Shakespeare's History Plays

Robert Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367474522
• eBook ISBN: 9781317876137
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles.

Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays.

The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Chapter One

Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc¹

GABRIELE BERNHARD JACKSON

Jackson’s essay exemplifies the recent trend to discover new interest in Shakespeare’s early history plays. It combines a scrupulous attention to historical detail with a gender-based approach, bringing them to bear on the presentation of Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part 1. One of the play’s surprises is the way that Joan is presented as powerful, even admirable, for much of the time, only to be degraded and humiliated at the end. By examining Elizabethan presentations of the strong woman, Jackson offers a way of understanding the reversal in the presentation of Joan which conventional views of her ‘character’ are powerless to account for: ‘the more free play Joan’s attractive force is permitted, the more completely she will have to be feminized at the end of the play’.

Glory is like a circle in the water,

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself

Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

With Henry’s death the English circle ends;

Dispersed are the glories it included.

1 Henry VI, 1.2.133–37²

This wonderfully evocative description of the everything that is nothing, an exact emblem of the rise and disintegration, in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, of one new center of power after another, is assigned to Joan of Arc, the character whom most critics agree in calling a coarse caricature, an exemplar of authorial chauvinism both national and sexual, or at best a foil to set off the chivalric English heroes of 1 Henry VI. Her portrait, says Geoffrey Bullough in his compilation of Shakespeare’s sources, ‘goes far beyond anything found in Hall or Holinshed or in the Burgundian chronicler Monstrelet’.³ Bullough ruefully lauds Shakespeare’s mastery in discrediting the entire French cause through Joan; many subsequent critics have shared Bullough’s admiration, although not his compunction, over the skill with which Shakespeare delineated an ‘epitome of disorder and rebellion’ to pit against the ‘epitome of order and loyalty’, the English hero Talbot: ‘She is absolutely corrupt from beginning to end’, rejoices the author of one book on Shakespeare’s history plays.⁴ When the play was presented in 1591 or 1592, English troops were once again in France, once again supporting a claim to the French crown, a claim by another Henry – their religious ally Henry of Navarre. ‘A play recalling the gallant deeds of the English in France at an earlier period . . . would be topical’, Bullough rightly says.⁵

The portrait of Joan, by this calculus of relation between drama and social context, takes its place among ‘English attempts to blacken the reputation of Joan of Arc’⁶ – an easy task in the Elizabethan period, when women ‘who refuse[d] the place of silent subjection’ could, like Shakespeare’s Joan in Act 5, be carted to execution as witches.⁷ By this reckoning, the character of Joan of Arc becomes a regrettable sign of the times.

Neither the content nor the form of Joan’s words about glory easily supports such a reading. Joan’s image of the circle in the water is not only the most poetically resonant statement in the play, it is also specifically borne out by the action. The eloquence of her recognition that all human achievement is writ in water, one of the play’s thematic pressure points, sorts ill with a lampooned character ‘coarse and crude in language and sensibility’.⁸ Yet 1 Henry VI does contrast English chivalry, especially in the figure of heroic Talbot, with the pragmatism of the French, especially Joan, and Act 5 does dispel both Joan’s power and her pretensions to divine aid in a series of progressively less dignified scenes.⁹

First she vainly offers diabolical spirits her blood and sexual favors in exchange for continued French success; subsequently captured, she rejects her old father to claim exalted birth; finally, faced with the prospect of death by burning, she claims to be pregnant, shifting her allegation of paternity from one French leader to another in response to her captors’ insistence that each of these is a man whose child should not be allowed to live.

Perhaps it is a reflection as much on accepted critical standards of aesthetic unity as on the gullibility of individual critics that several have read this last scene as Joan’s admission of sexual activity with the whole French camp. Ridiculous as such a reading is, it does at least integrate Act 5 with what precedes, undercutting Joan’s claims to virginity just as her conjuring undercuts her claims to divinity. Such an interpretation of Act 5 makes it synchronic with previous acts in meaning; only the revelation of that meaning is postponed. Similarly, Joan’s claims to divine mission which she never mentions again after her introductory speeches in Act 1, become in such an interpretation synchronic with the action which follows them. In the long central section of the drama, according to such a unified interpretation, Joan’s prior assertion of godliness struggles against Talbot’s repeated assertions of diabolism until Act 5 vindicates Talbot. The unstated premise of this kind of reading is that temporally multiple suggestions of meaning collapse finally into an integrated pattern that transcends the temporal process of dramatic presentation. In this final pattern, all suggested assignments of value are reconciled and each plot line or character allotted its proper plus or minus sign sub specie unitatis. The individual incident or dramatic effect has no more final autonomy than a number in a column for addition has in the sum below the line. These assumptions are very clear in Riggs’ influential 1971 summation of Joan’s character: ‘Beneath these postures, Joan is generically an imposter. . . . Hence the scenes in which she is exposed and burnt as a witch, like the stripping of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, serve a formal expository purpose that supersedes any need for a controlled, sequacious plot.’¹⁰

