| My dissertation studies how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers imbued armor with meaning and allowed it to negotiate crucial relationships between present and absent violence, self and other, and historical past and contemporary moment. This project considers literary, dramatic and visual representations of armor in states of wholeness and in states of destruction and reconstitution, the latter category of which includes the spoil of war and the military trophy, an anthropomorphic object comprised of the arms and armor of the vanquished. I argue that the notion of "spoiling" provides a means of understanding the early modern English subject's relationship to his literary and cultural past. Using the work of Walter Benjamin, who observes that spoils of war are both cultural treasures and objects of horror, I show that it is in an imagined military struggle between male bodies that the spoils of antiquity are claimed and reconstituted by writers of the period. The works I examine -- including Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, elegies and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney (including Lant's Roll), and Shakespeare's Roman plays -- claim or spoil armor as a means of exploring the relationship between militarism, artistic production, and subjectivity. I read these texts against pictorial representations of armor, including The Almain Armourer's Album, tapestries, early modern portraits, trophy books, and images of military triumphs. Drawing on studies of both print culture and early modern clothing, as well as on recent work on material culture and subject/object relations in Renaissance England, I consider not only the "life" of objects, a popular approach in contemporary criticism, but also how objects register the death and demise of subjects and cultures -- how objects, that is, can be both living and "dead" metaphors. |
