier is asked to claim his share of military
“glories”—both the abstract value of glory, or honor, and the objects, or
spoils, produced by the battle. The play’s early modern audience also is
called on to “part,” in the sense of divide and share, these “glories” or the
spoils produced by the play. The process of sharing necessitates division
and the breaking up of a whole, and the “glories” of which Octavius speaks
belong to all. The theatrical audience is implicated in a symbolic milita-
rism whereby its national narratives can be constructed and claimed only
through fragments. Octavius controls the process by which this occurs.
He anticipates a future moment when the act of spoiling will operate as a
mode of memorializing, and he draws attention to the theater as a space in
which a form of cultural spoiling occurs. Like the triumph in the opening
scene of the play, the early modern English stage displays spoils to its audi-
ence as weighty symbols. This self-replication is the final replication that
242 S. HARLAN

the play performs. The Roman past is reconstituted in altered, fragmented

form via display. It is offered up to the audience as “glories” or spoils, but
these spoils defy the audience’s attempt at appropriation, for they can only
be desired, never claimed.

THE CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN: DRESSING THE ROMAN

SUBJECT IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
In Act 4, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, as Caesar’s
soldiers arrive in Alexandria and war looms on the horizon, Cleopatra
arms Antony for battle. This scene, which is not in Plutarch, dramatizes
an acute anxiety regarding the potential disarming and divisibility of the
male body in battle—the transformation or reduction of the Roman mili-
tary subject into a spoil of war. In this crucial scene, the strange and sug-
gestive figure of the female “armourer” is placed in relationship to the
male military subject—in this case, Caesar—who may ultimately “spoil”
or disassemble the very cohesive object she creates. The play’s characters
invoke the visual arts—particularly painting—as a means of characteriza-
tion. Cleopatra describes Antony as “painted one way like a Gorgon,/The
other way’s a Mars,” (Ant. 2.5.118–19), and Enobarbus’s description of
Cleopatra characterizes her as “O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/
The fancy outwork nature” (Ant. 2.2.210–11). In both cases, the lovers
are mythologized by virtue of their similarity to Venus and Mars. But as in
Julius Caesar, the play presents the masculine, militarized Roman subject
as distorted. The anamorphic Antony is both Gorgon and Mars, less a
subject than the result of a trick of perspective. His distorted physicality is
most fully realized in the arming scene.
Antony is identified with Mars, the Roman god of War, from the first
lines of the play. Philo complains:

Nay, but this dotage of our general’s

O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front. His captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles of his breast, reneges all temper
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy’s lust. (Ant. 1.1.1–10).
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 243

Mars’s armored body, the quintessential masculine body of war, was

once contained, or constricted, in Antony’s flashing, “plated” eyes. His
warlike “captain’s” heart—which he will refer to again in the arming
scene—was also, before Cleopatra, similarly contained by his armor: spe-
cifically, by “the buckles of his breast,” but Antony is now an incontinent
figure. The “Egyptian fetters” that hold him are not an acceptable replace-
ment for the buckles that formerly held together his military dress and
himself. These opening lines assert that the male figure of war should be
a contained figure and that this containment is the result, to some extent,
of the limitations placed on him by his armor. Antony has been “trans-
formed” or recast, to use another term of the armories, as a “strumpet’s
fool,” and he must therefore be “transformed” back into his former self:
a Roman and a warrior.
But Antony’s own self-construction is not so uniform or unified as Philo
would believe. In this arming scene, his status as composite is dramatized
on the level of clothing and stage properties, a dramatic embodiment of
Barkan’s position that the Renaissance human body was an essentially
unified system that was “subdivided into a number of parts.”49 Crucially,
Cleopatra has great difficulty constructing Antony out of the pieces of
armor presented to her, and her attempt to recast him as Roman by
means of his Roman dress is only partially successful. In arming Antony,
Cleopatra enters into a tradition of maternal female armorers of the epic
tradition. Coppelia Kahn notes that,

The same epic tradition that opposed women to war also represents mothers
as arming their sons. In the Iliad, Thetis helps arm Achilles, as Venus arms
Aeneas in the Aeneid; both mothers symbolically authorize their sons’ mas-
culine vocations as warmakers, but do not bear arms themselves, remaining
on the feminine side of the gender divide.50

Cleopatra is likewise an arming and authorizing figure. At first, she

encourages Antony to stay in bed—“Sleep a little” (Ant. 4.4.2)—but he
calls twice to Eros for his armor. Presumably, when Eros comes onstage
with the armor, he is carrying a heavy, amorphous and unwieldy arm-
ful of stage properties. The size and magnitude of the armor is certainly
far in excess of Cupid himself: he struggles to carry this divided body of
Mars. In this scene, Eros is charged with the responsibility of perform-
ing the opposite of Cupid’s action. Rather than take his armor away,
he must bring it forth and construct out of it what Antony refers to as
“a man of steel” (Ant. 4.4.34). Cleopatra insists on involving herself in
244 S. HARLAN

this process; she attempts to take the place of Eros when she says, “Nay,
I’ll help too,” (Ant. 4.4.5) but the task proves more difficult than she
expects. Holding up a piece of the armor, she asks, “What’s this for?”
(Ant. 4.4.6). Cleopatra faces a crucial problem: she is unsure which piece
of armor corresponds to which section of Antony’s body. Her ignorance
and awkwardness underscore the essentially masculine military realm that
Eros and Antony occupy. Her lack of knowledge of the accouterments of
war excludes her from their world, as do Antony’s insistent and impatient
words: “Let be! Let be! … False, false! This, this!” (Ant. 4.4.7–8). In
Henry V, the armorers are busy “accomplishing the knights” before the
battle of Agincourt; in creating the shell that covers man’s body in battle,
they create the man himself. The scattered pieces that litter the stage must
be gathered up and arranged in such a whole, but this is not easily done.
Eventually, Cleopatra begins to “accomplish” Antony; she asks, “Is this
not buckled well?” and he responds, “Rarely, rarely” (Ant. 4.4.11–12).
No longer simply the “armourer of [Antony’s] heart,” (Ant. 4.4.7) she
is acknowledged to be an acceptable armorer of his body, as well. This
scene is a reversal of Venus and Cupid’s disarming of Mars. For Cleopatra,
dressing her lover is a sensual and playful act, but for Antony, his armor
is an object of desire for the male spoiler who may undress him in battle.
Even as Antony is constructed for battle, he acknowledges the threat
of disassembly that he faces. When Cleopatra asks, “Is this not buckled
well?” (Ant. 4.4.11), he responds with an acknowledgment, if a denial,
of the potential violence or violation that may be practiced upon him in
battle. He says, “He that unbuckles this, till we do please/To doff’t for
our repose, shall hear a storm” (Ant. 4.4.11–13). Antony’s arming and
his acknowledgment of his potential disarming are intimately linked, for
armor may be transformed into a military trophy, the object to which
Antony fears being reduced. This scene of arming posits that the elite
military subject may be no more than “a man of steel” once he “puts his
iron on”– what Hamlet refers to as “a piece of work,” (Ham. 2.2.286) the
product of labor, a reproducible figure rather than an unparalleled one.
The “work” in question here is the work, or products, of war; Antony says,
“That thou couldst see my wars today and knew’st/The royal occupa-
tion, thou shouldst see/A workman in’t” (Ant. 4.4.16–8). He is not only
workman, but also the product of those labors. When he bids farewell to
Cleopatra, he rejects “mechanic compliment”: “What’er becomes of me,/
This is a soldier’s kiss. Rebukable,/And worthy shameful check it were,
to stand/On more mechanic compliment” (Ant. 4.4.29–32). As he dons
his last piece of armor, he is rendered mechanical, the product of a craft.
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 245

But his clothing displaces his body, rendering him a hollow shell.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus imagines false friends as hollow or lacking in
substance:

Thou hast described

A hot friend, cooling. Ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are not tricks in plain and simple faith:
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle. (JC 4.2.18–24)

The “hollow men” of which he speaks are the product of artisanal

labor: his description of a “hot friend, cooling” suggests that the human
subject is forged in fire. As in Henry V’s reference to his troops’ “mettle
of your pasture” (3.1.27) in the speech at Harfleur, here one’s “mettle”—
or temperament or character—is the result of the forging process. When
Antony “put[s] [his] iron on,” he becomes this iron; his “mettle” and
“metal” are inseparable. Anne Barton notes that the titular character of
Jonson’s Sejanus, another early modern English play about Rome, is “as
hollow as his own statue in the theatre of Pompey, unreal …”51 This scene
of arming Antony suggests the hollowness of the Roman military subject
by foregrounding the hollowness of his armor.
This hollowness assures Antony’s divisibility and vulnerability. The
more his body is fortified, the more likely it is to be attacked.52 Antony’s
suit of armor necessarily attracts the enemy. It is an object of desire, an
object that can be broken apart and claimed as one’s own. The unity of
the natural body is threatened by the very form of its protection. In an
analogue to Caesar’s murder in Julius Caesar, the threat of exposure of
Antony’s body is realized when he is hoisted up to Cleopatra later in Act 4.
She dwells on his “heaviness”:

Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!

Our strength is all gone into heaviness;
That makes the weight. Had I great Juno’s power,
The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up
And set thee by Jove’s side. (Ant. 4.15.33–7)

Cleopatra refers to both the literal weight of Antony’s body and to the
figurative weight, or sadness, of the scene. She claims Antony as a spoil
of war or trophy, not—as other characters see him—as a monument or
246 S. HARLAN

colossus. The guards refer to the scene as a “heavy sight” (Ant. 4.15.42).
The arming scene is also a “heavy sight” insofar as it dramatizes the effort
necessary to produce the militarized Roman subject and invokes the effort
of taking him apart. Cleopatra’s attempt to construct Antony draws atten-
tion to his potential division or fragmentation, although the fragmentation
of the female body is more common in Shakespeare’s plays. For example,
Othello imagines that he might access Desdemona’s hidden, essential
infidelity by physically tearing her apart: “I will chop her into messes!
Cuckold me!” (Oth. 4.1.197). By chopping her into “messes”—that is to
say, into servings or portions of meat—he can not only punish her for her
crime, thus fulfilling his role as the executor of justice, but he can also, of
course, execute her. This imagined violence would portion Desdemona
out, which in turn would allow Othello to see each of her composite parts
and, ostensibly, to locate and view those that are associated with her sup-
posed betrayal and pollution. But of course the word “mess” also carries
connotations of the disorderly and the untidy, which suggests that the
figure to which Desdemona would be reduced in such a scenario would be
too grotesque and disarrayed to interpret. In other words, she would not
be so ordered as a military trophy; reducing her to “messes” would result
in a mess. In Cleopatra’s arming of Antony, and in his acknowledgment
of his potential disarming in battle by Caesar, the play gestures at the very
outcome that Othello desires: access to the interior by way of destruction
of the exterior. If one can tear apart or dismantle one’s clothing, one can
dismantle one’s self and gain access to an ineffable military subjectivity.
Antony’s arming negotiates a series of divisions, both material and, in
the end, temporal. As Eros fumbles with Antony’s armor, Antony con-
gratulates Cleopatra on her performance: “Thou fumblest, Eros, and
my queen’s a squire/More tight at this than thou” (Ant. 4.4.14–15).
He invokes the intervening medieval chivalric tradition that separates—
indeed, divides—the play’s early modern present from its Roman past. As
a mode of militant nostalgia, romance provides the rules for the proper
arming of a military subject, and Cleopatra is envisioned as a male “squire”
and subsumed into, or allowed to participate in, an anachronistic world
of masculine chivalric codes. But her status as armorer is contested and
unstable. I would like to contextualize the play’s treatment of the conven-
tions of romance by turning briefly to another play in which the manipu-
lation of armor suggests the debasing of these conventions. In Act 2 of
Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is likely a collaborative play
(possibly written with George Wilkins), a fisherman draws a suit of armor
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 247

from the sea just in time for Pericles to participate in a tournament at

King Simonides’s court. Like Antony’s armor, Pericles’s armor invokes
that of Achilles, Aeneas, and St. Paul, but it is also described as “rusty,”
(Per. 2.1.118) which suggests that it is a less illustrious object than its
glorious literary forerun ers.53 But it is certainly an outmoded object, one
associated with the values and narratives of romance.54 In both Pericles
and Antony and Cleopatra, how armor is described by those who handle
it affects its reception by its theatrical audience. We learn that Pericles lost
the armor in a shipwreck—he says that, “the rough seas, that spares not
any man,/Took it in rage” (Per. 2.1.130–1)—and that the return of this
object is a type of reparation:

An armour, friends! I pray you, let me see it.