Now of course the typical Shakespearean play does have a very powerful sense of ending, partly brought about by a ‘formal expository’ resolution of difficult issues. I want to emphasize, however, that it is equally typical of Shakespeare to present unexplained and suggestive discontinuities. One might remember the complete reversal of Theseus’ attitude to the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream: having backed up Hermia’s coercive father in Act 1 by citing the unalterable law of Athens, Theseus reappears in Act 4 (after a two-act absence) to overrule the same father and the same law with no explanation whatever. A more subtle version of this kind of turnabout occurs when Othello, calmly superior in Act 1 to the accusation that he has used sorcery in his relationship with Desdemona, informs her in Act 3 that the handkerchief which was his first gift to her is a magical talisman. In these instances, the critic’s expectation of unity forces interpretive strategy back on unspoken motivations and implicit character development, raising such questions as whether Othello deliberately lied to the senate in Act 1, or when exactly he gave Desdemona the handkerchief. I want to propose that these are unsuitable strategies and questions for a phenomenon that has little to do with unity of character and much to do with the way in which a character is perceived by the audience at a particular moment of dramatic time. I would argue that in Act 1 Othello had not given Desdemona a magic handkerchief as his first gift, but in Act 3 he had. It is a matter of the character’s consonance with the key into which the movement of the play has modulated.

This is not the place to make a detailed case for such an interpretive approach or to try to identify for these examples the reasons – external to a concept of character as coherent selfhood – that direct a change in Shakespeare’s presentation. Applying such an approach to the problem of Joan’s significance, however, permits us to recognize and give individual value to the phases of her portrayal, which, not untypically for Shakespeare, is partially continuous and partially disjunct. The changing presentation allows Joan to perform in one play inconsistent ideological functions that go much beyond discrediting the French cause or setting off by contrast the glories of English chivalry in its dying moments.¹¹ As Bullough long ago suggested, the play’s ideology is topical, but in what way and to what end cannot be answered as simply as he or some of the play’s subsequent critics have believed.¹² To characterize its main military hero, Talbot, the play alludes specifically to the contemporaneous French expedition led by Essex, as John Munro first suggested, but it incorporates far more ideologically ambiguous detail than has been recognized. Similarly, for its presentation of Talbot’s national and sexual opposites, the three Frenchwomen who are the play’s only female characters, it draws heavily on the current controversy about the nature of women and on the interrelated types of the Amazon, the warrior woman, the cross-dressing woman, and the witch, all figures that – for a variety of reasons – were objects of fascination both in England and on the continent at the end of the sixteenth century.

It is now generally accepted that the play dates from 1591/92, when English troops under Essex had been sent to France for the particular purpose of besieging Rouen; the play unhistorically dramatizes that city’s recapture from the French. Actually, Rouen had never been retaken; nor was it after this hopeful piece of stagecraft. But the parallel does not remain general and wishful. The play explicitly links Talbot to the current effort through a neatly turned compliment to Queen Elizabeth which has, oddly, been deflected by critics to Essex alone. Bearing away the fallen Talbot and his son, the English messenger declares: ‘from their ashes shall be rear’d / A phoenix that shall make all France afeard’ (4.7.92–93). The phoenix was one of Elizabeth’s emblems; Shakespeare uses it again in Henry VIII. She had not up to this time fulfilled the messenger’s prediction: early military success against French forces in Scotland had been completely cancelled by a disastrous occupation of Le Havre in 1563. The vaunting compliment can only refer to the most recent French expedition. Its leader – the dashing young popular favorite, Essex – would be an eminently suitable candidate for the role of Talbot redivivus.¹³ In 1591 the becalmed campaign was serving as backdrop for his exploits, one of them mimicked by another of the play’s departures from its sources. Encamped before Rouen, ‘Essex sent a challenge to the Governor of the town daring him to fight either a duel or a tournament’, which was, not surprisingly, declined.¹⁴ In 1 Henry VI, Talbot similarly challenges Joan and her supporters as they stand victorious on the walls of Rouen (2.2.56ff.).¹⁵ He is contemptuously rebuffed by Joan in one of those moments when English chivalry confronts French pragmatism: ‘Belike your lordship takes us then for fools, / To try if that our own be ours or no’ (3.2.62–63). A critic guided by the play’s obvious national sympathies could plausibly feel that Joan’s reply, however momentarily amusing, lacks magnanimity.

A closer look at the topical link between Talbot and Essex, however, suggests a more complicated ideological situation. Both the expedition and its leadership were controversial. Henry IV had broken his promise of reinforcements for a first set of troops, sent in 1589, and Elizabeth sent the second army with misgivings, putting the hot-headed Essex in command with a reluctance well justified by the results. ‘Where he is or what he doth or what he is to do’, she wrote angrily to her other officers, ‘we are ignorant.’¹⁶ Halfway through the expedition she ordered her uncontrollable deputy home, although he talked her into sending him back. A likely rescripting of this sequence of events appears in Act 3, where Talbot interrupts his conquests to go and visit his sovereign ‘with submissive loyalty of heart’ (3.4.10) and receives acclaim, reward, and a commission to return to battle (3.4.16–27; 4.1.68–73). In the second of these scenes, Talbot strips a coward of his undeserved Order of the Garter and makes a long speech about the value of ‘the sacred name of knight’ (4.1.33ff.) – another touchy subject after Essex’s temporary recall, for he had just knighted twenty-four of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc
• 2. A Mingled Yarn: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers
• 3. Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History
• 4. Stages of History: Ideological Conflict, Alternative Plots
• 5. Engendering a Nation: Richard II
• 6. Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body
• 7. Carnival and History: Henry IV
• 8. The Future of History: 1 and 2 Henry IV
• 9. A Tale of Two Branaghs: Henry V, Ideology, and the Mekong Agincourt
• 10. Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V
• 11. ‘Wildehirissheman’: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V
• 12. History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V
• Bibliography
• Index