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Leading Ladies

Feminine Authority and Theatrical Effect in Shakespeare’s History Plays

TO MOVE FROM Spenser’s epic-romance poem to Shakespeare’s history plays, I wish to return to the moment in The Faerie Queene at which forward historical movement is first breached: Arthur’s reading of history in Book 2. Before The Faerie Queene digresses from epic structure, the poem momentarily makes a proposal contrary to both the seductively digressive poetics of Books 3 and 4 and the unattractively direct poetics of Book 5. This is a proposal that Shakespeare’s histories will reach for and elaborate: that a reader or audience member may be ravished just as much by a literary work when it details the orderly, masculine, teleological progress of history as when it suspends that orderly progress.

We remember that the volume of chronicle history that Arthur peruses in Alma’s castle turns out to be his own history, the chronicle of his kingly ancestors the Britons. We also remember that Arthur remains ignorant of his connection to this chronicle because its account of his lineage halts just after it mentions Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon:

After him Vther, which Pendragon hight,

Succeding There abruptly it did end,

Without full point, or other Cesure right,

As if the rest some wicked hand did rend,

Or th’Authour selfe could not at least attend

To finish it: that so vntimely breach

The Prince him selfe halfe seemeth to offend,

Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach,

And wonder of antiquitie long stopt his speach.

(2.10.68)

Arthur is, understandably, frustrated at the “untimely breach” of his reading pleasure, a stoppage enforced unnaturally, “Without full point, or other Cesure right.” A closer look at these lines, however, reveals an Acrasian cast to Arthur’s reader response. Arthur’s delight, it turns out, derives as much from the interruption in his reading as from its previous progress, anticipating the poetic ravishment I have discussed in regard to Book 3, where poetic success and reading pleasure are to be found when linear heroic narrative is interrupted or suspended, not determinedly completed. First of all, the double equivocation of the breach half seeming to offend—not only merely seeming, but half seeming—makes the harm appear small indeed; and second, the “secret pleasure” that accrues to Arthur and “empeaches” the interruption’s offense in fact derives just as plausibly from the “untimely breach” that precedes the phrase, as from the “wonder of antiquitie” that follows it. The near homonymic substitution of “Authour” for “Arthur” in line 5, moreover, insinuates that the break in the text conforms to its princely reader’s desires to dwell upon his secret pleasure, “as if … th’Arthur self could not at least attend to finish it.” And because Arthur is reading a chronicle of England, the poetic reverberates within the political. In this first stanza, Arthur’s “wonder of antiquitie” comes during an interrupted account of dynastic succession—a breach that conforms in poetic terms to the interruption that powerful, seductive women classically provide for epic action, and in political terms, as I will discuss in this chapter, to the dynastic interruption that Spenser’s Virgin Queen clearly guaranteed for her country.

The very next stanza, however, enforces a diametrically opposed idea of what elicits reading pleasure, one that conforms to a masculine model both of textual power and of political authority:

At last quite rauisht with delight, to heare

The royall Ofspring of his natiue land,

Cryde out, Deare countrey, O how dearely deare

Ought thy remembraunce, and perpetuall band

Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand

Did commun breath and nouriture receaue?

How brutish is it not to vnderstand,

How much to her we owe, that all vs gaue,

That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue.

(2.10.69)

Here Arthur as literary consumer is “quite rauisht with delight” very differently from the way other men in The Faerie Queene are ravished. Far from suspending his sense, the chronicle heightens it, so that he reacts with reasoned, rhetorically patterned patriotism to this mapping of monarchical lineage. Arthur’s outburst manages to crown the way in which the chronicle he has just read has gradually effaced its own gynecocratic texture. At the beginning of the canto, which opened with a paean to Elizabeth, we were led to expect a genealogy ending with this Tudor queen: “Thy name O soueraigne Queene, thy realme and race, / From this renowmed Prince [i.e., Arthur] deriued arre” (2.10.4). Instead, the chronicle breaks off just after it recounts Uther Pendragon’s conquest over his father’s usurper and accession to his male forebears’ throne. Admittedly, the chronicle before this point does tell of three female rulers of ancient Britain, but Arthur’s response to his reading deflects what is female about England from its rulers onto the land itself.¹ His characterization of his “Deare countrey” as nourishing mother is highly conventional in both imagery and phrasing; both the didacticism and the repetitiveness of his speech (“Deare countrey, O how dearely deare”; “that all vs gaue, that gaue vnto vs all”) indicate that this particular portrait of femininity is hardly the source of the reader’s ravishment. Rather, Arthur’s experience of poetic delight in this stanza derives from learning of this maternal land’s “royall Ofspring,” who are, in the end, men-children only.² Whereas in Books 3 and 4 that which is ravishing—both authoritative female characters, and the poetry infused with this female nature—is identified as anathematic to the epic cause, here the poem, if only for a stanza, offers an experience of literary ravishment that depends on male rule.