Thanks, Fortune, yet, that after all thy crosses
Thou giv’st me somewhat to repair myself. (Per. 2.1.119–21)

Pericles informs the audience that the suit of armor “was mine own,
part of mine heritage,/Which my dead father did bequeath to me,” (Per.
2.1.122–3) and he recalls his father’s own story of the significance of the
armor. His father said:

‘Keep it, my Pericles; it hath been a shield

‘Twixt me and death’;—and pointed to his brace –
‘For that it sav’d me, keep it; in like necessity,
The which the gods protect thee from, may defend thee’! (Per. 2.1.125–8)

Pericles’s father insists that the armor’s purpose in the past as a protec-
tive “shield” should also be its purpose in the future. As it was used by
the father, so shall it be used by the son. Pericles remembers his father
“point[ing] to his brace” for emphasis. Even in memory, the armor is a
material reality as well as an idealized object imbued with significance by
the subjects who handle it.55
Pericles immediately claims the armor as his own: “… it was mine own,
part of mine heritage” (Per. 2.1.122). His repetition of the word “mine”
underscores the armor’s status as unique by virtue of its ownership. The
armor’s appearance also renders it distinct—he says “I know it by this
mark” (Per. 2.1.137)—and it is assigned a unique history that connects
Pericles to his absent father across time. Although the object is materi-
ally corrupted by rust, Pericles insists on its enduring, abstract “worth”
(Per. 2.1.135). He looks backward to assign meaning to his suit of armor.
248 S. HARLAN

Antony looks forward to the battle that awaits him and insists, “We shall
thrive now” (Ant. 4.4.8). But in both cases, the armor participates in,
and stands for, struggles: in Pericles, the fishermen express no great inter-
est in the armor’s significance or history but recognize its worth as an
object that might generate income.56 In Antony and Cleopatra, the armor
is passed back and forth between Antony, Cleopatra, and Eros in a playful
game that foreshadows a far less playful war in which objects will also shift
between hands.
Cleopatra is a suitable armorer, as well as a figure for Antony’s male
spoiler. Antony is more correct than he realizes when he says to her earlier
in the play, “You did know/How much you were my conqueror” (Ant.
3.1.164–65). Cleopatra fears that she, too, will be spoiled by Caesar and,
ultimately, by the theater. Her prediction is a neat, if exaggerated, sum-
mary of precisely what the play performs:

Saucy lectors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’posture of a whore. (Ant. 5.2.213–9)

Both Cleopatra and Antony will be spoiled by men. For Cleopatra,

this will occur on stage, which I will return to in the coda. For Antony,
his spoiling will occur on the battlefield. Antony will be undressed in a
homoerotic encounter, a violent culmination of the homosocial desire Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick defines as “the affective social force, the glue, even
when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively
charged, that shapes an important relationship”57 such as the one between
Caesar and Antony. In other words, one’s victorious opponent performs
precisely the opposite activity of his armorer. Kahn notes that,

The embracing irony of the play is that Antony never returns to the heroic
Roman image of fixed and stable identity from which—according to the
testimony of nearly every character in the play—he has only temporarily
departed.58

It is in the arming scene that he comes closest to reclaiming this

identity, but his failure is the play’s failure—which is to say, the play’s
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 249

acknowledgment that the center cannot hold, that the Roman subject
cannot be constructed or claimed in his entirety. In the arming and future
disarming that it dramatized in Antony and Cleopatra, antiquity is quite
literally objectified for the early modern theatergoer; the past is a series of
objects, not subjects.
Earlier in the play, Cleopatra invokes a past moment of dressing and
undressing that foreshadows the scene of arming. She says to Charmian:

That time? O times!

I laughed him out of patience, and that night
I laughed him into patience, and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed,
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan. (Ant. 2.5.18–23)

There are few instances of male characters cross-dressing as female char-

acters in Shakespearean drama, and this scene’s traffic in characters of high
social status separates it from the rough and tumble quality of Falstaff’s
ill-advised disguise as the old woman of Brentford in The Merry Wives of
Windsor (c.1597). Like the Mistresses Page and Ford, Cleopatra’s actions
in this scene are those of an early modern English housewife, not an
Egyptian queen. Natasha Korda reminds us that the early modern English
housewife was responsible for accounting for, managing, and regulat-
ing the material possessions of her house, which included herself. Korda
attends to Cleopatra’s manipulation of her “tires and mantles” as a power-
ful dramatization of what she refers to as “the ways in which Shakespeare
configures female subjectivity effects in relationship to objects of prop-
erty (including, though not limited to, stage-properties).”59 Cleopatra
manages her clothing; she controls who wears it and under what circum-
stances. She will likewise attend to Antony’s military dress in the arm-
ing scene. As Wendy Wall outlines, the early modern English housewife
possessed a specialized knowledge or skill set, which included dressing her
husband and children.60 Cleopatra performs precisely this function here:
she embraces an active role as a figure who dresses other people.
Antony dresses up twice in this play—first as Cleopatra and then as a
Roman military leader—and both scenes dramatize an anxiety regarding
the relationship between one’s clothing and one’s self. Marjorie Garber
refers to the cross-dressed Antony as “a glamorous drag queen,” and
indeed his cross-dressing in 2.5 underscores his liminal status.61 Clothing
the transvestite disrupts categories and threatens binaries: it occupies a
250 S. HARLAN

space between the male and the female. The Roman military subject like-
wise occupies a liminal space between the early modern present and the
perceived Roman past. This figure belongs to neither the present nor the
past; it is a shadow, insubstantial save the objects that construct it.
Crucially, this scene dramatizes imitation by way of Antony’s perfor-
mance of Cleopatra, and it is itself an imitation, or performance, of legends
of Hercules and Omphale.62 In placing her “tires and mantles” on Antony,
she dresses him, as she does in the scene of arming him for battle, as some-
thing that he is not. Antony is no more a woman than he is an armored
Roman leader, and indeed the polarity of these scenes—the dramatization
of both his supposedly masculine and supposedly feminine tendencies—
results in a performative canceling out of both possibilities, leaving Antony
as a figure who cannot be properly costumed or constructed. One’s armor
is dangerously inessential, or unconnected, to the self.

FROM CASQUE TO CUSHION: CONSTRUCTING

THE ROMAN SUBJECT IN CORIOLANUS

I have described Cleopatra as a marginal figure with regard to the play’s

Roman military world. In Coriolanus, as in Julius Caesar, the margin of
the military sphere is likewise a crucial space in which the question of the
cohesiveness of the Roman military subject is engaged. It is in Coriolanus,
the latest of the three plays, that the fervent hope for a constructed Roman
military figure is engaged most explicitly on the level of language. I read
this play as a further elaboration of the impossibility of constructing
the armored male body in the Roman plays. In Antony and Cleopatra,
Cleopatra attempts to build Antony out of the parts that comprise his
armor; in Coriolanus, Volumnia’s attempt to construct her son as a milita-
rized subject is a linguistic one, and it is only partially successful.
Coriolanus opens with a scene of public violence that is unusual for
plays of the period. As armed citizens march toward the capitol, Menenius
Agrippa explains to his on- and offstage audience the political situation in
Rome:

There was a time, when all the body’s members

Rebell’d against the belly; thus accus’d it:
That only like a gulf it did remain
I’th’midst o’th’body, idle and unactive,
Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 251

Like labour with the rest, where th’other instruments

Did see, and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,
And, mutually participate, did minister
Unto the appetite and affection common
Of the whole body. (Cor. 1.1.95–104)

Menenius’s parable does indeed have the ring of a “tale.” His first line—
“There was a time…”—engages his audience in a nostalgic narrative of
Rome’s, and the play’s, past and, of course, future. This vision of civil war
dramatized on the human body posits an idle and consuming belly that is
attacked by the active, functioning “instruments” of the body and reduced
to a “gulf”—a sort of remainder or leftover of the attack. These instru-
ments’ actions are imagined in terms of seven distinct verbs—see, hear,
devise, instruct, walk, feel, and minister—each of which tracks a particular
stage, or role, in the violent attack. The list of these verbs, each associ-
ated with a particular faculty of a part of the human body, underscores
the divided nature of this corporal and political body. This is an inversion
of the functional model of the body’s disparate parts working together
harmoniously that is posited in Corinthians: “And the eye cannot say unto
the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have
no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem
to be more feeble, are necessary” (I Cor 12.21–22). These body parts are
“mutually participate,” and yet the “whole body” of the last line fails to
materialize. The mutuality here is that of coordination and perhaps simul-
taneity, not union. One envisions the “gulf” of the belly: a void, an absence
and, most importantly and paradoxically, a leftover or remainder. This belly
is all-consuming and non-laboring, non-participant, set apart. It is not an
“instrument” but rather an inactive, motionless mass attacked by what
Menenius will call “the mutinous parts” (Cor. 1.1.110). The First Citizen
to whom he speaks adopts this language of the divided and mutinous body:

Your belly’s answer—what?

The kingly crown’d head, the vigilant eye,
The counselor heart, the arm our soldier
Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter,
With other muniments and petty helps
In this our fabric. (Cor. 1.1.113–8)

The term “fabric” refers to the contrivance, construction or formation of

a body or edifice. “Fabric” is derived from the Latin “fabrica” and “faber,”
252 S. HARLAN

which refers to a worker in metal, stone, or wood and is related to the

verb “to forge.” Like the militarized body of Antony as it is constructed
by Cleopatra, fabric is the product of skilled and specialized workmanship.
This understanding of “fabric” as associated with hard materials such as
metal pre-dates the more common seventeenth-century understanding of
fabric as any form of woven textile. “Fabric,” therefore, was hard before
it was soft.63 The “muniments” or fortifications the First Citizen refers to
here are designed to protect a solid, impenetrable surface. The word “fab-
ric” has important resonances for both the human body and for the city.
One speaks of the “fabric” of a city as one does the “fabric” of clothing,
and ideally, neither should be torn apart.
Jean MacIntyre notes that the “costumes of Coriolanus and Aufidius
combine the realistic and the symbolic, showing not only changes in activ-
ity (peace or war) and changes in the status of Coriolanus, but also changes
in their relationship.”64 She suggests that the characters’ costumes in Act
1 were “somewhat military” in order to “facilitate the rapid addition of
armor for the ensuing war scenes” in Act 2.65 If this is true, Coriolanus is
transformed between these two acts from a composite—or a figure whose
clothing negotiates a relationship between the realms of the civic and the
military—to an entirely militarized figure. Shortly thereafter, he will be
asked to shed this military self and to integrate himself fully into civic life,
a demand that he will perceive as tantamount to stripping him of his cloth-
ing. The “gown of humility” referred to in the stage direction at 2.3.41
and by the Third Citizen (Cor. 2.3.42)—or what Coriolanus refers to as a
“wolvish toge” (Cor. 2.3.114)—stands in stark contrast to his armor and is
utterly repulsive to him. He resents wearing this costume and participating
in the “custom” of which it is a part:

I do beseech you,
Let me o’erleap that custom; for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them
For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage. Please you
That I may pass this doing. (Cor. 2.2.135–39)

The “gown of humility” becomes an emblem of Coriolanus’s resistance

to this civic role, a resistance that he imagines in terms of acting: “It is a
part/That I shall blush in acting …” (Cor. 2.2.144–45). Like his military
dress, his wounds legitimate him as a warrior.66
Coriolanus’s desire to remain in military dress, and thus in the military
realm, underscores his rigidity, both literal and figurative, as well as his
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 253

status as a figure bound by militant nostalgia. He can’t envision a future

apart from his violent past; he refuses to make the transition from war
to peace that triumph required. This civic battle over his clothing draws
attention to the broader role of clothing in the play as problematically
deceptive and performative. Immediately after his public appearance,
Coriolanus asks, “May I change these garments?” (Cor. 2.3.144); at the
root of this request is his desire to “[know] myself again” (Cor. 2.3.146).
Coriolanus’s clothing does not reflect his interiority, which links him to
the figure of Antony. In both cases, the audience is left with the troubling
suspicion that a costume change indicates that a character’s outer self may
not be aligned with his inner self. Costume is established as a signifier
that may improperly signify. In other words, it is a mode of disguise. Like
Antony, who fears his armor will be spoiled by his enemy, Coriolanus fears
that he, too, will be stripped. In donning the robe of state, he fears that he
will “stand naked” in front of the people he so disdains. Antony may be
spoiled in the military realm, but Coriolanus is spoiled in the civic realm
before he is spoiled by Rome’s enemies. Clifford Ronan notes that in early
modern English plays about ancient Rome, “Rome and her citizens rep-
resented power, puissance, rhome, though Rome and Romans could also
figure forth loss and emptiness.”67 Both Coriolanus and Antony figure this
emptiness as nakedness: without one’s clothing, one is nothing.
This scene occurs after Cominius’s lengthy and detailed report of
Coriolanus’s actions in battle, which offers a glimpse of the militarized
Coriolanus—an armored figure that is most fully realized, most created
and creating, in the destruction of battle. Cominius imagines Coriolanus’s
military prowess as the “perpetual” spoiling of enemy bodies:

And to the battle came he, where he did

Run reeking over the lives of men, as if
‘Twere a perpetual spoil; and till we call’d
Both field and city ours, he never stood
To ease his breast with panting. (Cor. 2.2.118–22)

Unlike Antony, Coriolanus is not a figure of ease and repose. The term
“perpetual” refers to that which is lasting or destined to last forever and
that which is continuous in time without interruption or remission.
Coriolanus the man is engaged in a project that the play itself cannot
accomplish: namely, to present a Rome that is unbroken with the present
moment—a Rome free of discontinuities, continuous, and reaccessible.
Coriolanus’s “spoil” is perpetual: he is engaged in a never-ceasing act of
254 S. HARLAN

military spoiling, of transforming the subjects engaged in war into objects

of display in times of peace.
How Coriolanus engages with spoils of war reveals his character, but
this relationship is unstable and ever-shifting. In Act 2, his rejection of
the war’s spoils determines his worthiness as a consul. Cominius says that,

Our spoils he kick’d at,

And look’d upon things precious as they were
The common muck of the world. He covets less
Than misery itself would give, rewards
His deeds with doing them, and is content
To spend the time to end it. (Cor. 2.2.124–9)

The spoils are reduced to the “common muck of the world,” and
“deeds”—not loot—are their own “reward.” Later in the play, how-
ever, Brutus accuses Coriolanus of coveting spoils. This is a reversal of
Cominius’s earlier statement and indicates an important shift in how
Coriolanus is perceived as a civic and military leader:

In this point charge him home, that he affects

Tyrannical power. If he evade us there,
Enforce him with his envy to the people,
And that the spoil got on the Antiates
Was ne’er distributed. (Cor. 3.3.1–5)

