‘As at Turwin I was a demi-soldier in jest, so now I became a martialist in earnest.’ This remark, taken from Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, might help us to recognise a categorical shift, a change from an historical moment when fighting was a chivalric sport or form of group-specific behaviour to a moment when fighting was an occupation – from a moment when a fighter was regarded as a gentleman-amateur to one in which he was a professional or ‘martialist’. The opposition of the two terms corresponds to the opposition made by Michel Foucault between the ‘homme de guerre’ and the professional ‘militaire’, an opposition which is central to this essay. Nashe's noun ‘martialist’ is cited only from 1576 in OED and is not current in English: its appearance suggests that war in the period was changing from something familiar in the order of things to an object of inquiry.

In what follows I want to argue that a reading of the Shakespearean canon might lead us to conclude that at the end of the sixteenth century the age of the ‘soldier’ had passed and the age of the ‘martialist’ had arrived. Because, perhaps, of the recognition of a tradition of pacifism established by Erasmus, More and others, ‘martialists’ are constructed in Shakespearean texts as suspect figures, often, despite the victory at Lepanto in 1571, demonised in the figure of the ‘cruel Turk’.