Simon Barker

War and nation in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

This original study explores a vital aspect of early modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The book contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity, and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. Barker examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the later drama, for their subversive commentary on an emerging idealisation of Shakespeare and his work. The book argues that the early modern period saw the establishment of political, social and theological attitudes to war that were to become accepted as natural in succeeding centuries. Barkers reading of the drama of the period reveals the discontinuities in this project as a way of commenting on the use of the past within modern warfare. The book is also a survey and analysis of literary theory over the last twenty-five years in relation to the issue of early modern war - and develops an argument about the study of literature and war in general.Features files fix-build.sh fix-build.sh~ log1.txt mysql-build.sh mysql-build.sh~ Interdisciplinary approach addressing the early-modern period as one of particular importance in the history of warfare files fix-build.sh fix-build.sh~ log1.txt mysql-build.sh mysql-build.sh~ Examines the way that the period helped shape modern attitudes to war files fix-build.sh fix-build.sh~ log1.txt mysql-build.sh mysql-build.sh~ Sets Shakespeare in the context of those dramatists who preceded him, as well as his contemporaries and successors files fix-build.sh fix-build.sh~ log1.txt mysql-build.sh mysql-build.sh~ Surveys the work of the past and considers the future of criticism in relation to warfare

‘Faking It’: Provenance, Persuasion and the Renaissance Military Subject

Experts have had a long and profitable association with the business of war. They work on the development and manufacture of armaments and are then invited to comment on their deployment and effects. Legal, constitutional and even genealogical experts are involved in the perennial problem of justifying war (as we see in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Henry VI plays); and experts can be deployed in the business of selling war to the people. Bertolt Brecht plays upon the latter idea when he introduces an ‘expert’ actor in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. As we shall see, this figure, ‘the Actor’, explains (and also undermines) the cultural resonance of traditional approaches to Shakespeare in an episode that implies a relationship between this resonance and a sense of political, warlike persuasion. It is hard not to think also of the ‘weapons experts’ who played such diverse roles in the execution of Operation Telic (the British involvement in Iraq), a campaign underpinned by quasi-Shakespearean rhetoric that explored distinct codes of military subjectivity. I am thinking of the now famous speech delivered by Lieutenant Tim Collins as the Royal Irish Regiment prepared to cross the frontier. He urged his soldiers to be ‘ferocious in battle but magnanimous in victory’, spoke of Iraq’s history and the humanity of its people, and reminded them of the significance of the ‘mark of Cain’.1

The Double-Armed Man : Images of the Medieval in Early Modern Military Idealism

The hero of this essay is the extraordinary figure who first appeared as an illustration at the beginning of William Neade’s 1625 book of military theory and tactics, The Double-Armed Man.1 I shall return to him later, along with his rather less heroic mounted counterpart, leaving him for the moment as the accompanying caption describes, standing ‘coucht and charged for the horse with his Sword drawne’. Neade’s text is one example from a wide-ranging canon of early modern documents arguing the case for an enhanced awareness of the military requirements of the developing late-Tudor and early-Stuart state, and the frontispiece illustration is a perfect image of this canon’s relentless idealism. My particular concern is with the way in which this idealism is guaranteed for the reader by means of a not altogether untroubled marshalling of representations of medieval militarism and chivalry.