Although the play does not back up this accusation, Coriolanus’s

“tyrannical power” is imagined as the guarding of spoils. That he has not
distributed these objects to all is a violation of accepted military codes.
The construction of Coriolanus as a military subject is successful, but
crucially he is unable to be transferred from the military to the civic realm,
a failure that is characterized by Aufidius in terms of military dress:

First, he was
A noble servant to them, but he could not
Carry his honours even. Whether ‘twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of; or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’casque to th’cushion, but commanding peace
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 255

Even with the same austerity and garb

As he controll’d the war. (Cor. 4.7.37–47)

Here, the “garb” with which Coriolanus controlled the war is both
the grace and elegance of his manners, appearance and behavior and also
his fashion of dress, particularly his official or distinctive military dress.
In other words, military clothing can control and command and must
therefore be shed as one enters civic life, but it is precisely this costume
change that Coriolanus cannot perform. This problem of transitioning
from “the casque to the cushion” is central to the play. Coriolanus cannot
be removed from his Roman military context and perform, or be per-
formed, in the realm of the civic.68 He cannot enter into this space. In the
prologue to Henry V, the chorus asks:

Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt? (H5 1.0.11–4)

As in Coriolanus, the “casques,” or helmets, of which the chorus speaks

are a figure for the war’s excessiveness, its status as uncontained. The theater
seeks to contain—to “cram” the objects of war, and by extension war itself—
into a circumscribed space. The chorus draws attention to the limitations of
representation and to the spatial limitations of the theater. Coriolanus must
likewise be “crammed” into the seat of government in the senate house,
but this undertaking fails. As in Henry V, this failure is imagined in theatri-
cal terms. The movement from “th’casque to th’cushion” is one from top
to bottom: that is, from the head to the seat. This juxtaposition of helmet
and cushion serves to underscore the repose associated with times of peace,
but the “cushion” may also have resonated with the playhouse audience,
who could purchase cushions along with their admission. Such a resonance
would underscore the connection between the theater and the city.
Although here Aufidius means to be critical of Coriolanus, he repro-
duces the language of Volumnia’s critique of peace at the beginning of
the play, a critique that appeared in Julius Caesar. According to Volumnia,
the armored shell of the corporeal body (not the body itself) is rendered
lethargic in times of peace. She asserts that the military man may
“voluptuously surfeit out of action” (Cor. 1.3.25). It is war that asserts
that the self will not overflow and be dispersed beyond its boundaries.
Like the military clothing that attends it, war assures that one remains
256 S. HARLAN

contained but, more importantly, it also “becomes him” (Cor. 1.3.339).

As she says, his “bloody brow” (Cor. 1.33.38) “more becomes a man/
Than gilt his trophy” (Cor. 1.3.39–40).69 Robert S. Miola refers to this as
“an extravagant simile,”70 and indeed it has an extravagant effect, for the
comparison objectifies Coriolanus as his own spoil of war. The blood that
coats his forehead renders him a trophy; in other words, it so “becomes”
or suits him that he indeed “becomes” the wounds that mark his body and
render him a trophy. This principle of “becoming” allies the material and
the abstract: an accessory, property or garment may “become” a subject in
the sense of befit or accord with him (as in the Tamburlaine plays), as may
an attribute, quality, or action. Volumnia constructs her son’s militarized
body and spoils, or claims, him as proof of her own capacity as armorer.
Coriolanus himself spoils his mother’s language. In the next scene, he
adopts her idiom when he asserts, “Now put your shields before your
hearts, and fight/With hearts more proof that shields” (Cor. 1.4.23–4).
Volumnia invokes a specifically military mode of “proof” when she recalls,
“… I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now
in first seeing he had proved himself a man” (Cor. 1.3.14–18).
The “casque” that constructs and entraps Coriolanus is one of the play’s
few references to suits of armor. Menenius is the only other figure to invoke
a suit of armor explicitly in the play: “For the whole state, I would put mine
armour on,/Which I can hardly bear” (Cor. 3.2.33–34). Coriolanus wears
“this war’s garland” (Cor. 1.9.59), a gown of humility (Cor. 2.3.41), and
“mean apparel, disguised and muffled” when he arrives in Antium (Cor.
4.4.1), but he is not clothed in armor. Coriolanus’s clothing is thus an
improper signifier—that is, it fails to adequately represent the identity of
the subject that wears it. This dynamic is dramatized most explicitly when
Coriolanus is disguised in Act 4. When he appears at Aufidius’s door, the
Third Servingman describes him as a “strange guest” (Cor. 4.5.36), pre-
sumably alluding estrangement between his claim of gentlemanly status
and his ragged appearance, which leads the servingman to address him as
“poor gentleman” (Cor. 4.5.31). After Coriolanus and Aufidius have made
their pact to destroy Rome, the servingmen reflect on the nature of disguise
and “false report” which echoes Cominius’s earlier reference to the earlier
“good report” (Cor. 1.9.54) of Coriolanus through the streets of Rome:

First Servingman: Here’s a strange alteration!

Second Servingman: By my hand, I had thought to have strucken him with
a cudgel; and yet my mind gave me his clothes made a false report of him.
(Cor. 4.5.149–53)
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 257

Of course, all costume makes “false report” of the self, but the Second
Servingman’s acknowledgment of the capacity of clothing to provide a
“false report” is checked by his insistence that he was not fooled by the
disguise. The servingmen’s insistence on their ability to read Coriolanus’s
physiognomy—“I knew by his face …” and “He had, sir, a kind of face
…” (Cor. 4.5.157–58)—suggests that Coriolanus’s status as a militarized
figure is registered or inscribed on his body rather than on his clothing,
but the success of his disguise belies these claims. The First Servingman
refers to his proper recognition of Coriolanus as an “alteration,” which
connotes a change in the self and in the material—that is, clothing that can
be altered as by a tailor.
The servingmen note that the production of non-military clothing
flourishes in times of peace. The Second Servingman says, “This peace is
nothing but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers” (Cor.
4.5.226–7). In other words, peace destroys armor (“iron”) and produces
an excess of non-military, “tailored” clothing. His companion, the First
Servingman, concurs:

Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s sprightly
walking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled,
deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a
destroyer of men. (Cor. 4.5.228–32)

Although the term “vent” is generally glossed as “scent,” and the meta-
phor as one of hunting, I think it is more likely that war is here charac-
terized as capable of “venting”—that is, as able to both utter words and
to release air as from a confined space, thus aligning this image with the
description in Antony and Cleopatra of Antony’s transformation into “the
bellows and the fan/To cool a gypsy’s lust” (Ant. 1.1.9–10). War is “full
of vent”—it is a closed space with a profoundly full interior; Coriolanus
invokes a similar image of the fullness and excess of war when he refers
to Cominius as “too full/Of the war’s surfeits” (Cor. 4.1.45–46). War
“exceeds peace” as peace is empty, sluggish, and “insensible,” a dead thing,
but war is also excess itself, one extreme of the binary the Servingman
establishes. Menenius Agrippa asserts that Coriolanus’s character or self is
made manifest physically in his observation that, “What his breast forges,
that his tongue must vent” (Cor. 3.1.256), and later in the play Cominius
remembers Coriolanus when he was a “nothing”: “He was a kind of noth-
ing, titleless,/Till he had forg’d himself a name o’th’fire/Of burning
Rome” (Cor. 5.1.13–15). Here, again, the construction of Coriolanus is
258 S. HARLAN

imagined in terms of forging and venting, metaphors of metallurgy. His

physicality is not the same as his corporeality; his body is envisioned as the
product of labor and work.
Coriolanus embodies an “intemperance” associated with war in the
play. Brutus says of him that

he hath been us’d

Ever to conquer, and to have his worth
Of contradiction. Being once chaf’d, he cannot
Be rein’d again to temperance. (Cor. 3.3.25–8)

In Antony and Cleopatra, we learn that Antony “reneges all tem-

per/And is become the bellows and the fan/To cool a gipsy’s lust”
(Ant. 1.1.9–10). His abandonment of restraint—the accusation that he
“reneges all temper”—is a metaphor of the armories, for “temper” refers
to the particular degree of hardness and elasticity or resiliency imparted
to steel by tempering. In other words, his heart has lost the hardness
and resiliency of good steel that it formerly possessed in war. Antony
himself invokes this discourse of temperance when he says to Cleopatra,
“For I am sure,/Though you can guess what temperance should be,/You
know not what it is” (Ant. 3.13.125–26), an observation supported by
Proculeius in Act 5 when she attempts to curb Cleopatra’s self-destruc-
tive tendencies with the ineffectual appeal, “O temperance, lady!” (Ant.
5.2.48). The noun form of “temper” is derived from the Old French
“tempre,” or proportion, which was modified in the fifteenth century to
“trempe,” which referred both to the temper of steel and to the physical
constitution of man. This is, of course, where we derive the modern usage
of the word “temper”—namely, that one might “be out of temper” or
“lose one’s temper.” “Temperance” is related to one’s “temperament.”
In medieval physiology, “temperament” referred to the combination of
the four cardinal humours of the body (blood, phlegm, choler, and black
choler or melancholy), by the relative proportion of which the physi-
cal and mental constitution of the subject were held to be determined.
But “temperament” also connotes a process of moderation and regula-
tion, resulting in a middle path between extremes. A proper and bal-
anced “temperament” is the result of “temperance,” or the restraining of
passions and desires and the abstinence from activities or situations that
might overwhelm or intoxicate the self. In other words, the immaterial
(character) or the material (steel) might possess a particular “temper.”
 THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 259

In Measure for Measure, Escalus asserts that Angelo lacks “tempered

judgement” (MM 5.1.471), and in The Tempest (1611), Ariel informs
Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio that

the elements
Of whom your swords are tempered may as well
Wound the loud winds … as diminish
One dowl that’s in my plume. (Temp. 3.3.61–65)

This quality of “temper” allows one to make distinctions between the

character of subjects and the value or worth of objects as in Henry 6,
Part 1 when Warwick muses, “Between two blades, which bears the bet-
ter temper” (1H6 2.4.13). This term provides a basis for the judgment of
subjects and objects and thus plays a crucial role in warfare and militarism.
This principle of temperance is an ancient Roman—and early modern
English—value in these plays that bears a relationship to virtus, an abstrac-
tion that allows for the concrete evaluation and regulation of the subject.
Coriolanus is an intemperate subject—that is, in his inability to be
“rein’d again to temperance,” he is unsuitable to the extra-military or civic
realm, the realm of the “cushion.” When Coriolanus faces the tribunes of
the people and Plebeians in Act 3, Menenius must remind him to hold
his temper—“Nay, temperately! your promise!” (Cor. 3.3.68)—which
fails to calm Coriolanus. In Act 5, Aufidius refers somewhat ironically to
Coriolanus’s constancy in his betrayal of Rome when he observes that
Coriolanus “[keeps] a constant temper” (Cor. 5.2.92). But this constancy
does not last. In her successful appeal to her son to spare Rome, Volumnia
presents two possible triumphs with different sets of spoils, Coriolanus
himself or his Roman kin:

for either thou

Must as a foreign recreant be led
With manacles through our streets, or else
Triumphantly tread on thy country’s ruin,
And bear the palm for having bravely shed
Thy wife and children’s blood. (Cor. 5.3.113–8)

Coriolanus’s murder echoes and forecasts Caesar’s murder by a mob.

He intends to spoil Rome in an act of revenge, but spares it and is in turn
spoiled himself by Rome’s enemies. He does not “triumphantly tread” on
his country but is himself tread upon. Aufidius underscores Coriolanus’s
260 S. HARLAN

transformation into a trophy of spoil by standing on him, an act that draws

attention to Aufidius’s status as subject and Coriolanus’s reduction to
object. The stage direction indicates that, “The Conspriators draw, and
kill Martius, who falls; Aufidius stands on him” (Cor. 5.6.131). A “Third
Lord” echoes Volumnia’s language when he appeals to Aufidius to, “Tread
not upon him” (Cor. 5.6.133), but the ethos of triumph requires that
before Coriolanus’s body can be “take[en] up” (Cor. 5.6.147), it must
be physically debased or violated. This is a powerful theatrical enacting of
Benjamin’s “procession in which the present rulers set over those who are
lying prostrate,” and this moment literalizes the play’s metaphoric engage-
ment with spoiling.

