Shakespeare's Military Language: A Dictionary (review)

"The Athlone Shakespeare dictionaries aim to provide the student of Shakespeare with a series of authoritative guides to the principal subject-areas covered by the plays and the poems. They are produced by scholars who are experts both on Shakespeare and on the topic of the individual dictionary, based on the most recent scholarship, succinctly written and accessibly presented" (ix). Charles Edelman's contribution to this series, Shakespeare's Military Language, fulfills these expectations. His entries, arranged alphabetically and abundantly cross-referenced, provide first a clear definition of the word and a sense of its contemporary contexts, then a selective "guided tour" of Shakespeare's usage, and finally, when available, a manageable bibliography of relevant primary and secondary materials. The result is not only the useful glossing of many military terms unfamiliar to the modern reader but also an emerging sense of Elizabethan concepts of warfare in their own and in prior times, both medieval and classical.

Edelman writes clearly and efficiently, and his citations of Shakespeare's usage and the discussions that contextualize and clarify it are concise but sufficient. Frequent quotations from military manuals by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries, such as Giles Clayton, Gervase Markham, Thomas Styward, Sir Roger Williams, and Robert Barret, offer insights into both the style and content of such discourse. A good deal of this contextual reconstruction is valuable in its own right, as when Edelman discusses the special temper of Spanish swords and how it was achieved, or when he offers contrasting details about loading and firing a caliver and a musket. Surgeon and surgery also receive an unusually thorough treatment. Everyone except a specialist will be fascinated to learn about such weapons as the glaive, the bilboe, and the whinyard, bits of armor such as the vambrace and the sight, and the trousers called strossers that were "worn by the kern, when he wore trousers at all" (344). Browsers will also learn that a flash in the pan is a firing that does not expel shot; that a musket is both heavier and more powerful than a caliver; that a sticking place is the point at which a crossbow can be wound no tighter; and that artillery can refer to bows and arrows as well as guns. The background information on herald usefully glosses the interchanges between Henry V and Mountjoy, and Edelman's entry for horse contains the fascinating information that even Henry V's modest force would have brought 25,000 horses to France in preparation for Agincourt. We also learn that the pike equaled the handgun in "the elimination of the mounted man-at-arms from modern warfare" and that a "semi-official piracy" characterized the efforts of gentlemen such as Raleigh or commoners such as Drake to serve queen, country, and themselves on the high seas (253, 257).

Edelman's glosses draw insights from many sources, including history, art, and the theater, as when he discusses the use of sennet in the field and on the stage, or tells us that "mailed Mars" would have been truer to contemporary art than to contemporary warfare, which had eschewed chain-mail for over a century. The entry for helm (a large helmet) uses details from medieval funeral effigies, histories of medieval and Renaissance tilting, and a sketch by Henry Peacham of a scene from Troilus and Cressida for its reconstructed context. The entry for lance refers to details from the Bayeux Tapestry. Contemporary comments about the sentinel reveal common attitudes about such a "cold, boring, and thoroughly unpleasant job" that might be useful as we process its manifestations in A Midsummer Night's Dream or in Hamlet (305). Secondary references similarly enhance our understandings of such matters as the changing role of English archers in battle and the complexities underlying contemporary discussions of the Spanish Armada. One byway of this contextual knowledge is Edelman's consideration of the often-complex cases of Shakespeare's anachronisms and related inexactness. We learn, for...