Coats and Conduct: The Materials of Military Obligation in Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V

Pasupathi understands military garments in different terms--not as objects for the stage or the staging of royal authority but as the materials of England's military institutions as they existed historically and developed over time. Linking the status and significance of soldiers' coats in Shakespeare to historical shifts in practices for army provisioning and the raising of troops, he contextualizes references to coats and other military garments in the drama alongside the statutes that articulated--or failed to articulate--subjects' obligation to take up arms for the Crown. He establishes the statutes' increasingly centralized but also increasingly punitive notions of subjects' martial servicium debitum in late Tudor England and argues for the coat's capacity in 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V to embody and to elide this debt's implications.