SOURCE: Appelbaum, Robert. “War and Peace in The Lepanto of James VI and I.” Modern Philology 97, no. 3 (February 2000): 333-63.

In the following essay, Appelbaum explores the meaning of war and peace in Lepanto, contending that James's epic poem “tells its tale of peace in a complicated way.”

War and Peace. The topos antedates Leo Tolstoy's novel by two thousand years, and its utility is obvious. War is one thing. Peace is another. And so a discourse of differences, of contrasts, may begin. But as terms of rhetoric and representation, war and peace can also be held to resemble, to interpenetrate, or even to become one another. “Much remains / To conquer still,” Milton writes in his sonnet “To Lord General Cromwell”; “Peace hath her victories / No less renownd than warr.”¹ Peace, under the pressure of rhetoric like this, can be a lot like war since it can be said...