Trumpets and strumpets : time, space, emulation and violence in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

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.