Review
--William N. West, Northwestern University
English Mercuries turns a fresh, incisive, and informed eye on a literature usually read simply as jingoistic, proto-nationalistic paeans to the glory of war. McKeown, a veteran Marine and literature scholar, shows us poets torn by their experiences as soldiers, disenchanted with their queen, disgusted with war, and haunted by their dreams. English Mercuries opens a new and fascinating window on the early modern English culture of war; a view the reader will find surprisingly relevant to our present problems.
--Wayne E. Lee, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina
Adam McKeown finds in the writing of Elizabethan soldier-poets a sober and disenchanted counterpoint to the much-trumpeted patriotism of the age. English Mercuries is a work of moral and intellectual clarity, quietly compelling in its determination to peel away layers of historical myth in order to gauge English militarism by attending to the voices of veterans. It should not only reshape our understanding of individual writers from Thomas Churchyard to Ben Jonson, but also sharpen our appreciation of the complex, ambivalent view English citizens had of their government and its wars.
--David Lee Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina
Product Description
These misgivings are a powerful undercurrent in much of the literature of the period, even the most ostensibly patriotic works, but it is in the writings on war by soldier poets where they are most clearly pronounced. Fashioning themselves as servants of both Mars and Mercury (the god of war and the god of writing), Elizabethan soldier poets focused their war stories on the gritty realities of military campaigning, the price individuals paid for serving the state, and the difficulties of returning to civilian life. The book reconsiders some familiar writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson in the context of their military experiences and provides comprehensive studies of some important but underappreciated soldier poets like Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and John Harington.