In this chapter, I shall be concerned with how Shakespeare’s two major tetralogies of history plays (1, 2, and 3 Henry VI and Richard III; and Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V) contend, as does The Faerie Queene, not only with the presence of female authority, but also with the potential alliances between female authority and ravishing literary effect. Produced in the same decade that The Faerie Queene was published, Shakespeare’s histories, like the two Spenserian stanzas above, base their impact both on the anticipated progression of royal succession, and, conversely, also on the interruption, disruption, and contention of that succession.³ In an association of interruption with ravishment that matches the dynamics of The Faerie Queene’s Book 3, the characters in the histories who are most theatrically compelling are, initially, those who most threaten this orderly succession of male rulers. (When I say “initially,” I am referring to the histories as a sequence beginning with 1 Henry VI and ending with Henry V, the order in which Shakespeare probably wrote the plays.)⁴ As the histories progress, however, the plays echo the movement of the two anomalous Spenserian stanzas I have just analyzed in that they increasingly become an experiment in wresting theatrical authority from the unlawful female to the lawful male—in other words, a theatrical experiment in making what is kingly also ravishing. In the process of this experiment, the sequence of histories absorbs and shapes the political desires of its audience, which become theatrical desires as well: to witness and partake of a compelling masculine, rather than feminine, authority. At the same time, the histories progressively register the risk involved in that experiment, a risk that is elided in Spenser’s two stanzas by the apparently easy supersession of the first stanza by the second, but that is recalled in the theater whenever literarily induced pleasure is identified with the feminine.

Evaluating the gendered character of these plays requires first addressing two topics, one having to do with the genre of the history play itself, the second having to do with the gendered nature of the exchange between actors and audience in the Elizabethan public theater. Much more than “epic” or “romance”—which, although they never exist in unadulterated literary incarnations, at least had impressive pedigrees prior to Shakespeare’s era—“history” as an English literary form was invented in the sixteenth century. And arguably the history play, characterized by a plot that is drawn from English chronicles but that is not simply a transparent cover for a morality drama, was practically if not literally invented by Shakespeare.⁵ Although (as critics since Tillyard have asserted) the genre of the history play was made possible only through the sixteenth-century revolution in historiography—with its new emphasis on human rather than divine causes for earthly events; its new recognition of historical temporality and anachronism; and its new questioning of textual authority⁶—the fact remains that no playwright besides Shakespeare was so interested in thematizing these issues in terms of the chronicle history of England. Further, as Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin point out, of all the surviving history-play texts now known, only Shakespeare’s ten forays into the genre are so obsessively concerned with the topic of monarchy (rather than with other topics such as the relation between the king and the city of London).⁷

My sense is that Shakespeare so fully embraces the history-play genre and so focuses his history plays on monarchy because this ploy allows him to adapt The Faerie Queene to the stage. Or more precisely, the history plays afford a venue for engaging Spenserian concerns with gender, with authority, and with the intersections between gender, authority, and a variety of heterogeneous literary modes. During the same decade, the 1590s, that his romantic comedies reproduce the more obviously feminine elements of Spenser’s long poem—cross-dressed heroines, forests suited to wandering and enchantment, and even, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen herself—Shakespeare’s histories enter into The Faerie Queene’s internal debate regarding how to construct a masculine literary form out of English history.

Upon the face of it, the history play, insofar as it indeed partakes of innovations in historiographical practice, seems to be the ideal vehicle for furthering the cause of masculine authority. Not only is the Renaissance writing of history devoted, of course, almost entirely to masculine pursuits,⁸ but the very act of shaping the morass of human events into a condensed dramatic plot of a few hours’ playing time implements what Julia Kristeva calls the cultural norm of “men’s time”: “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression and arrival—in other words, the time of history.”⁹ In this sense a dramatic play, with its short length and its capacity to produce a noticeable and singular climax in Act 5, might be an even more effective means of showcasing masculine heroic action than the potentially baggy structure of the Virgilian twelve-book epic poem. The trick for Shakespeare, as for Spenser, is that Virgilian epic defines masculine action not only as victory in a given battle on a given day, but also as the activity of nation-building, which in an imperial, patriarchal system—as Henry VIII knew all too well—necessarily involves the aid of women as bearers of male heirs. Hence Spenserian and Shakespearean histories’ obsessive focus upon monarchical succession.