NOTES
1. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Alen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1961),
330–1.
2. Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 1.
3. See Anderson.
4. Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties,
and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 13. Wilder also
reminds us that, “[Robert] Fludd’s memory theatre, a mnemonic locus
designed for use by students of the arts of memory, so closely echoes the
dimensions and physical arrangement of the London theatres that, with
the additional evidence of its name, Frances Yates was led to speculate that
it was modeled on the Globe” (15).
5. Garrett A.  Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance
Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005), 3.
6. Jones and Stallybrass maintain that the armored King Hamlet “activates a
specific memory system: the transmission of property, including armor, as
the material ‘remember me’s’ which mark the heir as the living embodi-
ment of his father, Hamlet as Hamlet. If the father dies, his material iden-
tity survives in the helm and crest, the target or shield, the coat of arms
which heralds carried in front of the coffin at his funeral” (250). As Harris
notes of Stallybrass and Jones’ analysis of clothing on the early modern
stage, “Textiles, multiply inscribed by corporeality and memory, are resis-
tant to the synchronizations and temporal purifications of thick descrip-
tion and cultural biography. In Stallybrass’s garments, we can glimpse
another temporality that exceeds and complicates the reifications of the
self-identical moment and the diachronic sequence” (10).
THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 261

7. M.W.  MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background

[1910] (London: Macmillan, 1967), 11.
8. Ronan, 7.
9. See Robert S.  Miola’s Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983). Maurice Charney (1961) and Derek Traversi
(1963) generally follow MacCallum.
10. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in
the Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 207–8.
11. Ibid.
12. Charney, 208.
13. Regarding the value of virtus so central to these plays, Lisa Starkes-Estes
reminds us that it “surfaced in sixteenth-century England as a nostalgic
response to the changing role of the nobleman from warrior/soldier to
courtier.” See Starkes-Estes, “Virtus, Vulnerability, and the Emblazoned
Male Body in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” Violent Masculinities: Male
Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, ed. Jennifer Feather and
Catherine E. Thomas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 85–108, 95.
14. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256.
15. Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs, 37.
16. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, Paper Museums: The Reproductive
Print in Europe, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005), 11.
17. Michael Serres, Statues (Paris, Francois Bourin, 1987), 111.
18. Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993), 5.
19. Derrida, Specters, 7–8.
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 170–1.
21. Foucault, Discipline, 173.
22. Sue Welsh Reed and Richard Wallace, Italian Etchers of the Renaissance &
Baroque (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), 83. Reed and Wallace
note that, “Prints were collected primarily either for subject matter (that
is, maps, views, portraits) or out of admiration for the designer (such as
Raphael, Michelangelo, or Titian), rather than the collector’s interest in
the printmaker” (Introduction, xvi).
23. In her study of the sixteenth-century ornament prints in the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, Elizabeth Miller notes that, “… the subject
‘ornament’ had a secure place in print-publishing and collecting in the
sixteenth century.” She also notes that among the justifications for collect-
ing given by sixteenth-century writers were moral edification, organiza-
tion, and stimulus for the memory, and the condensation of universal
262 S. HARLAN

knowledge (Sixteenth-Century Italian Ornament Prints in the Victoria

and Albert Museum [London: V&A Publications, 1999], 8).
24. Mary Sidney, The Tragedy of Antony, in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology
of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arhur B.  Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000).
25. As Springer points out, this aesthetic has implications for understandings
of protection and defense: “Classical armour complicates the paradoxes
associated with armour by imitating its own absence. By simulating an
unarmed nude, the thorax implicitly denies the protection it affords, creat-
ing a freestanding monument to the autonomy of the individual” (30).
26. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 18.
27. Vernant further notes that, “… the term ‘colossus’ which is not neuter in
gender and whose origins are pre-Greek, is connected to the root kol-
which is associated with certain place names in Asia Minor (Kolossai,
Kolophon, Koloura), and which retains the idea of something erected,
something that has been set up. This is what appears to distinguish the
colossus from other archaic idols—the bretas and the xoanon, for
instance—whose appearance is, from many points of view, similar, with
their rigid posture and their arms and legs welded to the body. But the
bretas and xoanon seem to have been almost always moveable … The fun-
damental characteristic of the colossus, on the other hand, is that it is fixed
to one spot, immobile.” See Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks
(London: Routledge, 1965), 305.
28. Vernant, 306.
29. Ibid.
30. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 98.
31. Insofar as he incarnates in his own person the elements that are usually
distinguished from death, homo sacer is, so to speak, a living statue, the
double or the colossus of himself. In the body of the surviving devotee
and, even more unconditionally, in the body of homo sacer, the ancient
world finds itself confronted for the first time with a life that, excepting
itself in a double exclusion from the real context of both the profane and
the religious forms of life, is defined solely by virtue of having entered into
an intimate symbiosis with death without, nevertheless, belonging to the
world of the deceased” (Agamben, 99–100).
32. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 19.
33. Ibid. Engel also attends to the question of multiple perspectives in the
early modern theater. See Chap. 2, “‘But yet each circumstance I taste not
fully’: Spectacles of Ruin,” in Death and Drama, 65–85.
34. Joachim du Bellay, Antiquitez de Rome, ed. Malcolm C.  Smith
(Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 25.
THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 263

35. The French reads as follows:

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome

Et rien de Rome ed Rome n’appercois:
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.

36. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the
Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999),
Introduction, xxvii-xxviii. For a survey of humanist understandings of
antiquities, see Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical
Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), Chapters 8 and 9 and on anti-
quarianism, see Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, Chap. 2. On an
“archaeological consciousness” in the Renaissance, see Philip Schwyzer,
Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
37. John Archer notes the interrelatedness of foolery and antiquity in his anal-
ysis of these lines: “These bacchanals are Egyptian indeed, and Octavius
fears their effect upon his appearance, his speech. And his brain or core
sense of identity. For it is not only the physical signs of drunkenness, but
also the way they mark the foreign god’s power over his subjects, that
provoke Octavius’ panic. He has almost been ‘antick’d,’ both made into a
figure of foolery and submerged in an antiquity whose kinship he refuses
to acknowledge” (Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in
Early Modern English Writing [Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001], 54).
38. Stallybrass, “Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage,”
Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia,
Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 315.
39. Quoted in Burckhardt, 108.
40. John W.  Velz, “The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or
Anachronism? A Retrospect,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 11.
41. See Sawday on the mechanical body, 22–32.
42. Floyd-Wilson, p. 130.
43. John Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of
the Plays (London and New York: Palgrave, 2005), 128.
44. Archer further maintains that, “Dressed as a cook, Titus finally asserts the
privilege of the craftsman; his feast would also recall for the audience the
ceremonial dinners regularly mounted by the livery in crafts of every
stripe. Nevertheless, there is a diminution in his final role, especially when
it is compared with his turn as the victorious general of the first act …
As in the English history plays, the proud violence of aristocratic warfare
264 S. HARLAN

has been reduced to the demotic brutality of the kitchen or the butcher’s
shop.” See Archer, Citizen Shakespeare, 129.
45. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984).
46. Miller’s reference to the “the triumphal topos of outdoing” (83) is
relevant here.
47. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and
the Roman Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 173.
48. H.A. Mason, Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (London: Chatto and Windus,
1970), 242.
49. Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: Human Body as Image of the World
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1975), 4.
50. Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women
(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 145.
51. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 97.
52. W.G. Sebald makes an observation about the architecture of warfare that
might be applied to the bodies that engage in warfare, as well: “In the
practice of warfare … the star-shaped fortresses which were being built
and improved everywhere during the eighteenth century did not answer
their purpose, for intent as everyone was on that pattern, it had been for-
gotten that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy
forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain
on the defensive … The frequent result … of resorting to measures of
fortification, marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elabora-
tion, was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically invit-
ing the enemy to attack it …” See Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Random
House, 2001), 19.
53. Rusty armor is very rarely staged in Shakespeare’s plays. The only other
instance occurs in a stage direction at the beginning of 3.5 of the Folio
version of King Richard III (c.1591), which indicates that Richard and
Buckingham enter “in rotten Armour, marvellous ill-favored” (R3 3.5.1).
“Rotten” indicates physically decayed (a literal definition) as well as mor-
ally or politically corrupt (a figurative definition). There are several non-
Shakespearean instances of staging rusty armour in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In Robert Wilson’s The Cobler’s Prophecy (c.1590),
we find the following stage direction: “Enter Souldier, Raph, Mars his
lame Porter in rustie armour, and a broken bill, the Herrald with a pensill
and colours.” The kingdom is sick owing to the primacy of Contempt, and
Mars has been reduced to the state of a Porter. The characters discuss the
significance of the rusty armour in some detail. Raph asks, “Art thou one
of God Mars his traine?/Alas good father thou art lame,/To be a souldier
farre vnlustie,/Thy beard is gray thy armour rustie,/Thy bill I thinke be
THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 265

broken too.” Mars the Porter responds, “Friend make not thou so much
adoo,/My lamenes comes by warre,/My armours rustines comes by
peace,/A maimed souldier made Mars his Porter,/Lo this am I: now
questioning cease” (734–46). His association of peace with rusty armor
echoes many Shakespearean references and underscores the objects’ status
as fallen off from previous (military) standards (The Cobler’s Prophecy, ed.
A.C. Wood [Oxford: Malone Society, 1914]). In Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher’s The Faithful Friends (c.1604–26), the foolish Sir Pergamus
appears “in an old Armor a Capons tayle in his Beauer, a long sword; and
D‹i›ndimus a Dwarfe carying his Launce and Sheilde” (1047–50). Sir
Pergamus anounces that he is dressed “in Armes compleate,” but he does
not mention the rusty state of his garments. Rather, he attends to his
“long toole” and “prick shaft” (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The
Faithful Friends, ed. G.R. Proudfoot [Oxford: Malone Society, 1975]). I
also explore Pericles’ rusty suit or armor in “‘Certain condolements, cer-
tain vails’: Staging Rusty Armor in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” Early Theatre,
vol. 11.2, December 2008.
54. The armor is a nostalgic material manifestation of the moribund. In her
study of archaic style in sixteenth and seventeenth century, Lucy Munro
argues of the theatre that, “… dramatists used archaism to … make theat-
rical time run backward, or to confuse the boundaries between past and
present, between one theatrical generation and another. Yet to recreate
the theatrical past too fully would be to risk entering a recursive loop, in
which both dramatist and audience might lose their temporal bearings …
Archaism serves different functions: directing spectators’ reactions; com-
plicating historical narrative; eliciting affect” (176). See Munro, Archaic
Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013). Like theatrical tropes, outdated props and costumes could
also “make theatrical time run backward.”
55. The armor’s rust is also a powerful material reality on stage. Rust is a gen-
eral term for a series of iron oxides formed by the reaction of iron with
oxygen in the presence of water or air moisture. If moisture penetrates
microscopic cracks in iron, and oxygen comes into long-term contact with
the metal, the result is corrosion. Rust cannot easily be stopped, and it will
eventually destroy the object that it attacks. The object will disintegrate; it
will, quite literally, disappear. Rust is a common, everyday form of material
corruption. It implies exposure. But it also marks objects as unused, dis-
engaged, and old. Pericles’ armour is already a semi-destroyed object, an
object marked by the passage of time, when it is presented to its early
modern audience. The rust marks the armor as disappearing, or passing
away, right before one’s eyes.
56. For a reading of the role of class and economics in the scene, see Jones and
Stallybrass, who argue that Pericles is “literally ‘made up’ through the
labors of the poor” (259).
266 S. HARLAN

57. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 18.
58. Kahn, 116. In her foundational study Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in
Shakespeare, Kahn explores how Shakespeare’s “male characters are
engaged in a continuous struggle, first to form a masculine identity, then
to be secure and productive in it.” See Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine
Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of
California Press, 1981), 1. See also Berry on Shakespeare’s “tragic protago-
nists whose masculinity is figuratively unsettled by their encounter with
tragedy, not as stable signifiers of any singularity of either gender or mean-
ing, but rather as sites of maximum undecidability or uncanniness” (5).
59. Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in
Early Modern England (Philadelphia: the University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 11.
60. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in
Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
123.
61. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 125. Garber argues that, “Transvestism is
a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture, the disruptive
element that intervenes, not just a category of male and female, but the
crisis of category itself. The transvestite is the figure of and for that crisis,
the uncanny supplement that marks the place of desire” (16). Ann
Hollander rejects Garber’s emphasis on anxiety and maintains that one
must look to the history of fashion in order to understand cross-dressing
as a cultural phenomenon: “… I think that the model of a spectrum or a
palimpsest is more fitting for ‘cross-dressing,’ as I believe it also is for
actual sexuality. Male and female clothing has certainly been discussed,
described, prescribed, and proscribed in fairly rigid and anxious terms, in
laws, rules, sermons, and memoranda, in the Old Testament and in the
New, in letters, satires, and various fictions … But in wear, it has been
more complex, and has behaved much more imaginatively, than any writ-
ings reveal.” See Hollander, Feeding the Eye (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1999), 166.
62. As Stephen Orgel notes, “[Cleopatra] replicates the behavior of Queen
Omphale with Antony’s ancestor Hercules, commanded by the gods to
serve her as her slave in whatever capacity she wished. Omphale set him to
doing women’s household work; in some versions of the story this was
intended simply as a humiliation, but in others it was a device to keep him
by her side, and Hercules fell deeply in love with her. Ancient representa-
tions of the couple show Hercules in Omphale’s garments and holding her
distaff, while she wears his lion skin and bears his club.” See Stephen
THE ARMORED BODY AS TROPHY: THE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN SUBJECT… 267

Orgel, Impersonations: The performance of gender in Shakespeare’s England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78.
63. Ultimately, the relationship between the design of armor and textiles was
a reciprocal one. S.V.  Grancsay notes that the design of early modern
armor drew on trends in textiles. He points out that the breast and back
plates of fifteenth-century Italian armor were often decorated with
“curved flutings and ridges that simulate the folds and pleatings of the
civil dress,” and that sixteenth-century German armor “imitated in etched
decoration the designs woven into fabrics” (“The Mutual Influence of
Costume and Armor: A Study of Specimens at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 3 [1931]: 195 and 198).
64. Jean MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres (Alberta:
University of Alberta Press, 1992), 301.
65. Ibid.
66. As in Shakespeare’s English history plays, wounds often legitimate the
soldier. Page DuBois argues that the wound feminizes Coriolanus in “A
Disturbance of Syntax at the Gates of Rome,” Stanford Literature Review
2 (1985): 185–208. Madelon Sprengnether argues that the wound repre-
sents the humiliation of being rendered female in “Annihilating Intimacy
in Coriolanus,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary
and Historical Perspectives, ed. M.B.  Rose, M.B. (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1986).
67. Ronan, 152.
68. John W.  Velz notes that Coriolanus is a second Turnus, a figure that
belongs on the battlefield, not in the realm of the civic. See Velz, “Cracking
Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in
Coriolanus” ELR 13 (1983): 58–69. T.J. B. Spencer has commented on
the fact that the city in Coriolanus is drawn in minute detail. See Spencer,
“Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10
(1957): 34. And Gail Kern Paster argues that although the architecture of
the city allows the viewer to assess the characters’ interior states, Rome
remains separate from Coriolanus himself. See Paster, “To Starve with
Feeding: the City in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1978): 123–44.
69. For more on how blood in the play relates to different models of the male
body in early modern England, see Starkes-Estes, 89–91.
70. Miola, 171.
 Coda: “Let’s Do’t After the High Roman
Fashion”: Funeral and Triumph

In the final moments of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare treats the

relationship between the Roman triumph and two related early modern
English practices: funerals and the theater. In the last chapter, I argued that
Cleopatra’s arming of Antony for battle belied an acute anxiety regarding
the possibility of the Roman military subject’s reduction to a military tro-
phy by his spoiler. At the end of Act 4, when the fatally wounded Antony is
hoisted up to Cleopatra, he speaks of “put[ting] off my helmet,” a phrase
that echoes Marlowe’s treatment of the shedding of military dress in the
Tamburlaine plays:

The miserable change now at my end,

Lament nor sorrow at, but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o’th’world,
The noblest: and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countrymen. (Ant. 4.15.59–65)

Antony appeals to Cleopatra not to grieve—or “lament”—his death.

