This chapter has a fantasy hero. It appears in the form of the extraordinary figure of a foot soldier who features in a series of illustrations in William Neade's 1625 book of military theory and tactics, The Double-Armed Man. I shall return to him later, along with his mounted counterpart, leaving him for the moment standing, somewhat awkwardly in his spurs and heavy-looking armour, with longbow drawn and steadied against his pike, a full quiver of arrows on one side of his waist, and an elegantly hilted sword at the other. Neade's text is one example from the wideranging canon of early modern documents that argued the case for an enhanced awareness of the military requirements of the developing late Tudor and early Stuart state, and the illustration is a perfect image of this canon's relentless idealism. One of my concerns is with the way that this idealism was guaranteed for the reader by means of a not altogether untroubled marshalling of representations of medieval militarism and chivalry, classical models and current military fads and fashions. The ideological assumptions underpinning the approach of those who theorised the optimum Renaissance army – and thus the subjectivities of the individual soldiers that were to be recruited to it – are best seen when the model becomes overdetermined by the relentlessness of its idealism.

Armies recruit individuals, yet notions of ‘individuality’ do not fit readily into the specialised human activity that is warfare: individual acts may be celebrated and rewarded, but in the ‘theatre’ of war their significance (as ‘soliloquies’ of war) depends on a collective ‘troupe’.