Hence, too, their focus upon the ruptures in that succession, given that sixteenth-century English history not only features a few authoritative women but also concludes in one authoritative woman, the stubbornly nonreproducing Elizabeth Tudor. In The Faerie Queene, the problem of discontinuous monarchical succession—a problem that only gained urgency in the 1590s, as Elizabeth passed her sixtieth birthday without having named an heir—tends to evince itself in two forms: in the concentrated recitations in Books 2 and 3 of England’s and Faery land’s genealogy of rule;¹⁰ and more diffusely, as I suggested in Chapter 2, in femininity’s propensity to disrupt the plans of male aristocratic heroes. In Shakespeare’s history plays, in contrast, monarchical succession (meriting rule, achieving rule, holding onto rule, passing rule to one’s son) is the entire topic of the action, even by and large in the comedic, non-aristocratic tavern scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV. In fact, the freighted issues of monarchical succession and of queenship’s role in monarchical succession become, in these plays, coterminous not only with the very course of history, but also, as I will discuss below, with the very course of the plays themselves—the plot and rhythm of each individual play, and also the succession of one play to the next. Like Books 5 and 6 of The Faerie Queene, each of the plays in these two history tetralogies suggests a variant upon the theme of the relation between femininity and the furtherance of national epic.

As well, these plays cogitate upon potential connections among gender, epic, and theatrical success. At the same time that the history play is trying, in epic fashion, to establish England’s national character and national history as masculine, its venue of production casts aspersions on that masculinity. Not only was the public theater a disreputable institution, one that flourished in the less-regulated “Liberties” of London alongside taverns and brothels,¹¹ it was also one of very recent inception: the span of time from James Burbage’s construction in 1576 of the first permanent playhouse in London, the Theatre, to the first of Shakespeare’s history plays is perhaps twelve or fourteen years. As adolescent in years as the boy actors who took the parts of women, the public theater seemed an unlikely place to approximate the character of that most advanced and adult of Virgilian genres, epic. As well, contemporary analysts both pro- and anti-theater worried at the question of what effect, exactly, the experience of the theatrical event would have upon its audience. Stephen Orgel and Laura Levine have recently discussed the Renaissance perception of the theater as a sexualized exchange between actor and audience members.¹² In this exchange any number of gender positions may be played out, given that, as some Renaissance commentators saw it, not only the actors but also the male audience members might transform, at least for the space of the performance, from male to female. At issue with Shakespeare’s history plays, then—as I discuss in this chapter—is the drama’s very suitability for presenting England’s history as national epic, and for honing its audience into suitable participants in that epic project. For that reason, in my view, the history plays often correlate their various presentations of masculine and feminine authority with moments of metadiscourse upon theater’s capacity to distract, seduce, and even transgender its audience.

Although I discuss both historical tetralogies in this chapter, I dwell primarily on 1 Henry VI and Henry V, the first and last plays in that sequence, which show the Shakespearean history play at its extremes of courting and refusing theater’s alliances with the powerful woman.

Female Power and Its Alternatives in the Henry VI Plays and Richard III

As Leah Marcus has analyzed in detail, Joan La Pucelle’s appearance in 1 Henry VI calls up a wealth of associations between the French woman warrior and the Queen of England.¹³ Marcus focuses on the way Joan’s martial skills, which violate gender distinctions, establish Joan as the counterpart of Elizabeth, who not only envisioned her public, ruling identity as male, but also was portrayed by England’s own poets as “the Amazonian Queen.”¹⁴ This association of Joan with Elizabeth, reinforced by a host of topical references in the play, serves to air (and ultimately, Marcus asserts, to contain) an entire complex of anxieties about the purportedly oxymo-ronic phenomenon of female authority.¹⁵ But whereas Marcus locates a queen’s threat in her confusion of gender categories, her usurpation of male authority in a woman’s body, my sense is that it is the prospect of a purely feminine authority, freely wielded, that is truly threatening. We may see this danger in Joan’s first appearance in the play, when it is her perceived overwhelming sexuality as much as her prowess in arms that brings the Dauphin to his knees before her. “Impatiently I burn with thy desire,” he tells her immediately after she has defeated him in combat, “My heart and hands thou hast at once subdu’d” (1.2.108–9)—as if she has ravished him, substituting her desire for his self-command. Here Joan seems the direct heir of all of Spenser’s disturbingly authoritative females who suspend male self-consciousness. Foreign, marginal, and sexually loose, she is able, like Duessa or Acrasia, to entrance nearly every man she approaches, meanwhile enforcing her desires with the military skill of a Britomart or a Radigund.

