Unto the breach: martial formations, historical trauma, and the early modern stage.

Anderson, Thomas P.

Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, by Patricia A. Cahill. Oxford, U. K.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 227. Hardback $99.00.

Patricia A. Cahill's Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage is a remarkable book--always insightfull in its analysis of early modern military drama, often surprising in its discoveries about the texts it explores, and scrupulously researched for historians, theatre critics, and literary scholars. Through attentive and at times brilliant readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and lesser-known contemporaries, Cahill argues that the "cultural imagination" shaped by martial drama of the 1590s produced "new regimes of rationality and abstraction" (3). Far from "sterile exercises in abstract thinking" (3), however, martial drama, according to Cahill, "imagined modern warfare as a phenomenon defined by its traumatic impact--that is, by the fact that it cannot be fully grasped" (9).

For Cahill, the tension between new practical knowledge of warfare and the representations of traumatic violence common in popular martial drama in London playhouses enabled "new understandings of personhood and the body politic" (5). These new understandings emerged from what she describes as "intrusive scenes, compulsive repetitions, and disorienting temporalities that define traumatic experience in the modern social realm" (6). One of Cahill's major interventions in the scholarship on early modern drama is to argue that modern concepts of personhood are "intimately bound up with notions of the collective and the uniform" (28) that characterize military science during the period, and not necessarily shaped by "untrammeled individual aspiration" (42) often associated with the concept of Renaissance self-fashioning. For Cahill, traces of modernity are located both in the theatre's "preoccupation with disciplined multitudes, impressed common men, and regulated populations" (19) and in the "collective sense of disorientation" (19) represented in martial drama that "registers the traumatic impact of the era's preoccupation with war" (19).

Cahill's insistence that the English cultural imagination is shaped by a new brand of military rationality characterized by the necessary production of the collective, the normative, and the uniform transforms the psychoanalytic theory that underpins her study from a tool to explore the psyche of the individual subject into a hermeneutic that helps to explain the "affective force of the transactions between playgoers and plays in Elizabethan playhouses" (9). Indeed, Cahill's productive association of military science and martial drama with trauma theory provides compelling historical context for the book's psychoanalytic approach.

The first three chapters of Unto the Breach explore how martial drama registers the new practice of early modern military science that accounted for the individual through systems of aggregation, accounting, and bureaucratic administration. In exploring the effects of martial rationality on the Elizabethan cultural imagination, these chapters marshal an impressive array of related documents and texts that provide powerful context to Cahill's claims. Exploring military science manuals such as The pathwaie to martial discipline and The Practice of Fortification that emphasized arithmetical thinking in accounting for martial labor, chapter 1 presents a reading of Christopher Marlowe's two-part Tamburlaine that convincingly shows how the play "hints at the way numerical thinking unexpectedly morphs into a spectacle of horror, in which ... human flesh can be imagined as undifferentiated multitude" (69).

Cahill's second chapter, a fresh reading of Shakespeare's I and 2 Henry IV, probes the complexity of the Gloucestershire scene in which Justice Shallow and Falstaff levy troops for war. Cahill's examination of this scene places it in the context of early modern muster rolls common in the period which tended to classify subjects into an ideal uniform norm. For Cahill, however, the Shakespearean history plays "contemplate alternatives to such new regimes of rationality" (73) in their representation of what she terms the "mundane particular" (73)--the plays' representation of the abundant naming registered in muster rolls whose aim is normative abstraction.

Edward III is the subject of Cahill's third chapter, which is an illuminating account of how the desire to colonize Ireland continued to haunt the Elizabethan imagination. Using texts from Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, and John Derrike to contextualize her reading of the play, Cahill argues that martial and sexual desires are linked in the play and that this union suggests a shift away from the purely military toward biopolitical efforts to establish and maintain English identity. The play, for Cahill, becomes a "two-part fantasy of womb and war" (107) in which the limitations of warfare are supplemented by "the politics of procreation" (136) in order to preserve Englishness outside of England.

The book's final two chapters turn from how martial drama reflects the cultural production of a "regulated and reproducible social body" (19) to how plays popular in the period, specifically The Trial of Chivalry and A Larumfor London, represent bodies that are "uncanny" and depict time and space as out of joint. For Cahill, these bodily and temporal distortions register the "traumatic impact of the era's preoccupation with war" (19). Cahill's analysis of A Lamm for London in the book's final chapter is especially powerful. By juxtaposing events in the play to the period's fascination with popular images of a body known as "Wound-man," who was depicted as ravaged by war in all possible ways, Cahill persuasively shows how the play's putative didacticism about lessons learned from the sack of Antwerp for the early modern present is, in fact, a narrative about the unmasterable condition of traumatic history. The play, according to Cahill, "emerges as a text that bears witness not only to the upheaval in Antwerp but also to a more general cultural trauma--namely, the psychic dislocation generated by the increasingly militarized culture of late sixteenth-century London" (168).

The epilogue that closes Cahill's study offers an exciting reading of act 5 of Richard III in which Richmond and Richard occupy the stage together the night before the Battle at Bosworth Field and are visited by a procession of ghosts from their past. Cahill suggests that to some the visitations of the apparitions might suggest "the naive wish to simply relinquish the past" (218) in order to move forward--beyond the realm of a traumatic history. Yet according to Cahill, the "mode in which the procession is represented reveals that past traumas remain all too powerfully present in this breathing world" (219). This conclusion--that the impact of traumatic loss persists even in aesthetic acts that seem to want to overcome it--might come as a surprise to some readers of Cahill's study. That is to say, earlier in Unto the Breach Cahill seems to establish the possibility that "working through" (9, 139, 208) historical trauma is possible through dramatic reenactment. Her integration of Dominick LaCapra's influential account of the relationship between historical writing and trauma attests to the possibility of what LaCapra calls redemptive narratives that allow a collective to work through traumatic history. By the end of the Cahill's trenchant recapitulation of moments in martial drama that themselves register and repeat the impact of traumatic historical events, however, the book, it seems, surrenders this hope.

The impact of Cahill's remarkable study is amplified by the book s lucid, evocative prose that captures simultaneously the precision of the new military science as well as the implications of the many scenes of ambiguity and distraction in martial drama. The book's extensive apparatus--its copious, detailed explanatory notes and its complete index of names and subjects--complements Cahill's many invigorating lines of inquiry into representations of martial trauma on the early modern stage.

Reviewer: THOMAS P. ANDERSON