Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance.
Susan E. Harlan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, USA.
CHAPTER 1 – “Objects fit for Tamburlaine”: Self-Arming in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Robert Vaughan’s Portraits, and The Almain Armourer’s Album.- INTERLUDE – Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects, and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage.- CHAPTER 2 – Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lant’s Roll, and Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.- INTERLUDE – “Scatter’d Men”: Mutilated Male Bodies and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare’s Henry V.- CHAPTER 3 – The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.- CODA – “Let’s Do’t After the High Roman Fashion”: Funeral and Triumph.- BIBLIOGRAPHY.