But the character of Joan requires a reading in the light of not only Elizabethan fears about queenship, but also the theater’s motives for dwelling upon those fears. Marcus offers no real reason for theater’s desire to air such anxieties on stage, other than that they were anxieties culturally available to the English in the late 1580s. But such an explanation does not credit the theater with any agenda apart from, or more refined than, a cathartic one, as if the theater’s aims were exactly coextensive with its audience’s collective cultural psyche, or as if theater never sought to shape that psyche. More specifically, such an explanation of 1 Henry VI does not account for the way in which Joan is compelling for the theater, as well as frightening for the audience—compelling not only as a leader for the misguided French, but as a theatrical presence. And not simply as a “strong character” within the play: rather, Joan is identified within the text as possessing a specifically theatrical power that depends upon her verbal, physical, and dramaturgical presentation of herself, one that unveils itself as unmistakably female.¹⁶ Joan’s histrionic skills, I will argue, set a puzzle for the play: is theatrical success necessarily bound up in the triumph of the female? Though 1 Henry VI will work at this “puzzle” (a sobriquet punningly applied to Joan herself by the English) and will propose some provisional solutions, it will also bestow the terms of the problem upon its history-play successors, so that Richard III may be seen as an awful but in many ways convincing answer to the challenging precedent of Joan.¹⁷

To begin to investigate the association posed between theater and the powerful woman, let us return to Joan’s first appearance in Act I, scene 2, where she persuades the Dauphin and his companions that she can, indeed, aid their cause. Joan wins them over by means of a display that might be called magic, or trickery—but in either case, an adept, carefully managed performance. She convinces her on-stage French audience of what cannot be: that she can recognize the true Dauphin, even when he has put Reignier forward in his place; that she, an untutored girl, can defeat a trained swordsman. And these are only preludes to her verbal overthrow of the Dauphin, which conclusively proves her a master of rhetoric as well as of staged legerdemain.¹⁸ Coupled with the thaumaturgy of her seeming omniscience and omnipotence, Joan’s verbal power grants her the status of simultaneous dramaturge and theatrical spectacle. The progress of this scene in turn links the powerful woman’s theatrical skill to her sexual charms, so that the experience of being her willing audience is one of being ravished. “Look gracious on thy prostrate thrall,” exclaims the Dauphin, giving himself up as Verdant to Joan’s Acrasia: “Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth, / How may I reverent worship thee enough?” (1.2.117, 144–45). Joan’s presentation of herself to the Dauphin, then, defines feminine theatricality as a mode of seduction. Faced with the combination of overwhelming feminine sexuality and entrancing speech, the audience can only surrender, producing a hierarchy of sexual authority entirely contrary to what the Renaissance perceived as normative and natural.

Overtly, this situation is entirely contrary to one of the primary moral objections generally voiced by Elizabethan and Jacobean antitheatricalist writers: that women audience members would be the only ones easily carried away by smooth talk from the stage, which would pave the way for their literal seduction once they had left the theater. As Anthony Munday writes in his Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, “The Theater I found to be an appointed place of Bauderie; mine owne eares have heard honest women allured with abhominable speeches.” When women venture into the theater’s public arena, they open themselves up to all manner of enticement.¹⁹ Yet once drama’s “abhominable speeches” have been imagined as alluring, it is difficult to consider only the female members of an audience as ravished by theater. In The Schoole of Abuse, Stephen Gosson objects to theater on the grounds of its sensual invasiveness, with language that proceeds to convert the sensual into the sexual:

There set [poets] abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence: and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust. Therefore of both barrelles, I judge Cookes and Painters the better hearing, for the one extendeth his arte no farther then to the tongue, palate, and nose, the other to the eye; and both are ended in outwarde sense, which is common too us with bruite beasts. But these by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.²⁰

With no gender specified, Gosson clearly means us to imagine all audience members, men and women alike, sexually conquered—ravished through “privie entries” with “gunshotte of affection.”