In his final moments, he claims the Roman values of nobility, virtue, and
courage and rejects the alternative: namely, that he may have “cowardly
put off [his] helmet to/[His] countrymen.” This hypothetical “put[ting]
off” of the helmet would emblematize a rejection of his military identity

© The Author(s) 2016 269

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2_7
270 S. HARLAN

and a loss of its attendant values. Antony’s attention to one part of his
military dress reminds the audience of the scene of his arming and assures
them that his militarized body has remained intact and cohesive. In death,
Antony is indeed reduced to an object, but not to a military trophy per
se: Cleopatra describes him as a “withered … garland of the war” (Ant.
4.15.73), and when Dercetus enters in the next scene, he carries Antony’s
sword. This sword operates as a remainder, a leftover that stands in for
an absent subject—much as Sidney’s military dress did in his heraldic
funeral. This sword is also a spoil of sorts as Dercetus took it violently
from Antony’s dead body. He reports that, “This is his sword:/I robbed
his wound of it. Behold it stained/With his most noble blood” (Ant.
5.1.27–30). Although the sword is intended to prove Antony’s adherence
to the values of Romanitas and his status as self-slaughtering, it back-
fires: far from a simple emblem of violence, it becomes the impetus for
Caesar’s own mourning of his great enemy; the “noble blood” that stains
the sword gives rise to tears that “wash the eyes of kings” (Ant. 5.1.33).
Like many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra ends with
the anticipation of funerals. In Act 4, Cleopatra looks forward to Antony’s
funeral:

Our lamp is spent, it’s out.—Good sirs, take heart,

We’ll bury him, and then, what’s brave, what’s noble,
Let’s do’t after the high Roman fashion
And make death proud to take us. (Ant. 4.15.97–99)

The “it” to which she refers in “Let’s do’t after the high Roman fash-
ion” is ostensibly her own self-slaughter, but “it” also refers to Antony’s
funeral obsequies and rites: in other words, both suicide and proper burial
should “make death proud to take us.” Cleopatra confines herself to her
“monument” (Ant. 5.1.61) at the beginning of Act 5; she anticipates her
own death by prematurely situating herself in a funereal space. But her
own anticipations are mirrored by the triumphant aspirations of Caesar,
who looks forward to parading her as a spoil of war in Rome. He says,
“For her life in Rome/Would be eternal in our triumph” (Ant. 5.1.75–
76). The last act of the play is dominated by obsessive accounts of this
event. Cleopatra’s first description is as follows:

Shall they hoist me up

And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt.
 CODA: “LET’S DO’T AFTER THE HIGH ROMAN FASHION”… 271

Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud

Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! Rather make
My country’s high pyramids my gibbet
And hang me up in chains! (Ant. 5.2.65–72)

Cleopatra compares her horror of being “show[n]” in triumph to an

alternate scenario: the rotting of her abandoned corpse. This later vision
would “Blow [her] into abhorring”—it would render her a different kind
of object of horror. This language returns us to Benjamin’s admonishment
regarding the “horror” of spoils of war; Cleopatra prefers that her body
be spoiled by rotting rather than spoiled in triumph, and she elaborates on
this grotesque, Hamlet-esque vision in her conversation with the Clown
regarding the “joy o’th’worm” (Ant. 5.2.321). Proculeius also employs
the term “horror” in his suggestion that Cleopatra’s imagination is more
vivid than is warranted: “You do extend/These thoughts of horror further
than you shall/Find cause in Caesar,” (Ant. 5.2.73–75) but she knows
that Caesar will exercise his right as spoiler: “He’ll lead me, then, in tri-
umph” (Ant. 5.2.132). She is only one of many spoiled objects at the
end of the play, for she must also hand over her possessions to him. She
offers him “the brief of money, plate, and jewels/I am possessed of …”
(Ant. 5.2.165–67), and an anxious discussion ensues regarding whether
Cleopatra has held back any “immoment toys” or “nobler token” (Ant.
5.2.196 and 198).
Caesar himself invokes a discourse of the marketplace in his anticipa-
tion of his triumph, but he rejects this alternate model of acquisition and
assures her that, “Caesar’s no merchant to make prize with you/Of things
that merchants sold” (Ant. 5.2.215–16). Crucially, Cleopatra’s narrative
of Caesar’s triumph displaces the triumph itself, which her act of suicide
assures will never occur. Her famous narrative re-imagines the triumph
as a version of the early modern English theater, a debased and vulgar
performance of a lofty historical figure by a “squeaking Cleopatra” (Ant.
5.2.260). To Iras, the triumph is a horrifying spectacle, and she asserts
that, “I’ll never see’t, for I am sure my nails/Are stronger than my eyes”
(Ant. 5.2.264–65). Cleopatra offers the early modern theatrical audience
a description of this pageant, but she denies them its staging.
The triumph is displaced by Cleopatra’s own funeral, which is likewise
beyond the confines of the play. She anticipates her own transformation
into a monument or memorial—“… I have nothing/Of woman in me:
now from head to foot/I am marble-constant …” (Ant. 5.2.282–284).
272 S. HARLAN

She is aware of her own status as preserved—or lasting—rather than spoiled,

and her rejection of her prescribed role in Caesar’s triumph necessitates
another type of performance “after the high Roman fashion”: her funeral.
Caesar’s final speech invokes the role of the military in a funeral that will
assure her “fame”:

Take up her bed,

And bear her women from the monument.
She shall be buried by her Antony
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous: high events as these
Strike those that make them, and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral,
And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
High order in this great solemnity. (Ant. 5.2.417–23)

The “lament” of Antony and Cleopatra’s onstage and offstage audi-

ences replaces Antony’s earlier rejection of lament in the face of death.
The term “lament” appears several times in this scene: Agrippa’s observa-
tion, “And strange it is/That nature must compel us to lament/Our most
persisted deeds,” (Ant. 5.1.34–36) returns us to Tamburlaine’s language
of military “deeds,” and Caesar claims “lament” as a mode of sovereignty
in his apostrophic exclamation:

I must perforce
Have shown to thee such a declining day
Or look on thine: we could not stall together
On the whole world. But yet let me lament,
With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts. (Ant. 5.1.45–49)

Further, Antony’s “solemn show,” or anticipated funeral, displaces the

triumphal victory: one mode of social theater replaces another. The “high
events” of the play itself necessitate the “high order” of a military funeral,
not a popular theatrical performance, and Cleopatra—not a boy actor—will
play herself in this pageant. And so the play ends with a concern that was
operative in the Tamburlaine plays and in the many tributes to Sir Philip
Sidney: how the elite military subject represents, or presents, himself and
is represented by others. Caesar’s attempt to “show” his own power by
 CODA: “LET’S DO’T AFTER THE HIGH ROMAN FASHION”… 273

“showing” Cleopatra in triumph fails, but she will nonetheless be shown

in death. Funeral, not triumph, becomes the dominant metaphor for the
early modern English theater in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, and the
capacity of this ceremony to spoil the subject assures its power as a mode
of representation. Paradoxically, the theatrical replacement of triumph
with funeral preserves spoiling in a more subtle, performative manner.
Sidney’s funeral was civic theater: the parading of a figure that was both
triumphator and spoil, subject and object. The funeral’s militant nostalgia
took the form of figurative violence, an attempt to reclaim that which was
lost. Shakespeare’s Roman plays likewise suggest that the early modern
English subject’s Roman past is perpetually spoiled. In performance, the
past is reimagined in incompletely reconstituted forms. It is repeatedly
reclaimed and repeatedly lost.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 INDEX1

A Agydas (character) (Tamburlaine), 32

Achates (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 92, 95–8, 100,
111n35, 113n45
Achilles, 7, 36–7, 50, 54–5, 81n73,
89, 94, 166, 170, 243, 247
Adonis, 123–4, 126–7, 182n31
Aeneas, 10, 36, 85–104, 106n8,
108n21, 109n24, 110n28,31,
111n35, 112n38,41, 113n45,
166, 198, 215–17, 220–1, 239,
243, 247
Aeneid (Virgil), 18n9, 86–7, 91, 93,
99, 101–3, 107n10, 110n31,
114n53, 215–17, 239, 243
Agamben, Giorgio, 229, 262n31
Agincourt, battle of, 11, 71, 92, 195,
197, 203, 205–6, 208n5,
213n22, 244, 255
Agrippa (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 272
Albanese, Denise, 19n11
Alexander, Gavin, 161, 182n31
Alexander the Great, 3
“Almain,” the term, 55
The Almain Armourer’s Album, 32,
50–1, 55–8, 66, 81n72
Almeda (character) (Tamburlaine), 34
Althusser, Louis, 17n6
The Ambassadors (Holbein), 230
American war of Independence, 77n49
Amyras (character) (Tamburlaine), 50,
61–2, 64
anachronism, 107n16, 147, 199,
208n6, 246
The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton),
150
Anchises, 98, 239
Anderson, Benedict, 16n5
Andreani, Andrea, 221–4
Anman, Jost, 13–14

1
Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

© The Author(s) 2016 301

S. Harlan, Memories of War in Early Modern England,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58012-2
302 INDEX
Annals or a generall Chronicle of
England (1592) (Stow), 121,
145–8, 188n97
Anne of Denmark, 143–4
Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection
(Brown University), 145
Antichrist, 69n13
Antiquitez de Rome (du Bellay), 230–1
antiquity, 1, 3, 109n23, 120, 150,
231, 249, 263n36,37
Antony (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 12, 228, 243–6,
248–50, 252–3, 257–8, 266n62,
269–72
Antony (character) (Julius Caesar),
238–42
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare),
9, 12, 35, 104,
112n37,38218–19, 228, 232,
242–50, 252–3, 257–8, 269–73
(see also Agrippa; Antony;
Charmian; Cleopatra; Cupid;
Dercetus; Eros; Julius Caesar;
Octavius; Philo; Proculeius)
and Apollo, 228
and armor, 248
and battle of Actium, 12
and conventions of romance, 246–7
and Dressing The Roman Subject,
242–50
and fabric, 252
and funeral, 270–1
and Hercules, 250, 266n62
and homoeroticism, 248
and Mars, 242, 244
and “monument, ” 245–6, 270
and Omphale, 250, 266n62
and “relics, ” 104
and shedding military dress, 269
and spoils, 244–5, 248
and temperance, 258
and “vent, ” 257
and Venus, 242, 244
anxiety, 16n4, 71, 101, 120, 128, 153,
157, 161–2, 164, 178n3, 206,
237, 242, 249, 266n61, 269
and “anxiety of influence, ” 120
Apollo, 54, 95, 228
Apology for Poetry (Sidney), 3, 164–5
aposiopesis, 161
apostrophe, 129–30
Appadurai, Arjun, 9
Aries, Philippe, 154
aristocracy, 8, 21n24,30, 32, 55,
75n35, 79n64, 81n72, 86, 117,
143, 151, 185n62, 186n75,
187n80, 263n44
Archer, John, 234, 263n37,44
Ariès, Philippe, 116–17, 154, 188n95
Aristotle, 3
Armour and Masculinity in the Italian
Renaissance (Springer), 6–7
“The Armourer” (Stande und
Handwerker), 14
“arms, ” 76n40
Arnold, Janet, 80n68
The Art of Memory (Yates), 4, 20n15
The Arte of Rhetorique (1553)
(Wilson), 161
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 96
Ascanius (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 97–8
Astarte, 71n18
Astrophel (Spenser) (1595), 9, 106,
122–33, 173, 182n29,31. See also
Adonis; Clorinda; Venus
Athena, 136
attire, 7, 15n3, 21n25, 30, 135–6,
142. See also clothing
Aubrey, John, 156–9, 189n100
audience, 8–13, 30–47, 53–4, 61, 66,
67n4, 68n5, 71n17,18, 74n26,
78n51, 85–91, 106n9, 117, 125,
129–30, 135, 166, 172–3,
186n75, 187n90, 195–8, 203,
213n22, 217–18, 223, 229–30,

