1590s Drama and Militarism

1590s Drama and Militarism is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of various textual interventions into the military realities of the late Elizabethan period. Its major strength is its insistence on the discursive nature of militarism, and the author convincingly uses literary and non-literary texts, including manuals and contemporary military correspondence, to reconstruct the particular anxieties which surrounded the military exigencies of the 1590s. In this study Nina Taunton makes appropriate (and critically inflected) use of Foucault's theories of surveillance and Lefebvre's theories about the ideological production of social space. She puts Michel de Certeau's theories of social practice to good use in her analysis of military strategy. These theoretical perspectives are usefully combined with highly specific and well-documented historical analyses.