When we consider that the scene Gosson describes is one of male actors delivering honeyed speeches to a largely male audience, we might label his ire as homophobic in origin. Such anxieties are more explicitly expressed by the Oxford don John Rainolds, who is much concerned with the homoerotic liaison established between a male audience and a playing company of boys dressed in women’s clothes, playing women’s parts. And yet what is uppermost in Rainolds’s argument is that the players, though male, are effectively feminized by their actions and garb; and it is as women that they work their invasive, debilitating seductions: “can wise men be perswaded that there is no wantonnesse in the players partes, when experience sheweth (as wise men have observed) that men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastitie by comming to such playes? that the senses are mooved, affections are delited, heartes though strong and constant are vanquished by such players? that an effeminate stage-player, while hee faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love?”²¹ Later Rainolds makes the point that it hardly matters who or what takes the woman’s part, since the effect is the same: “For men may be ravished with love of stones, of dead stuffe, framed by cunning gravers to beautifull womens likenes.”²² Regardless of the absence of genuine women on the stage, the stage’s own theatricality depends upon playing out the feminine, appropriating a “feminine” model of seduction to structure its own effect.²³

For antitheatricalist writers—as Laura Levine has incisively analyzed the situation—what is ostensibly a fear for female spectators’ chastity thus deconstructs itself into a fear for male spectators’ sexual integrity. Levine describes the theater’s dissolution of masculine gender as a kind of “dark side” of Renaissance self-fashioning: if the Renaissance self is not fixed or stable, as Stephen Greenblatt argues, then it may as easily be shaped by outside forces as it is capable of shaping itself.²⁴ The notion that the feminine actor can impress a feminine nature upon its male audience members exposes, as Levine points out, the fear that there is no such thing as essential masculinity.²⁵ In the sexualized relation between theater and its audience, the spectators too become increasingly feminized, so that the whorish nature of the theatrical spectacle transfers itself to its onlookers: “For while [the beholders] saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors…. So that in that representation of whore-dome, al the people in mind plaie the whores.”²⁶ In this process of sexual ravishment the male watcher is also ravished from his proper sense of self, from all that makes him solid and impermeable. As William Prynne thunders in his monumental volume, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge, stage plays “so weaken and emasculate all the operations of the soule, with a prophane, if not an unnaturall dissolutenesse; that … they licentiously dissolve into wicked vanities and pleasures: and all hope of ever doing good either unto God, the Church, their Country, or owne soules, melteth as the Winter Ice, and floweth away as unprofitable waters.²⁷ As feminized, as whorish as it is, theater’s operation is fundamentally rapine, creating in its audience an absence of male self-possession, then forcefully (if bewitchingly) transferring its own licentious nature into the gap it has created.

Opening just after the demise of the powerful king, Henry V, 1 Henry VI begins with a vision of a world similar to that of the antitheatricalists’ theater: one with no men left in it. Gloucester makes of the late Henry V a demigod, a dazzling, frightening icon whose mere gaze was enough to repel his foes:

England ne’er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command:

His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:

His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings:

His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.

(1.1.8–14)

One wonders, upon reading these lines, what kind of play would ensue if the unrelievedly fearsome king they describe were its dominant character—perhaps another Tamburlaine, with its juggernaut of a conqueror, Taluslike, mowing down all that lies in his path.²⁸ In the end, a Henry V like the one Gloucester remembers blocks even the speech that could record his greatness: “What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech: / He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered” (1.1.15–16). We are reminded of the cautionary dictum of Aristotle regarding what might comfortably be contained in epic, but not in the theater: unlike in an epic poem, in a play “sameness of incident soon produces satiety, and makes tragedies fail on the stage.”²⁹

Although the play opens with longing for this mode of male authority, however, it also begins with no sense or hope that such an ideal king will ever return. Henry V’s absence leaves 1 Henry VI to match its aching nostalgia for the departed king with a foreboding sense of an approaching dismantling of order in the state—a dismantling that is almost immediately associated with what is feminine in the state: an “effeminate prince” (1.1.35); a proud Duchess of Gloucester who holds her husband in awe (1.1.39). Finally Bedford foretells a post-Henrician England inhabited by only women, in a nightmarish fantasy of nursing-turned-mourning:

now that Henry’s dead,

Posterity, await for wretched years,

When at their mothers’ moist eyes babes shall suck,

Our isle be made a nourish of salt tears,

And none but women left to wail the dead.

