Susan Harlan’s critical engagement with staged depictions of socially and politically valenced acts of arming for battle and subsequent commemoration sheds new light on the construction of masculine identity through and in terms of violence. At the center of her episodic examination of extant early modern narratives surrounding arms, armoring, and the nostalgia associated with received notions of belligerent contestation is a subtle argument that turns upon words relating to “spoil.” All of the primary texts discussed in this focal chapter on Philip Sidney participate in the communal mourning of the fallen nobleman, addressing or narrating his death in battle. At the same time, all are constrained by the literary and social traditions that in large measure dictate their form. The chapter preceding this close reading of the decorum and unusualness of such a state funeral uses Tamburlaine’s onstage donning of armor to set up early modern English understandings of warfare. This act of self-armoring establishes the “Scourge of God” in the audience’s eyes as a member of a legitimate and legitimating cultural tradition of armed figures, insofar as his “armored body” recalls classical military paragons. Although he is coded as being heroic, he is no hero, and he spoils his armor even as he goes on to spoil so many things in the world of the play, both animate and inanimate, emblematic of the play’s own “dramatic spoiling,” or appropriation and reconstitution, of modes of tragedy and comedy. Harlan’s measured digression on Hamlet demonstrates the extent to which militant nostalgia controls and reckons with excessive mourning. The armored ghost of King Hamlet proleptically reminds his son—and the audience—of a past military engagement, the result of which is figured chiastically with the armed appearance of Fortinbras in the play’s closing scene.

The final chapter, “The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus,” shores up the book’s main argument concerning how and the extent to which nostalgia operates as a mode of narrative, producing a set of creative fictions by which early modern England narrated its national past and present. Antony’s fumbled arming, for example, negotiates a series of divisions, both material and ultimately temporal. By way of contextualizing Antony and Cleopatra’s treatment of the conventions of romance, Harlan addresses the manipulation of armor in Pericles to illuminate the dramaturgical impact of the debasement of these conventions. Pericles’s armor, like Anthony’s, recalls initially that of Achilles, Aeneas, and Saint Paul, but, because described as “rusty,” suggests a less grand object than its glorious literary predecessors. This derelict armor, bequeathed as an inheritance to Prince Pericles from his father, is dredged from the sea by the fishermen, thus signaling its having become a battered shell of its once epic form but which, in short order, will take on the values and narratives of chivalric romance. How one’s armor is described by those who handle it, exemplarily in Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra, conditions audience reception and reinforces the play’s larger themes.

Harlan’s careful reading of these Roman plays provides a foundation for future investigations along similar lines, for she has mapped out the territory with skill and marked out well the lines of future critical engagement. As both a nod in this direction and by way of reiterating a key point intimated throughout, Memories of War is capped off with a coda on military triumph being displaced by funeral. Moving from Cleopatra’s highly stylized and self-consciously stage-managed short-circuiting of Caesar’s plan to display her at Rome as a spoil of war, Harlan comes full circle to show that this same concern informed Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays and the tributes to Sidney; namely, how the military subject presents himself to be known and, in turn, is represented by others.

Students and researchers of Renaissance drama, and of elegiac poetics especially, will be rewarded by the rich trove of insights contained in the notes. Throughout Harlan interrogates with clarity and rigor the imagined communities in terms of which early modern England figured its national past and invested its present. This is a sophisticated and important contribution to historicized studies of material culture, most notably as regards nostalgia and countermemory in Elizabethan England.