237–42, 247, 250–5, 263n44,
265n54,55, 270–2
Aufidius (character) (Coriolanus),
252–6, 259–60
Augustus Caesar, 105n3
B The Body in Parts (Hillman and
Babylon, 71n18
Bacon, Francis, 163–4
Bajazeth (character) (Tamburlaine),
32, 58, 63, 65
Baker, D.J., 209n9
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 234
Baldo, Jonathan, 196–7
Barabas, 71n18
Barabbas for Barabas, 69n13
“barbarian”, 71n18
Barber, C.L., 70n14
Barbour, Richmond, 71n18
Bardolph (character) (Henry V),
201, 203
Barkan, Leonard, 6, 109n26,
231–2, 243
Bartels, Emily, 71n18, 80n66, 111n35
Barthes, Roland, 15n3, 158–9
Barton, Anne, 245
Beard, Mary, 140, 184n51
Bearden, Elizabeth, 109n26
Beaumont, Francis, 264n53
Before Orientalism (Barbour), 71n18
Bellona, 62–3
Benjamin, Walter, 220–1, 235–6, 238,
260, 271
Bennett, Jane, 9, 26n35
Bergeron, David, 148, 187n80
Bergson, Henri, 211n16
Berry, Edward, 165
Berry, Philippa, 266n58
Bevington, David, 43, 46, 66n2, 68n5
Billing, C.M., 16n4
The Black Pinnace (shipping vessel),
147–8
INDEX 303
blood/bleeding, 12–13, 44, 63, 94,
113, 124–7, 131–2, 150, 173–6,
196, 202–4, 213n23, 214n26,
218, 238–41, 255–9, 267n69,
270, 272
Bloom, Harold, 120
Boas, F.S., 147, 185n64
Mazzio), 6
body politic, 209n9, 229, 251
book, his weapon, 42
Bourdieu, Pierre, 111n36
Breitenberg, Mark, 16n4
Brenk, Beat, 2–3
British Library, 145, 186n71,
189n100
Brown, Bill, 24n31
Brown, Georgia, 107n10
Brown, J.R., 83n90
Bruster, Douglas, 43, 258
Brutus, 238–41, 245, 258
and Coriolanus, 254, 258
and Julius Caesar, 238–41, 245
Bryskett, Lodowick, 121–2, 130–1
Burckhardt, Jacob, 69n13
Burke, Peter, 14n1, 15n3
Burnett, M.T., 61
Burton, Jonathan, 71n18
Burton, Robert, 150
Butler, Judith, 73n23
Buxton, John, 181n26, 192n134
Byrd, William, 155
C
Cahill, Patricia, 8, 60, 68n5, 79n56,
80n65
Calbi, Maurizio, 16n4
calculation, 111n36
Callapine (character) (Tamburlaine), 34
Calyphas (character) (Tamburlaine),
50, 61
Campbell, L.B., 71n15
304 INDEX
Canterbury, 198–9, 207n2
carnival, 107n11, 234
Carlson, Marvin, 37
Carlton, Charles, 33
Carnicelli, D.D., 82n84, 141
Carruthers, Mary, 4
Carthage, 90–2, 98–102. See also
Dido, Queen of Carthage
Cassius (character) (Julius Caesar),
228–9, 239–40
Celebinus (character) (Tamburlaine),
34, 41, 50, 61–2
Ceos, Simonides of, 4
Charmian (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 249
Charnes, Linda, 93, 100, 105n6,
112n40
Charney, Maurice, 219
Cheney, Lord Henry, 145
Cheney, Patrick, 87–8, 108n17
Children of the Chapel, 87
chivalry, 1, 8, 24n29,30, 32, 35,
79n64, 81n73,75, 120, 165, 167,
169, 177, 188n92, 191n128,
192n133, 201, 207n1, 246
Chorus (character) (Henry V),
197–200, 203, 237–8
Christianity, 69n13, 71n18, 83n88,
120, 134, 143–4, 166, 169, 172,
177, 189n103, 191n131
and “good death,” 191n131
Church of the Minorities, 148
Cicero, 163
Clare, Janet, 74n27
classicism, 1–2, 10, 19n11, 20n15, 62,
69n12,13, 81n73, 86–8, 101,
105n5, 107n10,16, 109n23,
120–3, 136, 149–50, 161, 167,
169, 179n4, 181n26, 184n50,
190n123, 196, 208n4, 217–19,
224–6, 229, 231
Claudius (character) (Hamlet), 26n36,
115–16
Cleary, V.J., 18n9
Cleopatra (character), 12, 71n18, 104,
112n37, 228–9, 242–6, 248–52,
258, 266n62, 269–74
and Antony and Cleopatra, 12, 104,
112n37, 228–9, 242–6,
248–52, 258, 266n62, 269–74
and Julius Caesar, 229
Cloanthus (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 99–100
Clorinda, 122, 126–31
clothing, 8, 13, 15n3, 16n4,
21n24,25, 29–42, 50–9, 63,
75n35, 77n49, 80n68, 111n34,
115, 117, 127, 147, 152, 164,
167, 179n6, 187n91, 200–1,
225–6, 232, 237, 242–57,
260n6, 266n61. See also attire;
costume; disguise; disrobing;
fabric; helmets; nakedness;
tailoring
and “casting of ”, 59
and dressing the Roman subject,
242–50
and “scarlet robes, ” 59
Cobbler (character) (Julius Caesar),
234, 236–7
Cole, Douglas, 78n51
Colin Clout (Spenser), 122
colossus, 215, 226–30, 240, 245–6,
262n27,31. See also
memorializing; monument
comic, 196, 201–2, 208n6,
211n16,17, 18, 212n20, 232
Cominius (character) (Coriolanus),
253–4, 256–7
“conceit, ” 42–4, 79n56, 96, 143, 193
Constable (character) (Henry V),
79n64, 199, 203
Constantine, 2
Corinthians, 251
corporeality (corporeal), 4, 10, 20n15,
26n35, 81n73, 89, 95, 128–9,

163, 174–5, 195, 197, 199–202,
214n26, 223, 238, 251, 255–8,
260n6. See also fragmentation
Coriolanus (c.1608) (Shakespeare), 9,
83n87, 218–19, 250–60,
267n66,68. See also Aufidius;
Brutus; Cominius; Coriolanus;
First Citizen; First Servingman;
Martius; Menenius Agrippa;
Second Servingman; Third
Citizen; Volumnia
and “casques,” or helmets, 255
and corporeality, 258
and “fabric,” 251–2
and “gown of humility”, 252–3
and margin of military sphere, 250
and spoils, 253–4
and temperance, 258–9
Coriolanus (character) (Coriolanus),
253–4, 256–7, 12, 252–60,
267n66, 68
corpses, 55, 62–3, 82n79, 83n88, 96,
111n34, 125, 134, 148–50, 154,
188n95, 190n123, 195, 201,
205–7, 229, 238, 271
Cosroe (character), 36, 45
costume, 15n3, 30, 37, 40, 60, 65–6,
67n4, 75n32,35, 83n90, 117,
186n66, 200, 219, 232, 250–7,
265n54, 267n63
Craik, T.W., 212n20
Crary, Jonathan, 191n128
Critical Inquiry, 24n31
cross-dressing, 33, 72n20, 249–50,
266n61
“cuisses” (thigh armor), 11, 77n49,
169–73, 192n134
Culler, Jonathan, 129–30
“cultural biography,”, 37
Cupid (character), 97–8, 112n38, 243
and Antony and Cleopatra,
112n38, 243
and Dido, Queen of Carthage, 97–8
INDEX 305
“curtle-axe, ” 29, 34–5, 37–8, 40–1,
50, 203
“custom, ” 30
Cynthia’s Revels (Jonson), 6
D
Damascus, 32, 41, 48, 63–4, 71n18,
83n90
Dauphin (character) (Henry V),
79n64, 199, 201–3, 212n20
Davis, Fred, 55
Dawson, Anthony, 87, 103, 107n14,
108n21, 110n27
De Amicitia (Cicero), 163
De Brij, Theodoor, 145
de Certeau, Michel, 1, 15n2
De la verite (Mornay), 172, 193n139
de Montaigne, Michel, 163
de Somogyi, Nick, 8, 206
Deats, Sara Munson, 107n11
Defense of Poesie (see Apology for Poetry)
Dercetus (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 270
Derrida, Jacques, 90, 116–21,
179n8, 223
Dessen, Alan, 76n40
Dido (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 10, 86–7, 90–104,
106n8, 108n17, 18, 110n28,
111n35, 112n38, 114n53, 198,
214n26
Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe),
10, 79n56, 85–104, 106n8,
107n10,11, 108n17,18, 110n28,
111n35, 112n38, 114n53, 198,
214n26 (see also Achates;
Ascanius; Cloanthus; Cupid;
Dido; Ganymede; Iarbus;
Ilioneus; Jupiter; Sergestus;
Venus)
and counterfactual language, 98
and “forgetfulness, ” 100–1
306 INDEX
Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe)
(cont.)
and “haunting, ” 89
and Hecuba, 92
and Helen, 10, 86–8, 97–9,
101–2, 104
and Myrmidons, 94
and “out of joint, ” 94–5
and Priam, 110n28, 112n41
and Pygmalion, 93
and Pyrrhus, 112n41
and Sichaeus, 98
Diggs, Thomas, 73n25
disguise, 97, 204, 232, 249, 253,
256–7
disrobing, 35, 236–9
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 69n13,
79n56, 87, 98–9, 107n16
“The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda”
(Sidney), 122, 128–31
Dollimore, Jonathan, 69n13, 180n14
Don Quixote, 194n144
Donaldson, Peter, 33
Donne, John, 96
Du Bellay, Joachim, 230–1
DuBois, Page, 267n66
Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 128, 168
Dyer, Gwynne, 134, 136, 139
E F
Earl of Pembroke, 56–7
Eden, 71n18
Edward II (Marlowe), 10, 46–9, 51–3,
66, 66n2, 111n35 (see also
Edward II; Gaveston; Lancaster;
Mortimer Junior)
Edward II (character) (Edward II),
46–9
ekphrasis, 109n26
Elam, Keir, 40
elegies, 10–11, 62, 108n17, 116–39,
147, 155, 160–1, 163, 173–4,
177–8, 179n4, 180n17,
181n24,26, 182n29,31, 34,
183n41, 186, 201, 255
“An Elegie, or friends passion, for his
Astrophill” (Roydon), 133
Elizabeth I of England, 16n5, 65,
73n25, 106n8, 132, 148, 165,
185n64, 186n66, 194n147, 196
Elizabethan, 65, 71n18, 77n49, 105,
106n8, 9, 109n26, 139, 143,
187n83, 267n68
Engel, William, 20n15, 188n93,
262n33
English national identity, 39, 85, 198
The English Myrror (Whetstone)
(1586), 31
English Renaissance, 4, 6, 38, 95, 119,
179n4, 219
Englishness, 77n47, 198, 209n9
engraving, 51, 145, 149–55, 189n99
Enobarbus (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 242
Enterline, Lynn, 19n14, 226
Eros (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 243–4, 246, 248
European Renaissance, 18n6, 208n6
fabric, 21n25, 80n68, 154, 198,
251–2, 267n63
Fagles, Robert, 109n24
The Faithful Friends (c.1604–26),
264n53
Falco, Raphael, 31, 69n13, 121,
182n29, 192n134
Falls, Cyril, 77n49
Falstaff (character) (Henry V), 201
Feather, Jennifer, 8, 18n10, 213n23

