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

Abstract

.Reviews113 might also quibble with Mayer's contention that melodrama, unlike tragedy, "exacts no toll" on its protagonists: u[t]he good characters emerge unscathed; they have grown wiser in the ways of the world" (149). Such, of course, is generally the case. But what is one to make ofthe numerous historical melodramas on the laterVictorian stage,Dion Boucicault's RobertEmmet(1884) for instance, that lead inexorably to the gallows or scaffold, culminating in the execution of the historical hero turned martyr? These questions, much like the unfortunate spelling of Eleonora Duse's first name (corrected in the index, but not in the text both times it appears), hardly amount to a molehill ofobjection. For much like writing a letter of recommendation for a superior colleague or student, tempering praise for this very fine book with a few grains of criticism is tough work. There's just not very much to complain about. Stephen Watt Indiana University Alan Shepard.Marlowe's Soldiers:Rhetorícs ofMasculinityin the Age oftheArmada.Aidershot and Burlington:Ashgate,2002. Pp. viii + 248. $69.95. In Marlowe's Soldiers, Alan Shepard focuses less on Marlowe's depictions of actual soldiers than on the playwright's complex response to the period's stern military ethos, an important component ofthe early modern understanding of masculinity. For Shepard, Marlowe's characterization of military men, perhaps even his choice ofplots,was deeplyaffectedbythe war fever in England following the defeat ofthe Armada in 1588. After all, during the 1590s the reading public was deluged with treatises and pamphlets (some ofwhich Shepard analyzes) on the subjects of military strategy and deportment. Like Marlowe, several other playwrights, including Peele, Kyd, and Chapman, addressed public concerns about state security by treating military subjects in their plays. Shepard argues that Marlowe's work both presents and problematizes his culture's "regulated codes of masculinity" as well as its valorization of"callous violence, ... ironic disrespect for diplomatic and even martial rhetoric, and contempt for any form oftheatricalized identity"; ultimately,"the plays do bedevil the putative links ... between state security, prescriptive English masculinity, and the act ofplaying soldier on the stage" (4). Shepard carefully contextualizes Marlowe in a postArmada England whose values Shepard reconstructs not only from dramas but from such texts as Barnabe Rich's Allarme to England and A Path-Way to MilitaryPractise,William Blandys TheCastle,orpictureofpollicy,and Geoffrey 114ComparativeDrama Gates's The Defense ofMilitaryProfession. This book's historicist presentation ofthe cultural documents ofthe day, then, serves a broadly deconstructive rhetorical analysis. Shepard's work usefully complicates the standard views of Marlowe's protagonists. The book benefits from the recent work ofEmily Bartels, Simon Shepherd, Nick de Somogyi, and Curtis Breight but builds primarily on the foundation provided by older historical critics such as Paul Kocher, Leicester Bradner,and Paul Jorgensen.With chapters on TamburlaineIand II,Dido, Queen ofCarthage, Edward II, The Jew ofMalta, The Massacre at Paris, and Doctor Faustus, this work offers a graceful argumentative arc. In Shepard's formulation , the book's argument forms a parabola: Its highest points are its first and last chapters on Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus respectively: in these plays we can see Marlowe's least and most ironic representations ofthe culture wars between soldiers and civilians.... [T]he farther one reads beyond Chapter 1, the weaker the magnetic pull of Tamburlaine's hypermilitarism; the closer to Chapter 6, the stronger the playwright's skepticism. (15-16) Given this structure, the most provocative chapters are those in the second half of the book. Hypermilitarism in Tamburlaine and even Dido needs little commentary . The authorial resistance that Shepard perceives in such elements as the responses ofTamburlaine's prisoners seems slight; these scenes are perhaps an inevitable part of dramatizing a conqueror's progress. In the early chapters the most notable sections are those that draw on contemporary documents to compare Marlowe's handling of well-known events with that of other writers. Aeneas's betrayal ofDido, for example, seemed serious enough to Barnabe Rich for him to question why the English "'for the glory of antiquity shoulde bee so fond to recount their Genealogy from such a desteyned progeny'" (qtd. in Shepard 54). Several of Marlowe's contemporaries wrote approvingly...