(1.1.47–51)

The principle of female disorder in the play comes to be embodied, of course, in Joan. But her dramatic self-possession then implies an equivalence between female disorder and theatrical activity, both of which are enabled by the demise of the epic ruler. This equivalence comes to be borne out by the contrast and conflict in this play between Joan’s schemes and conquests, which are nearly always acted out on stage, and Talbot’s heroic deeds, which are nearly always reported. Talbot, the only honorable English warrior left in France, exercises the remaining fragment of Henry V-style heroism, as Gloucester’s opening speech has portrayed it. But like Henry V, who in his ascent to iconic status has left only inadequate reportage to convey his memory, Talbot’s actions achieve greatness primarily in the telling. Throughout the play, Talbot’s authority continues to consist more in what is claimed for him, and by him, than in what he has actually done in our sight and hearing. Even when he does perform feats of arms on stage, like rescuing Ypung Talbot from his French assailants, the deed requires that Talbot retell what has presumably just transpired before us: “Then leaden age, / Quicken’d with youthful spleen and warlike rage, / … from the pride of Gallia rescu’d thee” (4.6.12–13,15). In fact, the portrait of Talbot’s heroism can best be painted after he is dead, when in Lucy’s speech he comes to equal Henry V in awesome power. Lucy claims for Talbot’s absence, not his presence, a truly ravishing power in which Talbot’s representation alone would bereave his onlookers of sense: “Were but his picture left amongst you here, / It would amaze the proudest of you all” (4.7.83–84). The fact that Talbot’s reputation as a man of valor is based on things recalled, not witnessed, associates him with the world of epic. Epic is, after all, always retrospective in nature, beginning in medias res and proceeding as a memorial reconstruction of events past; moreover, it also allows room for presenting heroic acts whose magnitude could never be reproduced on stage, or anywhere else but in memory.³⁰ Act I’S sequential reporting of Talbot’s heroism (scene 1) and staging of Joan’s seductiveness (scene 2) therefore establish what amounts to a contest of literary modes, epic versus dramatic, as well as a contest between masculine and feminine.

Nowhere is the initial contrast between Talbot’s epic authority and Joan’s dramatic authority more apparent than in their martial encounter in Act 1, scene 5. Here Talbot himself is ravished by Joan, driven out of his normal senses. And significantly, he attributes this influence not to her force of arms (though she has just equalled him in hand-to-hand combat) but to a kind of stage-trick, as if Joan fights using mirrors:

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel;

I know not where I am, nor what I do:

A witch by fear, not force, like Hannibal,

Drives back our troops and conquers as she lists:

So bees with smoke, and doves with noisome stench,

Are from their hives and houses driven away.

(1.5.19–24)

Here, as in Joan’s opening scene with the Dauphin, we find staged in small what the antitheatricalists claimed for the entire practice of theater: the conjuress steals the man’s senses, leaving him not knowing where he is, or what he does. Joan’s deeds are typically wrapped in charges of deceit—a common accusation against poetry as a whole, which feigns what is not true, but also against theater in particular, which embodies and clothes those feignings. Even Joan’s compatriots accuse her of cunning and falsehood after the English take Orleans, a charge that seems hardly fair, considering she is the one hurriedly composing ways to recoup their loss (2.1.50–77). And yet it is true that even Joan’s legitimate military stratagems have the air of Odyssean trickery. Her plan to recover Rouen, for example—by passing off herself and a few other French soldiers as grain-toting peasants—depends on her directing their disguise and accent. By referring to “Pucelle and her practisants” with what is evidently a Shakespearean neologism (3.2.20, my emphasis), the Bastard of Orleans directly labels Joan as either stage manager or play-actor, for the word “practise” in the Renaissance had as one of its meanings “to perform, act (a play)” (OED v. 1b).

Joan’s finest dramatic hour is her persuasion of the Duke of Burgundy to the French cause, which is staged like an antitheatricalist writer’s worst fantasy of being ravished by a seductive female theater. First Joan lays out her plan as depending on verbal cajolery: “By fair persuasions, mix’d with sugar’d words, / We will entice the Duke of Burgundy / To leave the Talbot and to follow us” (3.3.18–20). Then, as a skillful actor would, she uses her words to conjure up for Burgundy images of things invisible, impressing into him a concrete, tangible vision of a land not contained within the theater: “Look on thy country, look on fertile France, / And see the cities and the towns defac’d … / See, see … / Behold” (3.3.44–50). Her words prefigure those of the Chorus in Henry V, but with none of their implications of dramatic effect requiring strenuous imaginative effort from a disbelieving audience. Far from it: Burgundy’s conversion under these blandishments is practically instantaneous, figured both as a bewitchment, and as a sexual capitulation in which he is the feminized partner:

Either she hath bewitch’d me with her words,

Or nature makes me suddenly relent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

I am vanquished; these haughty words of hers

Have batter’d me like roaring cannon-shot

And made me almost yield upon my knees.