Fermor, U.E., 31
Ffoulkes, Charles, 76n43
First Citizen (character) (Coriolanus),
251–2
First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays
(1623), 61
First Servingman (character)
(Coriolanus), 256–7
Fitzgerald, Robert, 109n24
Flavius (character) (Julius Caesar),
233–4, 236–7, 239
Fleming, Juliet, 118
Fletcher, John, 264n53
Florentine humanists, 102
Flower, Harriet, 184n51
Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 77n47, 199, 234
Fludd, Robert, 260n4
Fluellen (character) (Henry V), 3–4,
199, 201, 210n11, 211n17
foreigner, 32, 51, 71n18, 99, 153,
155, 178, 200, 259, 263n37
forgetting, 96–104, 113n44
Forker, C.R., 47
Fortinbras (character) (Hamlet),
117–18, 147, 200
Foucault, Michel, 158, 223
fragmentation, 5, 10, 12, 17n6,
19n14, 26n36, 65–6, 94–5, 152,
195, 198–9, 203, 207, 211n18,
214n26, 216, 220, 224, 226,
232, 241–2, 246
Franssen, P.J.C.M., 24n30
Fraser, R.S., 207n2
Fraudenberg, Louise, 182n34
French aristocracy, 79n64
French soldier (character) (Henry V),
195, 202–3
Freud, Sigmund, 16n4, 70n14, 120–1,
180n20
funerals, 9–12, 38, 63, 82n78, 83n89,
86–7, 104, 106n8, 116–78,
184n51, 185n62,64, 186n66,68,
INDEX 307
187n90, 188n92,95, 97,
194n147, 216, 231, 260n6,
269–73. See also Sir Philip Sidney
(1587) (Whetstone)
G
Gaius Martius victories (101 BC), 226
Ganymede (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 97–8
Garber, Marjorie, 68n7, 212n20, 249,
266n61
Garrard, William, 73n25
Gaveston (character) (Edward II), 46–9
Geary, Patrick, 111n34, 112n38
Genette, Gerard, 159
Germany, 55, 267n63
Gibbs, Joanna, 61, 82n79, 111n35,
114n47
Gifford, George, 121, 137, 168–72
Gillies, John, 70n14, 82n78
Globe Theater, 4
Goldberg, Jonathan, 149–50
Goodland, Katharine, 182n32
Gouws, John, 171–2, 192n137
Grancsay, S.V., 267n63
Grandpre (character) (Henry V), 203
Great Britain, 49, 209n9, 210n11,14
Greenblatt, Stephen, 17n6, 70n14,
71n15, 163, 230
Greenfeld, Liah, 16n5
Greville, Sir Fulke, 9, 11, 86, 116,
118, 121–2, 125, 131, 133,
137–8, 147, 151, 153, 156,
160–78, 191n128, 192n133,
134, 194n144
Grierson, Philip, 112n38
H
“habiliments, ” 7–8, 30
Hakluyt, Richard, 48
308 INDEX
Halder, Jacob, 55–7
Halpern, Richard, 25n33
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 26n36, 69n13,
75n32, 95, 115–19, 147, 178,
200, 217–18, 223, 244, 260n6,
271 (see also Claudius; Fortinbras;
Hamlet; Horatio; Old Hamlet;
Marcellus; Ophelia)
and “helmet effect, ” 223
and Old Norway, 117, 200
and specula, 224
Hamlet (character) (Hamlet), 26n36,
69n13, 95, 115, 178, 217–18,
223, 244, 260n6, 271
Hampton Court Palace, 141
Hannibal, 79n56, 104
Harding, Vanessa, 187n90, 188n97
Harraway, Clare, 78n51
Harris, J.G., 37–8, 95, 105n6, 179n8,
188n93, 260n6
Harrison, R.P., 154–5
Hawkins, Sir John, 48
Hector, 88–9, 94, 110n31, 154
Hecuba, 92
Hedrick, Donald, 213n22
hegemony, 210n11
Helen of Troy, 86–8, 97–9, 101–2,
104, 110,
Helgerson, Richard, 105n7
“helmet effect, ” 223
helmets, 32, 51, 54–7, 63–5, 77n49,
152, 197, 221–7, 255, 269
Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare), 228
Henry, V., 51
Henry, V (Shakespeare) (1599), 3–4,
11, 59, 71n17, 79n56, 92, 95,
110n27, 113n46, 183n39,
195–207, 207n2, 208n5, 209n9,
217, 237–8, 244–5, 255 (see also
Agincourt, battle of; St. Crispin’s
Day speech)
and Canterbury, 207n2
and conflicting narratives, 204
and helmets, 255
and Day of Judgment, 11, 95,
196–7, 204
and English limbs and mettle, 198–203
and Folio, 207n2
and glove, 211n17
and “good yeoman, ” 198
and Harfleur, 198–9, 201, 212n20,
238, 245
and “mettle, ” 199, 245
and militant nostalgia, 204–7
Henry V characters (see Bardolph;
Chorus; Constable; Dauphin;
Falstaff; Fluellen; French Soldier;
Grandpre; Henry V; Jamy;
Katherine; MacMorris; Montjoy;
Nym; Orleans; Pistol; Williams)
Henry V (character) (Henry V), 51,
92, 195–207, 207n1,2, 208n5,
213n22, 245
Henry VI, 5
Henry VI, Part 1, 168
Henry VIII, 73n25
Henry VIII, 208n5, 232
Hephaistos (character) (Prometheus
Bound), 26n35, 54
Henslowe, Philip, 38
Herbert, William, 170–1
Hercules, 250, 266n62
Hermes, 100–1
hero, 1, 11, 31, 36, 39, 54, 63, 66n2,
69n12,13, 81n73, 85–8, 92,
106n8, 107n11, 110n27, 136,
160, 165–9, 190n123, 198,
204–5, 248, 267n68
Heywood, Thomas, 6
Hillman, David, 6
Hippolyta, 113n46
Hirsch, Marianne, 22n26
Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys,
the father and the son (1588)
(Holinshed’s Chronicles)
(Molyneaux), 137

historiography, 14n1, 19n11, 27n37,
208n6, 211n18
Holbein, Hans, 230
Holderness, Graham, 198, 209n9
Holinshed, Raphael, 53, 121
Holinshed’s Chronicles (1588), 121
Hollander, Ann, 30, 56, 81n71,
266n61
Homer, 1, 3, 54, 86, 93, 102, 106n8,
166
homo sacer, 229, 262n31
Horace, 104n2
Horatio (character) (Hamlet), 117,
178, 217–18
Hospitality And War Stories, 87–96
housewife, early modern English, 249
humanism, 3–4, 17n6, 18n10, 19n11,
102, 181n21, 184n50, 217,
263n36
Hunt, Lynn, 211n18
Hunt, Maurice, 209n9
Husserl, Edmund, 214n25
Hutson, Lorna, 162–3
I 245, 248, 259, 270–3
Iarbus (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 89–91, 95, 101
idealization, 19n11, 56, 179n4
identity, 15n3, 16n5, 17n6, 22n26,
24n31, 31–4, 39, 41, 50–1, 55,
65, 75n35, 85, 90, 98, 100–1,
104n2, 105n7, 112n40, 113n44,
117–20, 133, 150, 159, 177,
180n14, 182n29, 198, 201, 205,
213n23, 217–19, 228, 248, 256,
260n6, 263n37, 266n58, 269
Iliad (Homer), 54–5, 86, 94, 102,
107n10, 108n21, 243
Ilioneus (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 89–91, 98–100,
110n28
INDEX 309
individualism, 17n6, 31, 69n13,
185n62, 205, 262n25
Isis and Osiris, 71n18
Islam, 71n18
Italy, 55, 184n50
Ive, Paul, 75n34
J
James, Heather, 105n3,5
James I, 77n49
Jamy (character) (Henry V), 199,
210n11
Jed, Stephanie, 19n11, 102
Jesus Christ, 5, 119, 133, 166, 176,
190n123, 209n9
Johnson, Samuel, 119
Jones, A.R., 15n3, 37, 117, 177,
211n17, 260n6, 265n56
Jones, Richard, 43–4
Jonson, Ben, 6, 104n2. See also
Cynthia’s Revels
Jorgensen, Paul, 8
Julius Caesar (character), 12, 221–3,
226, 228–9, 232, 234, 236–42,
and Antony and Cleopatra, 232,
242, 246, 248, 270–3
and Coriolanus, 259
and Julius Caesar, 228–9, 234,
236–41, 245
and The Triumph of Caesar (1599)
(figure), 221–2, 226
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 9, 99,
126, 218–19, 221, 228–9,
233–42, 245, 250, 255 (see also
Antony; Brutus; Cassius;
Cleopatra; Julius Caesar; Cobbler;
Flavius; Murellus; Octavius;
Portia)
and Anchises, 239
and colossus, 228–9
310 INDEX
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) (cont.)
and the feast of Lupercal, 237
and the King’s Two Bodies, 229
and Pompey, 233–6, 238–9,
240–1, 245
and “rude mechanicals, ” 233–4
and self-replication, 241–2
and triumph, 236–7
and Turnus, 239
Jupiter (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 88, 97–8
Juvenal, 104n2
K Lees, Clare, 81n75
Kahn, Coppelia, 243, 266n58
Kamps, Ivo, 14n1, 17n6, 208n5
Karim, Aisha, 144
Katherine (character) (Henry V),
113n46, 202, 212n20
Kay, Dennis, 121
Keene, Derek, 104n2, 150–1
Kelsall, Malcolm, 66n2
Kent, D.A., 180n17
King, Ros, 8, 24n30
King John (Shakespeare) (c.1596), 40
King Richard III (c.1591)
(Shakespeare), 264n53
King’s Two Bodies, 229
Kinney, C.R., 81n73
Kipling, Gordon, 187n83
Kocher, Paul, 37, 77n49
Kopytoff, Igor, 37, 74n31, 111n34
Korda, Natasha, 15n3, 67n4, 75n35,
108n20, 249
Kyd, Thomas, 42
L and old Roman walls, 38
Lactantius, 19n14
Lafrery, Anthony, 226–7, 229
Lancaster (character) (Edward II),
10, 46–9
Landsberg, Alison, 22n26, 96
Lange, Marianne, 185n64
Language Machines, 156–7
Lant, Thomas, 11, 116, 118, 138–60,
186n75, 188n97
Lant’s Roll, 119, 122–3, 125, 130,
139–62, 177, 183n48, 186n75,
188n97, 189n100, 194n147,
221, 226
and “hatchemente, ” 153
and plates, 152, 154
Latour, Bruno, 26n35, 179n8,
180n12
Lawrence, B.B., 144
legere (to read), 4
Leggatt, Alexander, 70n14, 240
Leo X, 231
Levin, Harry, 30–1
Levine, Laura, 113n46
libido, 180n20
Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney
(Greville) (1652), 9, 11, 86, 116,
118, 121–2, 125, 131, 147, 151,
153, 160–78
and “States of Zealand, ” 177–8
and “water bottle” story, 176–7
“limbs, ” 55, 95, 133–4, 139,
198–207, 212n20
liminal, 25n32, 32, 43, 142, 229,
249–50
Lindsey, Robert, 87
The Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 119
Llewellyn, Nigel, 156, 185n62
London, 38, 55, 57, 85, 104, 145,
147–51, 157–60, 260n4
and “multiple identities, ” 104
as “New Rome, ” 85
Lopez, Jeremy, 106n9
Lord Buckhurst, 56–8, 143
Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare)
(c.1594), 40

Low, Jennifer, 8, 69n12, 106n9
Low Countries, 75n34, 145, 150–1,
182n31
Lucretia’s rape, 19n11, 102
“Lycidas” (Milton), 119–20
Lyne, Raphael, 26n36
M 45, 61–6, 82n78,79, 84, 85, 98,
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 169
MacCallum, M.W., 219
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 73
MacIntyre, Jean, 252
MacMorris (character) (Henry V),
199, 210n11
Magnetes (character) (Tamburlaine), 32
Magritte, René, 158
male bonding, 127
Mandelbaum, Alan, 109n24
manliness, 40
Mann, Sir James, 55
“The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Death” (Gifford), 121, 137,
168–9, 172
Manning, R.B., 24n30
Mantegna, Andrea, 141, 221–2
Marcellus (character) (Hamlet), 200
Marcus, L.S., 39
marginalization, 25n32, 83n88, 250
Marius, 226, 229–30
Marlowe, Christopher. See Dido,
Queen of Carthage; Tamburlaine
Mars, 106n8, 136–7, 203, 242–4,
264n53
Marshall, Cynthia, 17n6, 45
Martius (character) (Coriolanus), 260
martyr, 133–4, 165, 169, 190n123
Mason, H.A., 240
material, 26n35
“material culture, ” 9, 15n3, 24n31
Mauss, Marcel, 111n36
May, S.W., 121
INDEX 311
Mazzio, Carla, 6
McClure, G.W., 181n21
McCoy, R.C., 192n133
McEachern, Claire, 210n11
McGann, Jerome, 190n111
Measure for Measure (Shakespeare),
258–9
memorializing, 4, 9–12, 20n16, 32,
104, 107n14, 113n44, 115–22,
127–33, 139, 144–5, 150, 152,
155, 157, 160, 165, 168–9, 178,
179n6, 204–5, 213n21, 215–17,
220, 224, 228, 236, 241, 271
“memory theater, ” 4
Menenius Agrippa (character)
(Coriolanus), 250–1, 256–9
The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.1597),
249
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 19n14, 226
“mettle, ” 198–207, 234, 245
Microcosmus (Purchas), 143
A Midsummer Night ’s Dream
(Shakespeare), 96, 113n46,
113n46, 234
militant nostalgia, 1–13, 29–31, 38,
51, 86–8, 94, 96–104,
116–17, 125, 155, 164, 196, 199,
204–7, 217, 228, 230, 246,
252–3, 273
Miller, Anthony, 60, 142, 144, 220
Miller, Elizabeth, 261n23
Miller, Jonathan, 37
Miller, W.I., 185n61
Miola, Robert, 91, 105n5, 256
The Mirror for Magistrates (Campbell),
31, 275
Moffet, Thomas, 170–1
Mohammed, 51
Molineux, Edmund, 121, 137
Montjoy (character) (Henry V), 206
Montrose, Louis, 17n6
312 INDEX
monument, 61, 82n78, 132, 178,
178n2, 228, 231, 245–6,
262n25, 270–2
Mornay, Du Plessis, 172, 193n139
Morse, Ruth, 85
Mortimer Junior (character),
10, 46–9, 53, 66
“The Mourning Muse of Thestylis”
(Bryskett), 121
Much Ado About Nothing (1588–89),
187n91
Mullaney, Steven, 25n32
Munro, Lucy, 265n54
murder, 12, 208n4, 237–40, 245, 259
Murellus (character) (Julius Caesar),
234–8
Mycetes (chracter) (Tamburlaine), 45
Myhill, Nova, 106n9
Myrmidons, 54, 94
N Ovid, 19n14, 93, 108n17, 226
Nabokov, Vladimir, 216
Nagel, Alexander, 2, 208n6
nakedness, 7, 62, 203, 252–3, 271
Nashe, Thomas, 87
nationalism, 16n5, 209n9
Neill, Michael, 63, 83n89, 186n66
Netherlands, 55
Newman, Karen, 148, 167
Norway, 218
nostalgia. See militant nostalgia
Nym (character) (Henry V), 201, 203
O 183n42, 190, 193n139, 199, 258
Octavius (character), 238, 241,
263n37
and Antony and Cleopatra, 263n37
and Julius Caesar, 238, 241
Odyssey, 89, 108n21
Old Hamlet (Ghost), 26n36, 69n13,
75n32, 116–17, 200, 217–18,
223, 244, 260n6
Oliver, H.J., 110n27
Olympia (character) (Tamburlaine),
44–5, 59
Omphale, 250, 266n62
Ophelia (character) (Hamlet), 26n36
Orcanes (character) (Tamburlaine),
39, 65
Orgel, Stephen, 37, 187n80, 266n62
Orientalism in 1978, 71n18
Orleans (character) (Henry V),
79n64, 203
Orlin, L.C., 104, 108n18
“ornament, ” 61–2, 220, 224, 230,
261n23
Othello (Shakespeare), 202, 246
the Other, 30, 32, 71n18, 86, 90, 133
Ottoman Turk, 71n18
The Overreacher (Levin), 30
Owens, Margaret, 197–8, 208n3
The Oxford English Dictionary, 6, 40,
64, 160
P
Pallas, 135–6, 215–17, 220–1
Panopticon, 223
Paris, 88–9
Parker, Henry, 141
Parker, John, 69n13
Parker, Patricia, 96
“passion, ” 122, 133–5, 138–9,
Paster, G.K., 104n2, 149, 213n23,
267n68
patriotism, 68n5, 108n18, 209n9
“pattern diagrams, ” 80n68
Pauline tradition, 69n13

