Traumatography in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy.

In his first tetralogy, Shakespeare presents a starkly pessimistic counterpoint to Thomas Nashes' enthusiastic celebration of the early modern stage's renascence of chivalric ideals. Figures like Talbot – emblems of an older chivalric order – fade into irrelevance as their lofty self-conceptions clash with the cold pragmatism of a new political world: their outdated virtues are received with apathy by a rising generation of Machiavellian courtiers such as Richard III. As such, Shakespeare's portrayal of these older characters represents an irreparable disconnect between the medieval past and his own early modern present. England's defeat by France – a painful emblem of his time – is transformed from a straightforward military failure into a symptom of inexorable decline: Norbert Elias's "civilizing process", framed as a moral unraveling rather than material progress. By sidestepping a blunt, mortifying reckoning with England's inadequacies against French power, Shakespeare's narrative becomes elusive and layered – less a chronicle of events than a haunting act of traumatography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]