Abstract:
In this article I examine a number of scenes in Shakespeare’s Troilus
and Cressida where trumpet calls punctuate the action, arguing that they index
forms of early modern masculine warrior identity. The apparently peripheral
theatrical signs highlight, by means of their acoustic semiosis, forms of masculinity
imbricated in processes of self-perpetuating violence. That spiralling violence
is referred to at one juncture, as a ‘rank feud’ (4.7.16) – a conflict both
growing out of control but also one centred around ‘rank’, that is, hierarchical
competition generating violence out of violence. I claim that the play, by exploring
the deeply oxymoronic structure of the masculine warrior ethos, what it
in the context of Hector and Ajax’ duel calls, ‘A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’
(4.7.7), points to broader structures of endemic conflict in early modern English
society. The play repeatedly uses the term of imitative ‘emulation’ to index this
phenomenon. Such a term, though referring specifically to internecine aristocratic
competition, in turn pointed to wider patterns of violence which were of
great concern to contemporaries, but which changes in English society down
the seventeenth century would gradually make obsolete. The theatre, I suggest,
unwittingly imagined these transformations by its very aesthetic form, ‘[a]nticipating
time’ in Agamemnon’s phrasing (4.6.2). It did so not out of any uncanny
prescience, but because the early modern theatre’s own variety of imitative
‘emulation’, albeit short-lived, was one sector of an emergent capitalist economy
in whose interests social strife, culminating in the civil wars and the collective
trauma of 1649, would be increasingly curtailed as the century entered its
last quarter.