Peacham, Henry, 39
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Shakespeare),
246–8, 265n55
Perondinus, Petrus, 70n14
Petrarch, 82n84, 126, 135, 140–2
Pfister, Manfred, 78n53
Phillippy, Patricia, 178n3
Philo (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 242–3
The Phoenix Nest (1593), 9, 122, 133,
136–8
Piazza del Campidoglio (Rome), 226
Pietz, William, 211n17
Pigman, G.W., 179n4
“pillar, ” 5, 32, 61–3, 82n84, 226
Pistol (character) (Henry V), 202–3
Pitcher, L.V., 109n23
The Place of the Stage (Mullaney),
25n32
Plautus, 104n2
Pliny, 48
Plutarch, 11, 165, 216–17, 219,
236–7, 242
Pollard, Tanya, 36
“polytemporal” objects, 37–8
Pope S.V, 226
Portia (character) (Julius Caesar), 126
“postmemory, ” 22n26
The Pourtraitures at Large of Nine
Moderne Worthies of the World
(Vaughan) (1622), 32, 50–2
Priam, 88, 110n28, 112n41, 113n45
Principal Navigations (1589)
(Hakluyt), 48
Proculeius (character) (Antony and
Cleopatra), 258, 271
prologues, 12–13, 25, 42–5, 51, 59,
68n7, 71n17, 78n51, 79n56, 102
Prometheus Bound, 26n35
props, 37, 46, 66, 67n4, 208n3,
265n54
prosopopoeia, 109n26
INDEX 313
Protestantism, 69n13, 134, 146,
150–1, 165, 169, 173, 187n90
Pugh, Syrithe, 87, 112n38, 114n53
Purchas, Samuel, 143, 186n66
Puttenham, George, 118, 140
Pygmalion, 93
Pyramus and Thisbe (Ovid), 234
R
Rackin, Phyllis, 208n6
Ralegh, Sir Walter, 122, 135, 138–9
Ramazan, Jahan, 120
Ranciere, Jacques, 157
rape, 19n11, 88, 102, 113n46,
212n20
Reed, S.W., 261n22
Rees, Joan, 176
Reformation, 38, 108n18, 178n3
relics, 5, 20n19, 96–7, 104, 111n34,
190n123, 198, 207, 208n6,
214n26, 231
“The Relique” (Donne), 96
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)
(Greenblatt), 17n6
repetition, 48, 58, 63, 70n14, 78n51,
87–9, 101, 103, 107n14,
113n46, 128, 131, 160, 162,
179n8, 230, 235–7, 240–2, 247,
261n22
and reproductive prints, 230,
261n22
Rich, Barnabe, 73n25
Richard II (1595) (Shakespeare), 7–8,
21n24, 208n5, 218
Riggs, David, 69n13
A Roman trophy (engraving), 226–7
romance, 29, 31, 81n75, 97–9, 104,
106n8, 109n26, 192n133, 196,
212–13, 246–7
Romanitas, 233, 236, 270
Romany, Frank, 87
314 INDEX
Ronan, Clifford, 85, 107n16, 219, 253
Royal Armories (Greenwich), 55
Roydon, Matthew, 12, 133–5
Ruines of Rome (1591) (Spenser),
230–1
“The Ruines of Time” (Spenser), 128
Rush-Meyrick, Sir Samuel, 81n72
Russell, P.E., 194n144
S Shepherd, Simon, 58
Sacks, Peter, 119–20
Sackville, Thomas (1st Earl of Dorset)
(Lord Buckhurst), 57
Said, Edward, 71n18
St. Crispin’s Day speech, 11, 92,
183n39, 196–7, 205–7
St. Paul, 36, 142, 147, 149, 155–6,
209n9, 247
Sawday, Jonathan, 17n6
Scarry, Elaine, 213n21
Schenck, Celeste, 127
Schiesari, Juliana, 182n34
Schor, Esther, 120
Schwartz, Kathryn, 72n22, 235
Schwyzer, Philip, 5
Scopas (sculptor), 4
scroll, 11, 116, 118, 139–60, 146,
183n48, 186n75, 188n97,
189n103,104
Sebald, W.G., 264n52
The Second Part of the Fair Maid of the
West (Heywood), 6
Second Servingman (character)
(Coriolanus), 256–7
Second Sophistic, 109n26
Second Voyage (Hawkins) (1565), 48
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 248
Sejanus (Jonson), 245
Sergestus (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 100
Serres, Michael, 119, 179n8, 222
Shakespeare, William. See Antony and
Cleopatra; Coriolanus; Henry V;
Julius Caesar; Richard II; Troilus
and Cressida
Shakespeare and the Remains of
Richard III (Schwyzer), 5
Shapiro, James, 46
Sheba, 71n18
Shepard, Alan, 8, 73n25, 106n8
Shepard, Alexandra, 16n4
Sidney, Mary, 122, 125, 128, 131–3,
141, 149–50, 173, 224
Sidney, Sir Philip, 2–4, 9–11, 63, 66,
86, 104, 106n8, 116–78,
181n26, 182n29, 185n64,
186n75, 190n123, 191n128,
192n133,134, 137,
194n144,147, 216, 270–3. See
also Apology for Poetry
and absence, 160–78
arming of, 135–6
death of, 118, 121
and “Death’s trophy, ”143–4
and Dr. James’ journal, 125
and literary self-fashioning, 164–5
and “our Scipio, ” 135
and process of mourning, 139–60
and Psalms, 122, 125, 131–2,
and Zutphen, 106n8, 117–18, 121,
135–9, 146–7, 152–3, 166, 170
Simkin, Stevie, 71n18, 83n90
Simon Magus, 69n13
Simonides of Ceo, 4
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
81n73
Sir Philip Sidney (1587) (Whetstone),
121, 137–8
Six, Jeanine, 183n48, 185n64,
194n147
Smythe, Sir John, 73n25, 171,
192n134

social identity, 55
Sodom and Gomorrah, 71n18
Sofer, Andrew, 67
The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd)
(c.1582–92), 42
specula, 224
Spenser, Edmund, 61, 122–4, 128,
131, 177–8, 182n31, 231
Sphinx, 71n18
Spitzer, Leo, 21n25
“spolia, ” 2–3, 18n8
Sprengnether, Madelon, 267n66
Springer, Carolyn, 6, 190n123,
262n25
Stallybrass, Peter, 15n3, 17n6, 37,
75n35, 117, 177, 189n103,
208n4, 211n17, 232, 260n6,
263n38, 265n56
Stande und Handweker (Anman)
(1590), 13–14
Stanitzek, George, 159
Stewart, Susan, 3
Stow, John, 121, 145–8, 188n97
Strickland, Ronald, 186n75
Strocchia, S.T., 188n92
Strong, Roy, 184n50
subjectification, 17n6
subjectivity, 8, 16n4, 17n6, 19n11,14,
21n24, 30–3, 65, 100–1, 215,
241, 246, 249
Suleiman the Magnificent, 51
Sullivan, Garrett, 101, 113n44, 217
Sutherland, John, 195, 207n1
Swiss, Margo, 180n17
synecdoche, 6, 11, 26n36, 39, 89, 94,
125–6, 172, 197–201, 208n4
T and identity, 33–4
tailoring, 75n35, 80n68, 81n71, 257
and “pattern diagrams, ” 80n68
Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 9–10, 29–45,
50, 53–4, 58–66, 66n2, 68n7,
INDEX 315
78n51, 79n56, 85, 114n47, 149,
166, 217, 256, 269, 272. See also
Agydas; Almeda; Amyras;
Bajazeth; Callapine; Calyphas;
Celebinus; Cosroe; Magnetes;
Mycetes; Olympia; Techelles;
Theridamas; Usumcasane; Zabina;
Zenocrate
and Captain of Balsera, 59
and “curtle-axe,” 29, 34–5, 37–8,
40–1, 50
and Damascus, 32, 41, 48, 63–4,
71n18, 83n90
and Mausolus, 63
and “Persian and Egyptian arms,” 62
and shields, 50
and triumphator, 63
and “weeds, ” 33
Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, 9–10,
29–45, 50, 53–4, 58–66, 66n2,
68n7, 78n51, 79n56, 85, 149,
166, 217, 256, 269, 272
Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, 10,
34, 39, 41, 44–5, 54, 58–65,
66n2, 78n51, 85, 114n47, 149,
166, 217, 256, 269, 272
Tamburlaine (character), 9–10, 29–55,
58–66, 67n4, 68n7, 69n13,
70n14, 71n16,18, 72n22, 73n23,
74n26, 78n51, 80n66, 82n78,79,
83n90, 99, 105n6, 107n10,
113n45, 114n47, 272
and Achilles, 36–7, 50
and armor, 33–41, 50–1, 85
and clothing, 33–6
as “Death, ” 48
and “deeds, ” 34, 42
and effective rhetoric, 68n7
as lord, 33–4
“objects fit for, ” 41–2
and portrait, 51–2
and self-arming, 32–6
316 INDEX
Tamburlaine (character) (cont.)
and shepherd, 33–4
and shield, 51
and “speech of war, ” 45–6
and “stately tent of war, ” 44
and triumph, 60
and “value” as military subject, 35
tapestries, 141
Taunton, Nina, 8, 73n25
Taylor, Gary, 197
Teague, Frances, 20n19, 67n4
Techelles (character) (Tamburlaine),
32, 35–6
temperament, 234, 241, 245, 258–9
The Tempest (Shakespeare), 258–9
Tennenhouse, Leonard, 208n4
textiles, 252, 260n6, 267n63
Theweleit, Klaus, 7
Third Citizen (character) (Coriolanus),
252
Thomas, Keith, 186n66
Thompson, E.P., 30
Thomson, Leslie, 76n40
Thurn, David, 41–2
Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 39,
208n4, 234, 263n44
The Tragedie of Dido Queene of
Carthage, 87
The Tragedy of Antony (1592)
(Sidney), 224
translation, 47, 51, 61, 82n84, 102–3,
107n10, 109n24, 114n53, 120,
122, 131, 141, 146, 171–2,
186n75, 202, 212n20, 217, 219,
226, 230–1, 238
transvestite, 83n88, 249–50, 266n61
Trionfi (Petrarch), 82n84, 140–2
The Triumph of Caesar (1599),
221–2, 226
The Triumph of Death over Chastity
(tapestry), 141–2
The Triumph of Fame over Death
(tapestry), 141–2
triumphator, 63, 235
Troilus and Cressida (1602)
(Shakespeare), 12–13, 86, 112n40
Trojan War, 10, 85–8, 91–3, 95–7,
100, 102, 105n6, 109n24,
112n40
Tromly, F.B., 65
Tudor, 16n4, 105n7, 121, 196, 209n9
Turk, 41, 51, 58, 64, 71n18, 114n47
Turnus, 215–17, 221, 239, 267n68
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 33, 72n20
U
Ulysses, 88
Usumcasane (character)
(Tamburlaine), 32, 64
V
Van Dorsten, Jan, 168
Vaughan, Robert, 10, 32, 39, 50–2.
See also The Pourtraitures at Large
of Nine Moderne Worthies of the
World
Velz, J.W., 267n68
Venus, 60, 88–9, 97–8, 122–3, 126–9,
173, 242–4
Venus (character) (Dido, Queen of
Carthage), 88–9, 97–8
Vergil, 18n9, 105n3
Vernant, J.P., 229, 262n27
Vico, Enea, 224–5
Victoria and Albert Museum
(London), 261n23
Virgil, 86–7, 93, 99, 106n8, 108n21,
112n38, 114n53, 166, 215
virtus, 259, 261n13
Vita Magni Tamerlanis (Perondinus)
(1551), 70n14
Vitalis, Janus, 231
Volumnia (character) (Coriolanus),
250, 255–6, 259–60

W Williams, Raymond, 21n25
Wagner, M.D., 214n25
Wall, Wendy, 108n18
Wallace, Richard, 261n22
Wallace Collection, 81n72
The Wallace Collection in London, 57
Walsh, Brian, 27n37
Walsham, Alexandra, 20n19, 214n26
Walsingham, Frances (the Countess of
Essex), 122
Walsingham, Sir Francis, 145
Watts, Cedric, 195, 207n1
weapons, 37–8, 42, 46–7, 50, 76n50,
89–90, 97, 124, 137, 151, 198,
202, 212n20, 220, 226, 238
Weber, Max, 31
Weimann, Robert, 43
Weiner, Seth, 172
West, Philip, 213n22
Wharton, David, 109n24
Whetstone, George, 31, 70n14, 121,
137–8, 194n147
Wilder, L.P, 217, 260n4
Wilkins, George, 246–7
Williams (character) (Henry V), 11,
95, 197, 199, 203–7, 208n5,
211n17
INDEX 317
Wilson, F.P, 43
Wilson, Robert, 264n53
Wilson, Thomas, 161
Wood, C.S., 2, 208n6
woodcuts, 65, 221–4
The Work of Mourning (Derrida), 116
wound, 44–5, 50, 97, 119–39,
175, 182n31, 191n128,
192n134, 259, 267n66,
270
and Sidney, 119–39
Y
Yates, Frances, 4, 20n15, 260n4
Z
Zabina (character) (Tamburlaine),
58, 63
Zenocrate (character) (Tamburlaine),
10, 32–5, 45, 50, 58,
60–3, 65, 82n78,79,
84, 83n89
Zieger, Melissa, 127
Zimmerman, Susan, 83n88