(3.3.58–59, 78–80)

Although at first the contest between Joan’s and Talbot’s literary modes is evenly matched, 1 Henry VI comes to make provisional inroads on depriving the theatrical feminine of its power, by beginning to assimilate a different version of dramatic power to the male and the epic. Talbot’s brand of heroism, even dependent as it is on what the stage cannot directly convey, accumulates a certain dramatic power of its own—a power paradoxically derived from the absence of visible, staged effects; and Joan’s female, flamboyant, immediate brand of theater is increasingly disallowed.³¹ To maintain his own masculine integrity, Talbot cannot, of course, practice Joan-like verbal seductions, which would immediately associate him with theatrical diversion and enchantment. Moreover, Talbot does not project a stage presence that immediately enthralls. The Countess of Auvergne makes much of his unprepossessing appearance, calling him nothing but “a silly dwarf … this weak and writhled shrimp” (2.3.21–22), and mocking him for bearing no resemblance to an epic hero: “I thought I should have seen some Hercules, / A second Hector, for his grim aspect / And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs” (2.3.18–20). Far from being ravishing, Talbot’s person is shrunken, detumescent, inconsequential. But in this encounter with the Countess, Talbot begins to contrast that kind of ravishment with a new kind of theatrical creation, one that is manifestly not feminine in Joan’s terms. Rather than seducing his audience into abandoning their right minds—as Burgundy follows Joan—Talbot projects a vision that requires his audience to exercise their minds, to follow him in imagining a world that the immediate surroundings cannot contain, but in this case a world where female allurement is supplanted by heroic imperviousness.

Talbot’s response to the Countess illustrates this proposal of theater as an exercise in projection. When she declares she will clap him in irons, he tells her it is impossible to do so:

No, no, I am but shadow of myself:

You are deceiv’d, my substance is not here;

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity:

I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious lofty pitch

Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.

(2.3.49–55)

Only then does he call in his men, actualizing on stage, we would expect, the means to overpower her. But when we consider what Talbot is claiming—that he can’t call in all his soldiers, there wouldn’t be room for them—we realize that his projection continues to depend on his audience, the Countess, imagining more than his stage, her house, can hold. Like Joan, Talbot anticipates Henry V’s Chorus, but whereas Joan’s stratagem with Burgundy depends on her spellbinding presence—that is, a presence that binds his attention only to her, and to the sexualized bewitchment she acts out before us—Talbot’s design is to direct attention away from himself, to what is beyond his ability himself to enact. At this moment, Talbot solves the Aristotelian dilemma of how to represent epic heroism on stage without the presentation seeming ridiculous. When staged representation is replaced by voiced projection, when a dwarfish Talbot refers to his massive army, the audience stops sniggering and immediately responds as desired: the Countess is cowed into firm belief, surrendering the stage to the English warrior. “I find thou art no less than fame hath bruited,” she says in capitulating, “And more than may be gather’d by thy shape” (2.3.67–68).

If Talbot can assume dramatic authority in this way, why, we might wonder, can Joan not attempt a reciprocal appropriation? Why can feminine theatricality not seize hold of projective authority? The answer may lie in the essential incompatibility between the immediate theatrical ravishment Joan controls, and the detached descriptions by which the epic vision may be brought on stage. This incompatibility may be measured, in fact, by what happens when such descriptions are brought to bear on Joan herself. The French readily encomiate Joan as the English do Talbot. But such tributes transform all too quickly into eulogy, and in the process demonstrate how any memorial project of this kind serves to control, rather than to enhance, the feminine theatrical presence.³² Immediately after he deifies Joan as Astraea’s daughter, the Dauphin imagines her dead, shifting the object of his adoration from Joan herself, to the container he will have made for her ashes:

A statelier pyramis to her I’ll rear

Than Rhodope’s of Memphis ever was;

In memory of her, when she is dead,

Her ashes, in an urn more precious

Than the rich jewel-coffer of Darius,

Transported shall be at high festivals

Before the kings and queens of France.

