Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

Shepard argues that the Marlowe plays wrestle with the philosophical assumptions about the nature of war and the role and status of soldiers in English culture.

He argues about how these soldiers were being embedded in those years in contemporary military handbooks penned by veterans of war, in homilies, royal proclamations, poems, pamphlets, and other plays, Shakespeare’s included.

Drawing on early modern theories and uses of classical rhetoric, stage history, queer theory, historicist strategies and even magical realism, Marlowe’s Soldiers investigates how and why Marlowe’s plays make entertainment of a wealth of historically and geopolitically divergent fantasies about martial law and its discontents.