1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare's Henry V. .

Nina Taunton. 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare's Henry V.

Aldershor, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001. viii + 240 pp. index. illus. bibl. $74.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0274-5.

Keenly aware of the benefits of interrextualiry, Nina Taunton unlocks a door to the infrequently-studied 1590s literature of the art of war-- manuals, treatises, contemporary military correspondence--and scrutinizes its interaction with the Tamburlaine plays of Marlowe, Chapman's Caesar and Pompey and two Byron plays, and Shakespeare's Henry V She finds that the military writings and the plays "crystallize into a debate around problems of space, order, command, national boundaries and defence" (16). Moreover, both types of writing inevitably "intervene" in the military realities of the waning years of Elizabeth I's reign to provide "a complex response to anxieties about the erosion of national boundaries as a way of talking about erosions of the masculine self" (16).

Taunton points out that the military writings are strongly didactic and steeped in a classical rhetoric that alone should invest them with substantial interest for critical scrutiny. Running through these writings is an argument about whether experiences in war or theories about war resulting from education are superior qualifications for a military leader (compare Iago vs. Cassio). A second argument asks if final authority for a campaign should rest with the commander of the army or with the ruler of the realm. In examining the evidence, Taunton notices "ambiguities, contradictions and omissions in policy and prescription" (222). Chief among the omissions are any guidelines for the anomalous place of women in a military environment, whether prostitutes, wives, mothers, or the queen herself. In the dramatic literature, such portrayals as Marlowe's of Zenocrate, Zabina, and Olivia only exacerbate the simultaneous acknowledgment and negation of women "as signifiers and functionaries" found in the military writi ngs (222). Although she finds it "useful to examine and interpret varying modes of discourse on war by a method amalgamated from Foucault's genealogies and archaeologies" (22), Taunton is openly critical of his model of history (20) and, overall, selectively Foucauldian. Moreover, she includes other theorists. In discussing military strategy, for example, she makes use of Foucault's theories of surveillance, Henri Lefebvre's theories about the ideological production of social space, and Michel de Certeau's theories of social practice. Together with derailed, well-documented historical analyses, she produces, as she claims, a "distinctive kind of discourse not yet examined in either historiographical or new historicist accounts of the period" (3). In demonstrating the discursive and ideological nature of war, Taunton asserts that "war is above all an intellectual activity" (18). She provides ample supporting evidence, especially from the writings of the earls of Essex and Northumberland.

The first part of the book focuses on the responsibilities and behavior of "Generals"; the second, on "Stratagems of War," which Taunton assumes are "specific forms of knowledge in a branch of philosophy as well as in that branch of military science that deals with the validity and varieties of modes of war" (95); and the third, on "Camps" set up on battlefields. In the first part, Taunton weighs in on the (long standing) debate about whether Tamburlaine can be called a hero or an uncompromising, egotistical villain by showing that Marlowe adhered remarkably to the war manuals of the day and that, although the killing of Calyphas may seem repugnant to us, there was in fact some doctrinal justification for it (58-59). Taunton does not resolve the question of Tambutlaine's apparent cruelty but she does indicate that more of it than is usually considered has roots in the military treatises that heretofore have been overlooked. Much the same can be said of her analysis of the generalship of Shakespeare's Henry V which, despite an adherence to clearly stated military principles, ultimately renders Henry's noble cause "problematic and ambiguous" (69). This conclusion is underscored by the way in which the folio text seems to question the quarto text (62-64). Chapman's Byron plays continue the debates over the problems of high command generated in Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays, especially "the contradictory nature of the qualities required in a military leader" (90). Thus, the plays accurately reflect the ambiguities and ambivalences of the military writings.

Taunton writes with persuasive candor and impressive documentation about the confusions found in dramatic and non-dramatic considerations of military procedures and the ways in which they both reflect and influence contemporary military practices. By design, her book raises more questions than it settles. As a result, one emerges from it with an understanding of a significant cultural cause for some of the contradictions and ambiguities in the plays under scrutiny and with a greater appreciation of the instability and the anomalies of military thinking and practices during the final years of Elizabeth's reign.