“A Sharper Reproof to These Degenerate Effeminate Days”

Abstract

The previous chapter claims that while Vesalius presents a notion of body and self drawn from the classical tradition that ensures agent autonomy through objectification of the body either of the opponent or the corpse, his English imitators and Shakespeare’s Roman plays, influenced by a medieval English tradition, present a form of agency that understands combat as mutually constructive for both combatants and agency as relational. Vesalius’s depiction of the body begins to suggest the role violent, physical opposition plays in the construction of individual understandings of self. To elucidate how this process extends to the development of an English national sense of self, this chapter examines historical narratives, and especially moments when masculine codes of combat are appropriated by women, that illuminate the cultural differences at stake in these different modes of understanding combat in relationship to the self.

Nay, what if I prove plays to be no extreme, but a rare exercise of virtue? First, for the subject of them, (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers’ valiant acts (that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm- eaten books) are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honors in open presence; than which what can be a sharper reproof to these degenerate, effeminate days of ours?

How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears often thousand spectators at least (at several times), who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.

—Thomas Nashe, from “Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil” ¹