Abstract
The military historian Geoffrey Parker recently noted that in Europe the period from 1500 to 1700 was “the most warlike in terms of the proportion of years of war under way (95 percent), the frequency of war (nearly one every three years), and the average yearly duration, extent, and magnitude of war.”1 While warfare or the threat of warfare was constant during Shakespeare’s lifetime, the nature of armed conflict seems to have undergone significant changes. Michael Roberts was the first to claim that a “military revolution” took place in Europe between 1560 and 1660.2 Roberts asserted that the key facets of this revolution were the introduction of the musket and the longbow to replace the lance and the pike, the overall increase in the size of armies, the use of smaller divisions within those armies, and war’s increased impact on the populace. While articulating his military historical paradigm Roberts acknowledged that E. G. R. Taylor’s work on mathematical practitioners had influenced him: “And behind the artillery lay a fringe of scientific laymen and minor mathematicians—those ‘mathematical practitioners’ whose part in educating the seamen, gunners and surveyors of the age has recently been made clear.”3 These early modern mathematical practitioners invented many deadly new technologies, including submarines, gas-shells, an armored fighting vehicle, the first torpedo, multibarreled guns, hand grenades, and saws with silencer attachments. Gunpowder innovations impacted even the rank and file soldier such that, according to Roberts, “the slowly increasing technical complexity of firearms was already beginning the process of forcing the soldier to be (on however primitive a level) a technician.”4
[T]hese instruments which discharge balls of metal with most tremendous noise and flashes of fire … were a few years ago very rare and were viewed with the greatest astonishment and admiration, but now they are become as common and familiar as any other kind of arms. So quick and ingenious are the minds of men in learning the most pernicious arts.
—Petrarch,De Remediis, book 1, dialogue 99
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Notes
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ), p. 1.
See Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution 1560–1660 (Belfast: Marjory Boyd, 1956 )
See also Sir George Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), esp. pp. 73–75.
Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550–1800 ( Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1991 );
John Childs, Warfare in the Seventeenth Century ( London: Cassell, 2001 ).
For more on gleaning military knowledge from the classics see Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and Practice ( Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965 ), pp. 12–13.
Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 380–382. Geoffrey Parker insists that “England finally dropped longbows in favour of handguns during the 1560s. Although a rearguard action was fought in favour of the longbow by some armchair strategists, their case was not generally heeded” (p. 18).
Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of the European Expansion 1400–1700 ( London: Collins, 1965 ), p. 39.
Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1956), p. viii. In 1859 William Thoms, founder of Notes and Queries, asserted that Shakespeare saw military action in the Low Countries in the 1580s. Thoms cited a letter by Sidney dated March 24, 1586, from Utrecht that mentioned, “Will my Lord of Leicester’s player,” and Thoms noted that the profusion of military epithets, allusions, and similes in Shakespeare’s writings indicated firsthand familiarity with battle (William Thoms, “Was Shakespeare Ever a Soldier?” Notes and Queries 7 [1859]: 330–333, 351–355). Thoms’s position was revived in 1949 when Duff Cooper published Sergeant Shakespeare (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949). Cooper asserted that Shakespeare served in the Low Countries and was promoted to the rank of noncommissioned officer.
Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary ( New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000 ), p. 1.
In Steven Marx, “Holy War in Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 85–97.
James I, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918 ), p. 270.
Gervase Markham, Honour in His Perfection (1624), p. 24.
See Roy S. Wolper, “The Rhetoric of Gunpowder and the Idea of Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 589–598, esp. p. 597.
Thomas Digges, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, named Stratioticos… (1579), p. 116.
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 ), p. 123.
See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of the Valorous & Witty Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (London: Macmillan, 1923), book 2, pp. 36–37.
For more on the relationship between emblems and Renaissance technologies see Edward Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Maurice Keen has described aristocratic fascination with firearms, noting that “guns came to be decorated with tracery, blazons, mottoes and inscriptions, and were given names as swords once had beenchrw(133).Noblemen adopted guns for their badges and ensigns,” and “captains of noble bloodchrw(133) came to regard it as part of their business to know about guns and how to use them” (Maurice Keen, Chivalry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984], pp. 241–242).
John Smythe, Instructions, Observations, and Orders Mylitarie (1595), p. 188.
William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (1591), pp. 5–6.
Robert Norden, The Gunner, Shewing the whole practise of Artillery.... (1628; repr., New York: De Capo, 1973 ), p. 617.
The chemistry and physics here are drawn from Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 ), p. 67.
See John X. Evans, “Shakespeare’s ‘Villainous Salt-Peter’: The Dimensions of an Allusion,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 451–454. My discussion of saltpeter mining in England is drawn from Evans.
C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966 ), p. 127.
The ideal among the neo-Stoics was that the true Christian soldier should be able to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune both on and off the battlefield. An extreme instance of this neo-Stoic ideal is what Spenser refers to as Talus’s “stonie philosophie” in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. For more on the prominence of neo-Stoic philosophy among English courtiers and the ways in which Spenser’s representation of Talus both confirms and complicates neo-Stoic ideals, see Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. p. 17 and pp. 203–235.
For more on Pistol and his popularity see Leslie Hotson, “Ancient Pistol,” Yale Review 38 (1948): 51–66.
R. A. Buchanan, Technology and Social Progress (Oxford: Pergamon, 1963), p. 163;
Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 ), p. 3.
Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and Helmut Georg Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 ), p. 85.
In Maurice J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 and of Contemporary Foreign Works ( 1900; repr., London: Holland Press, 1957 ), p. 57.
For more on Smythe’s arguments see Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001 ), p. 133.
For more on the caliver see John Francis Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974 ), p. 283.
C. G. Cruickshank, “Military Developments of the Renaissance,” in A Guide to the Sources of British Military History, ed. Robin Higham (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 72. This 1595 order seems to have been heeded, because in a letter dated April 29, 1598, the Earl of Huntingdon, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, wrote that “nowe theire Lordships’ pleasures are that all the Bowes and Arrowes and bills generally must be refused, and supplied only with musketts” (in Cockle, p. 46).
In William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1997 ), p. 3339.
G. Geoffrey Langsam, Martial Books and Tudor Verse ( New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951 ), p. 2.
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© 2006 Adam Max Cohen
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Cohen, A.M. (2006). Weapons of Fire and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Trajectory. In: Shakespeare and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12004-5_4
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