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

234 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) was informed by factors other than class. Marx was right about structure, wrong about consciousness. The Manor remained a central pillar of local government into the eighteenth century: here, the parish seems slightly less central than it has been shown to have been elsewhere. Administratively speaking, Colyton was moderately experimental, but often consumed with factional politics. It had its share of weird and wonderful religious beliefs, dissenters, and proud martyrs to the Good Old Cause (also modified here) in 1685. The community she describes is never less than highly political. Gentry women were least likely to practice family limitation. In the general population, abortions were perhaps as common as they have been at any time, per head, but only a few were discovered and documented. We get a rather frightening glimpse of village wives inspecting the bed of a suspected abortion. Overall, Sharpe affirms ‘the ability of English local populations to respond sensitively to local conditions’, not only in regard to reproduction, but to making a living, loving and hating, peace and war, intriguing, buying and selling, worshipping and the politics of everyday life in general. Like the late medieval Essex communities studied by L. R. Poos, or the Derbyshire Peaks, Whyckham, the Stroudwater Valleys, Cheapside and Westminster, this is no ‘peasant society’. For the origins of capitalism, we must look not to the generations afterAdam Smith, but to the sixteenth century. Colyton was a unique variant and catalyst of wider national and international influences and relationships , a pulsating cell in a commercial, consumer society long before the eighteenth century. Sharpe’s study roundly affirms de Vries’s keyword, ‘industriousness ’, and adds another dimension to the popular culture of the age: resourcefulness . No early modern or local studies collection should be without it. David Rollison School of Humanities University of Western Sydney Shepard, Alan, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. viii, 248; R.R.P. £40.00; ISBN 075460229X. Alan Shepard argues that Marlowe’s plays controvert an Elizabethan ideology of militarism and its associated norms of masculinity. He claims that Marlowe demonstrates scepticism about essentialist notions of a masculinity founded in Reviews 235 Parergon 20.2 (2003) military’virtus and that he espouses a performative understanding of gender roles. Though Marlowe’s treatment of war varies from apparent endorsement to apparent repudiation, Shepard argues that it always opposes militarism, that it takes a side in what Shepard calls the Elizabethan ‘culture wars between soldiers and civilians’. The book shows an admirable range of reference, contextualising Marlowe’s plays in Elizabethan history and Renaissance writings about military life and values. It also draws on a variety of modern theorists, such as Judith Butler on gender and Klaus Theweleit on the male fantasies manifested in the proto-Nazi Freikorps. Shepard’s use of these writings is somewhat patchy and less convincing. Shepard begins with an able survey of treatises on military matters, which he contrasts with the chivalric mode of most poetic treatments. He shows how the treatises betray an anxiety about a peace that they associate with femininisation, and about the arts of writing that they themselves practise. Conversely, they promote linked ideas of masculinity and the state. He gives considerable attention to the proclamations of martial law under Mary and Elizabeth. In Tamburlaine, Shepard traces a dialectic between a militarist ideology, in which the desire for conquest is innate, part of nature, and a civilian resistance, which states the claims of antimilitarism. This discussion deploys an excellent knowledge of Renaissance military writings, though its mustering of Renaissance antimilitaristauthoritiesisweaker.ShepardgivesattentiontoTamburlaine’svictims, Olympia, Agydas, and Calyphas, arguing that they manifest forms of ‘universal need’, to be distinguished from ‘socially constructed desire’. This dialectic is undeniable but obvious, and not very remarkable dramatically, which perhaps explains the ‘scant attention’ generally given to these episodes. Shepard shows how the destructive ‘natural’ claims of Tamburlaine are in fact social constructions. He assumes that Marlowe shares this understanding, a possible but unprovable position. A similar question arises with Dido, Queen of Carthage. Shepard refers to ‘Marlowe’s criticism throughout the play of the zero-sum nature of epic...