(1.6.21–27)

It is worth examining how this passage, although seeming to confer explicit forms of power upon Joan, progressively empties each form of any real influence. At first the Dauphin appears to cede Joan the place of highest honor, the place of epic: the coffer to which he compares Joan’s funerary urn is the one in which Alexander the Great stored the treasured poems of Homer, progenitor (to the Renaissance mind) of all epic. Moreover, the image of how that urn will be displayed is evocative of a saint’s remains, brought out in a precious reliquary “at high festivals” to elicit the crowd’s devotion. But ashes are not poems, and although Joan’s remains may be put in an urn befitting epic, they do not display in these lines an epic poem’s ability to speak—the ability for which, we presume, Alexander valued the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nor do the Dauphin’s words grant to Joan the power of saintly relics: we hear nothing of this urn having any effect on the kings and queens who will look on it. Thus, though the word “transported” promises religious ecstasy, it is a promise instantly reneged upon—here the word has only its mundane meaning. Hence the Dauphin’s memorial construction of Joan, in its jewelled silence, shows none of the dramatic skill the not-dead Joan plies so well. In the Dauphin’s vision, the Joan who has ravished him—skillfully improvisational, uncontrollably verbal, seductively coercive—is literally shut up in a vessel not of her own making. A panegyric to Joan, unlike one to Talbot, is therefore discontinuous with her kind of theatrical authority; it transforms her from an active maker of theater to a mere object of spectacle. The Dauphin’s speech manipulates her, like Tamburlaine’s Zenocrate, into a dead image serving the male epic project, an inspiration for conquests not her own. Darius’s jewel-coffer was Alexander’s battle prize.³³

The plot and the politics of 1 Henry VI require Joan’s eventual dismissal; but because her activities have been identified with one mode of theatricality, her removal also involves showing that mode to be both devalued and ineffectual. In short, the play as a whole enacts the desire voiced in the Dauphin’s fantasy: a desire to cordon off the feminine as a ravishing force, projecting her instead as a mute and contained spectacle. Act 5, scene 3, in which Joan’s loss of power is revealed, demonstrates this shift most visibly. Throughout the play, as we have seen, both the French praise and the English epithets attached to Joan have concentrated in large part upon the power of her voice. As prophesying daughter of Saint Philip, as “damned sorceress,” or as “shameless courtezan” (1.2.143; 3.2.38, 45)—in other words, as Sibyl or as Siren—she is equally assigned a preternatural ability to enforce her desires through speech. Thus her demons’ appearance in this scene, as well as their refusal to obey her commands, offers a commentary on the substitution of masculine for feminine voicings of power in the play. On the one hand, this episode occasions a significant dramatic moment for Joan, affording her a speech of some thirty lines; but on the other, it thematizes the evaporation of her dramatic effectiveness, since the demons as unwilling audience do not respond. And perhaps more importantly, the demons’ mere appearance on stage, their first, signifies that Joan’s power has been precipitated from an active, circulating linguistic and sexual energy into a gaggle of stagy fiends, whose dumb departure drives Joan to admit, “My ancient incantations are too weak” (5.3.27). Joan is still free to speak, of course, but her speech hereafter does not move her listeners. Her last exchange with York upon her capture by him both locates where her power has resided all along, in her tongue, and illustrates how this female verbal power will be increasingly circumscribed in the remaining plays of this first tetralogy.

York. Fell banning hag, enchantress, hold thy tongue!

Joan. I prithee, give me leave to curse awhile.

York. Curse, miscreant, when thou comest to the stake.

(5.3.42–44)

Although women can curse, and their bitter prophesies often as not come true, cursing hardly equals the planning, instigation, and control of dramatic action, as the women of Richard III will bear out. Joan’s last appearance, with her wildly dispatched and easily mocked attempts at saving herself from the flames, demonstrates even more strongly the extent to which female control in the play has dissipated. Her hastily composed excuses, far from ravishing her audience and substituting her will for theirs, are either ignored (“Ay, ay; away with her to execution!” [5.4.54]) or used to finish her off (“Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee” [5.4.84]).

The removal of both Joan and Talbot from the stage leaves the end of 1 Henry VI in an interesting vacuum of authority, one with which the final three plays of this tetralogy must contend, even as the persons represented in them contend for the crown. Although Talbot the hero is mourned, we are left nonetheless with the sense that his mode of epic action has been discarded as ultimately unsuited to the theater, even as this “great exemplar of chivalric masculinity,” as Coppélia Kahn describes him, is “no longer viable in this twilight of feudalism.”³⁴ Both the chivalry for which Talbot is famous and the reportage that conveys that heroism become awkward and overblown in his last scene, whose strain is evident in its poetry, fifty lines of stilted, endstopped couplets. It is afterward too easy for Joan to point to Talbot’s corpse as only that, “Stinking and fly-blown,” fallen too far for the audience’s epic desires to project him as other than what the stage can present (4.7.76).