Revisiting the Images of the Wounded Soldiers and the Rhetoric of War in Early Modern England

Abstract

During the later years of Elizabeth I's reign, as well as being at war with Spain, England continued to deal with armed rebellion in Ireland. Given these historical contexts, it is clear that the frequent literary or stage portrayal of English soldiers is the product of a time when the threat was all too real. Contrary to stereotypes that represent valiant English soldiers, the images of wounded soldiers in literature and on stage were used not as an expression of patriotism but as an expression of social anxiety. The purpose of this paper is to look at the historical background which influenced the way in which the late sixteen-century Englishmen viewed the wounds of war, and relate it to the images of wounded soldiers in the late sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English drama. In doing so, I argue that because of contemporary culture's obscured notion of the differences between disability and deformity, the wounded soldiers had no clearly defined social category, and, as a result, were reduced to the edge between military and civilian life. Representations of the wounded soldiers on the early modern English stage offer us a glimpse into one aspect of the process of overturning a long established cultural and social view of their wounded bodies.