Shakespeare's Theatre of War.

Nick de Somogyi. Shakespeare's Theatre of War.

Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. vii + 296 pp. $61.95. ISBN: 1-84014-207-3.

Heather James. Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and Translation of Empire.

(Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 22.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii + 271 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59223-2.

A half century ago Duff Cooper speculated that Shakespeare was involved in the wars on the Continent during the years for which there is no documentation for his activities, and that he had most likely held the rank of sergeant. While this hypothesis has never been taken seriously, others have remarked on the playwright's knowledge of warfare, most significantly Paul Jorgensen in Shakespeare's Military World (1956), a work with which we were expected to be familiar in graduate school when our professors were veterans of the recent World War. During those days when many of us had ourselves spent time in the military (however little some of us had accepted the 1950's Cold War mentality), I think there was then a greater recognition of the feeling of threat which England endured between 1588 and 1605, the two dates bracketed in the famous engraving "The Double Deliverance," which proclaimed that God had saved the land from Armada and Gunpowder Plot. Hence it is gratifying to see the appearance of Nick de Somogy i's Shakespeare's Theatre of War, which sets out to explore "the relations between drama and history, and... to illuminate the influence of wartime on the production of Elizabethan plays" (2).

In the earlier chapters de Somogyi presents some close readings of late Elizabethan drama in relation to war. He focuses on war theory, on the casualties resulting from military conflict, and the art of war itself, the latter expressed on stage through Marlowe's Tamburlaine. Keeping in mind this conqueror's famous map, de Somogyi rightly stresses the importance of cartography to warfare at that time, and he also makes careful note of the use of mathematics -- that is, skill expected of the scholar -- in this regard. He further might have mentioned the use of mathematics in gunnery, as described at great length in such a work as Niccolo Tartaglia's Three Books of Colloquies Concerning the Arte of Shooting Artillerie (translated by Cyprian Lucar), entered in the Stationers' Register on 30 October 1587 and published in the year of the attempted Armada invasion. The use of readily available illustrations such as those which appear profusely in this edition or elsewhere (for example, the engraving of a drummer an d standard-bearing ensign in Henry Roberts's Lancaster his Allarums [1595]) would also have significantly added to de Somogyi's book, especially since the only visual depiction (from the 1611 edition of Ripa's Iconologia) appears on the dust cover.

The connection drawn by de Somogyi between the theater and the place of warfare, also called a "theater," is revealing in that both involve the use of deception to be effective, as events both in Ireland and on the Continent proved. To be sure, civilians were familiar enough with "playing at war," since there is considerable evidence for the local mustering of militias. At York the space called Toft Green was used for military exercises, and this was the same space used for assembling pageant wagons for the Corpus Christi plays. Local officials also had to send men off from time to time to serve as soldiers, as, for example, recorded in the Coventry Leet Book in 1507, or, as noted by de Somogyi, in the case of Shakespeare's own father in 1569 when he was bailiff of Stratford and recruited men to defend the Crown (cited by de Somogyi from a tertiary source, not the Stratford records transcribed by Edgar Fripp). The marching of local militias in Midsummer Shows and the like -- shows in which guns were discharg ed -- at London and elsewhere has been amply confirmed by dramatic records such as those collected for the Malone Society.

Following a chapter on the rumors of war, de Somogyi launches into the two final chapters that make this book exceptional. The chapter entitled "The Ghosts in War" is splendidly conceived. It either puts to rest or qualifies the more doctrinally based arguments concerning the ghost in Hamlet (for example, the well-known article by Sister Miriam Joseph), and also is broadly suggestive for further discussion of other plays, including Macbeth. If, as General Douglas MacArthur said, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away," sometimes those who have died in battle seem more frequently than we might expect to have faded away into a surprising afterlife as ghosts. The discussion of Hamlet forms a brilliant conclusion in which de Somogyi gives close attention to the military background against which the play needs to be examined. Reasons for the possible omissions in Q1 are given, and special attention is given to the role of Fortinbras, whose entry into the play on his way to do battle over a worthless patch o f ground to the east in Poland must reflect the disillusionment with the current wars in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. The one serious omission in the book involves a reason (not, of course, the only reason) for these wars: matters of religion. This aspect deserves attention, especially on account of Shakespeare's attitude to the Old Religion for which, many scholars suspect, he might have had a preference, though there is no reason to assume that he had followed his father in dying "a papist."

Matters of religion also are left out of Heather James's analysis in her Shakespeare's Troy, which nevertheless could have benefitted from attention to the politics involved in England's Protestantism and its stance with regard to the forces of Catholicism on the Continent. James focuses on the legendary history of Britain and the founding of the kingdom of Britain by Brutus, the Trojan prince whose story was famously told in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and frequently invoked as a way of distinguishing and glorifying England. Many in Shakespeare's time understood England to be in direct contrast to Aeneas's Rome, now the site of the Papacy, which was allied with Spain and its imperial pretensions to power over the British. Focusing instead on England's own desires for empire, James curiously omits the main location of its colonial activity in Ireland and ignores the Continent, where Sidney and others fought for the Protestant cause.

James attempts to blend cultural studies and source studies in close readings of the texts of five Shakespeare plays (Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Tempest), and in so doing mainly directs attention to the Aeneid and, to a lesser degree, Ovid's Metamorphoses. These works were, of course, well known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, for they were staples of the classroom at the Stratford Grammar School and elsewhere; resonances that appeared in plays of the period thus would likely be noted by a great many in audiences, especially the privileged playgoers of whom Ann Jennalee Cook has written. Whether the allusions that appeared on the stage in plays would have been noticed in the ways that are demarcated by James, however, seems to me another matter. It is worthwhile certainly to trace out Shakespearean sources, but it appears to me questionable to attempt to force upon them social and political meanings that would have baffled the Bard.

I find particularly flawed the tendency to treat the characters as if they were real people and often to give them credit for the creative strategies of the author; for example: "When Prospero contaminates Vergil's epic storm [at the beginning of The Tempest] with the incantations of Ovid's Medea, he marks the collapse of distinctions between Vergilian authority and subversive Ovidian metamorphosis" (214). As will be seen from this passage, the book is thick with jargon. In particular the word contaminate seems to be a favorite, and this is ironic in the light of Shakespeare's use of the word as a synonym for defilement (e.g., Julius Caesar 4.3.24).