Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada by Alan Shepard (review)

Abstract

160 Reviews Irish and the range of languages in the Americas occurred less through a deliberate policy?Spanish Jesuits made a concerted effortto learn a number of tongues?than the lazy and convenient assumption of superiority, a 'more indirect operation ofpower which seeped into all quarters of native life, including language' (p. 35). The Eng? lish in Ireland were more culpable still. Numerous commentators note how noisy and clamorous Ireland was. Barnaby Rich in The Irish Hubbub (1617) bases a whole pamphlet on Irish addiction to wailing and weeping loudly at funerals. Yet, as Palmer points out with perfect justice, the striking paradox is that 'the language which made most of the noise is almost never heard' (pp. 40-41). Instead, the Irish often enter texts 'making a racket' (p. 65) because their speech is not represented. John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) shows the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, exchanging let? ters with the Irish. Palmer demonstrates that the encounter as it stands must be a fiction because the illustration concerned reveals that the English knew no Irish, so the translators have been removed in order to exaggerate Sidney's authority. In Chapter 3 Palmer surveys the evidence of Elizabethan administrators' know? ledge of Irish. It has often been assumed that because so many lived in Ireland forso long they must have acquired some ofthe language. Palmer finds the evidence unconvincing , arguing that even the most linguistically adept, Edmund Spenser, borrowed only fortywords of Irish in his works, suggesting that 'his interest was forensic and superficial ' (p. 79). Irish was treated less as a language and more as a sign with newcomers simply learning the limited range of words they needed to survive. The elaborate civil conversations so important to humanists failed to open up a genuine 'dialogue with the other' (p. 119). It will be interesting to see whether Richard McCabe's researches into Spenser's use of Irish come to the same conclusion. It is possible that anglophone culture in Elizabethan Ireland was more hybrid than Palmer's analysis demonstrates. Chapter 5 shows how similar strategies pushed to an even more aggressive limit excluded the native Americans from the linguistic community of the colonists while preserving the fiction of dialogue and inclusion (for obvious reasons), and a final chapter analyses how the Irish managed to include their voices in English texts and so prevent the total silence demanded by the English, or, like Florence MacCarthy, exploited their facility as bilinguals to enhance their own positions and so undermine English confidence in their ability to control Ireland. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland is a well-researched and intelligent book which puts a crucial but all too often neglected issue back on the scholarly map and it demands to be read by a wide variety of scholars, not just those interested in early modern Ireland. University of Sussex Andrew Hadfield Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada. By Alan Shepard. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2002. viii + 248 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-7546-0229-x. Amid his sequence of leather-gloved homicides for the RSC, Antony Sher played Tamburlaine (Stratford and London, 1992, dir. Terry Hands). At one moment Sher memorably continued speaking his mighty lines (which had audiences bouncing iambically in their seats) while climbing a rope, his breathing perfectly controlled as he physically rose above everyone but the upper gallery and comprehended all in his scorn. Through trained strength Sher physically expressed the ideal of male prowess to which Tamburlaine cleaves, and his concurrent public engagement with his personal and theatrical difficulties as a gay South African Jew framed his perfor? mance as a contemporary 'rhetoric of masculinity'. His text, alas, conflated into fiveacts Marlowe's ten?allowing one-night stands but losing the breathtaking generic inversion of Tamburlaine's marriage (ending Part I), MLRy 99.1, 2004 161 and the equally calculated coup de theatre of having, not Jove with a thunderbolt, but Allah with dysentery finallystrike the tyrannous blasphemer down, a whole play later. However understandable the decision to cut and conflate, the loss of Marlowe's formal generic manipulation (and attendant stage business) distorts his diptych...