Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (review)

Patricia Cahill’s Unto the Breach is a marvelous accomplishment of literary scholarship: a deeply researched and conceptually sophisticated treatment of early modern military culture and its translation onto the English Renaissance stage. Densely packed with scrupulous details (for instance, the price of a wooden leg in the sixteenth century) and supplemented with choice illustrations, the book is a rich weaving together of vibrant, often genuinely revisionary, local readings of Elizabethan plays with broader critical and methodological claims about the role of early modern martial drama in processing the consequences of sixteenth-century warfare. That role, according to Cahill, was to stage ways of knowing and feeling—in her view, hallmarks of the modern—generated by the Elizabethan experience of battle.

This argument depends upon Cahill’s deft examination—influenced by recent work in the history of science, performance studies, and trauma theory—of an archive of primary printed sources dealing with the theory and practice of early modern warfare. Citing accounts of battles, instructional guides, muster books, and medical texts, Cahill discusses the emergence of military studies as a science or discipline, one based on principles of rational calculation and abstraction easily incorporated into the language and staging of the drama. Her analysis takes its cue from works like Mary Poovey’s History of the Modern Fact (1998) and aligns her study with other recent monographs, like Henry S. Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (2006) and Jessica Wolfe’s Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (2004), whose historicizing impulses are trained not on topical allusion or political environment but on period modes of perception and comprehension. What sets Cahill’s work apart is its psychoanalytically inflected attention to the traumatic recoil from the rational, depersonalizing effects of a martialist epistemology. With care and tact, she shows the drama’s presentation of warfare “as a double-edged phenomenon” (4), whose violence can overwhelm or obliterate its strategies of organization and control. The chapters thus move back and forth between “Elizabethan performances of martial rationality” and “scenes of horrific injury and systematic killing” (3), exploring “how specific plays are implicated in the era’s new discourses of measurement—discourses having to do with organizing bodies in a spatial grid, comparing bodies on a horizontal axis, and reproducing bodies as a socially engineered population—and . . . how such plays represent, through narratives of trauma, a sense of the incommensurability of bodies and spaces” (18).

The first chapter, on Marlowe’s two Tamburlaine plays, is perhaps the most exciting, due to its discussion of the reliance of martial treatises on new mathematical practices and to its challenge to conventional readings of the play’s notoriously individuated overreacher. Rather than seeing Tamburlaine as the epitome of self-fashioned individualism, Cahill describes the protagonist in relation to the “emergence of a new subject position—namely, the man whose authority derives from his expertise as a militarist” who is also “implicated in, and constituted by, an abstract, geometrically and arithmetically manipulable, social body” (27). Starting with a brief consideration of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor and its “fantasy of serial killing” (31), Cahill turns to Tamburlaine’s “language of ‘infinite’ or uncountable numbers” (56) to explore the way the play reduces personhood to number and the specialized rites of chivalry to the regularized performance of warring multitudes, ultimately depicting Tamburlaine as the man who is “no longer knowable apart from abstraction, the man who is no different from an indeterminate number of others” (68). At stake here is the traditional view of the protagonist as distinctly “other,” a creature defined by his Scythian ancestry and outsider status; Cahill repudiates this notion, suggesting that “the play relentlessly foregrounds the language of technical expertise in its representation of war, thereby representing mass slaughter not as barbarity but rather as a complex ensemble of routinized...