ABSTRACT
The treatises and the correspondence on military matters in the 1590s share a preoccupation with boundary insecurities caused by Spanish rearmament and repeated threats of invasion. They also reveal by diverse means a mutual lack of confidence between monarch and generals, and a conflict of objectives in the various Continental military campaigns. Border insecurities combined with friction between ruler and those in high command, and among members of the high command themselves, to deepen fissures in attempts to deal with trouble spots in Portugal, France, the Netherlands and Ireland. The sources of this lack of confidence stemmed to a considerable degree from the commanders' own self-defining agendas, against the monarch's insistence on masterminding military operations. These were live issues in the plays. They stage the antagonism between royal and high command, and explore the nature of the conflict between strong, idealized, sometimes tyrannical figures of supreme command (both royal and military) whose judgement and authority is challenged by their own appointed deputies. As such they work as fictions of real events and people and also as wish-fulfilment fantasies (in the apprehension of its imminent loss) of the triumph of royal and military power. In certain respects, they may be regarded as a kind of mediation between real situations and the military idealizations of the treatises, thereby providing a means of airing anxieties about the ways in which Continental campaigns were being conducted, about coping with the ambitions, jealousies and rivalries of the generals themselves, and about juggling the competing claims from the various battlefronts for ever-increasing amounts of money and numbers of men.
