In the late 1570s, when Ralegh joined Champernowne’s company across the Channel, Hubert Languet was writing thus to the young Philip Sidney, impressing upon his protégé the models (models unexpectedly espoused by a humanist scholar) of warrior patriots from medieval scenes of conflict. In their different ways, all three men sought to promote the Reformist cause in Europe in the final decades of the sixteenth century, but, as we have seen, Ralegh would be particularly exercised by the far-flung possessions of Spain and the riches they surrendered to their colonial masters across the Atlantic. Leading Elizabethan figures, such as Sidney, Ralegh and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, would enter the fray against Catholic forces on the battlefields of Western Europe as the Tudor century drew to a close. Sidney met his death at Zutphen in the Low Countries in 1586. Conversely, both Ralegh and Essex survived their service in the Protestant cause in the French Wars of Religion.

When the author of The History of the World came to consider, much later in life, the demise of the Roman commander Aemilius in the field against his Punic adversaries, he could not refrain from returning attention to ‘the English vertue of the Lord John Talbot’ which was ‘more highly to be honoured’.² Indeed, if Thomas Nashe is to be believed, the charismatic appeal of Talbot continued to stir the imaginations of a goodly number of those who packed the London playhouses. In Pierce Penniless (1592), he enthused

The present discussion reflects upon the ways in which Shakespeare’s (and his collaborators’) Henry VI plays of the 1590s, plays which seek at the outset to heroise the martial exploits of Talbot, may be seen to engage more broadly with lively contemporaneous debates concerning the call to arms, both past and present.⁴ These dramatic narratives unmask the terrifyingly indiscriminate manner in which brutality pollutes everyday lives and selves and lays waste to any remains of human dignity to which those locked within these flux-ridden worlds still aspire. As we have seen, the promotion of the combatant’s trade remained a thorny undertaking in this period. If, in The arte of warre (1591), William Garrard concluded ‘a Souldier must be as well acquainted, and as able to beare continual trauail, as a Bird can endure to flie, yea and to put on a resolute minde to beare all the miseries and hazardes of warlike affaires’,⁵ others might share Ralegh’s sometimes doleful accounts of English soldiery witnessed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the queen’s godson, Sir John Harington, noted in his recollections of the 1599 Irish campaign that the English cavalry was not supported by ‘Roman citizens, but rascal soldiers, who, so their commanders had been saved, had been worthy to have been half hanged for their rascal cowardliness’.⁶

The Henry VI plays concentrate squarely upon the ways in which violence not only corrupts all forms of social exchange, but blights the ethical potential to which the human subject might lay claim. Forsaking his mourning garb at the opening of 1 Henry VI, Bedford proclaims, ‘Wounds will I lend the French instead of eyes,/To weep their intermissive miseries’ (VI¹: I.i.87–8); and Talbot himself barks at the French, ‘Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heels/And make a quagmire of your mingled brains’ (VI¹: I.iv.107–8). In this anguished dramatic vision extending over three plays, all human life is remorselessly made flesh. Furthermore, we are urged to attend to the ways in which slaughter (the politics of control in extremis) comes to monopolise the imaginative existence and affective allegiances of anyone wishing to secure the power of command. Indeed, by 3 Henry VI, this irrepressible appetite to communicate human creativity (in thought, word and deed) with a stunted vocabulary of blood sports is still very far from being exhausted. Richard of Gloucester submits, ‘Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile’ (VI³: III.ii.182), and Clifford confides to his victim, the Yorkist child Rutland, ‘if I digged up thy forefathers’ graves/And hung their rotten coffins up in chains,/It could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart’ (VI³: I.iii.27–9).⁷

Shakespeare’s dramatised investigations into the power to excite violence run the length of the Henry VI plays – plays which may be seen to describe a striking narrative arc from the political demise of one warlord in the shape of Henry V to that, not of his son, but of one whom Warwick terms, as the cycle nears its conclusion, ‘our quondam queen’, Margaret of Anjou (VI³: III.iii.153). In these dramatic worlds of collapsing governance, the only means by which to affirm selfhood, to win political recognition and to subjugate others is through the perplexingly creative power to violate, to unpick hitherto prevailing constructs of vis and virtus. Fully acknowledging these debased conditions of existence (in which he has participated so vigorously), the doomed Suffolk rails before his killers, ‘Come, soldiers, show what cruelty ye can,/That this my death may never be forgot!’ (VI²: IV.i.132–3).

Restoring History to the Nation

At the beginning of Britannia (first published in Latin in 1586), William Camden attended to the ways in which his native land had been characterised since antiquity by culturally freighted expectations of excentricity and exceptionalism:

Whilst recognising the seductive mythologies which had grown up around these Fortunate Isles situated initially beyond the orbit of the Pax romana, Camden’s scholarly endeavours, as was recognised in the previous chapter, concentrated upon recuperating a more substantial, heroic narrative for his nation with the resources of textual and artefactual memory: ‘to restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity’.⁹

Unsurprisingly, Britannia chose not to stress unduly indeterminacies in the fate of a weakling nation, frequently located down the centuries on the edge of continental theatres of power and subject to the predatory desires of foreign potentates. Instead, the invasion of the realm and its introduction into Roman imperium are endowed with a markedly salvific status:

Even if, on occasions, the historian concedes that the Roman yoke were ‘grievous’, the reader is reassured that ultimately it proved a ‘saving health’ for the island: ‘for that healthsome light of Iesus Christ shone withall upon the Britans … and the brightnesse of that most glorious Empire, chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds’.¹¹ Thus, rather than emphasising geographical or chronological disjunction, Camden’s Britannia figured forth a developing narrative of political and spiritual election – and his scholarly undertaking was clearly speaking directly to ideas which had gained currency amongst at least some quarters of the population. When the parson George Owen, for example, reviewed the progress of his own Welsh nation in Tudor times, he confessed ‘that if our ffathers weare nowe lyvinge they wowld thinke it som straunge countrey inhabited w^th a forran nation, so altered is the cuntrey and cuntreymen … from evill to good, and from good to better’.¹²

Camden’s endeavours were profoundly humanist in tenor: he committed his scholarship to bridging the intervening centuries between his own time and that of the Romano-British period, and to responding to the voids in his countrymen’s knowledge with the nourishing resources of textual and artefactual memory – which is to say, in this instance, with the resources of narrative plenitude: ‘in the studies of Antiquity, (which is alwaies accompanied with dignity, and hath a certaine semblance with eternity) there is a sweet food of the minde well befiting such as are of honest and noble disposition’.¹³ In the same period, Shakespeare’s history plays similarly reserved particular attention for the rehearsal of the island kingdom’s past. However, these plays unearth a specifically fifteenth-century, martial cycle of events for their 1590s audiences in order to disclose the painfully close proximity of its violence and the fragile, nay illusory, nature of lasting political settlement.

By the sixteenth century, generations of humanist scholars had already ensured that, apart from rhetorical performance, one of the most significant ways in which the intellect might fulfil its ethical potential was through the mediation of historia.¹⁴ In a tome to which Shakespeare clearly had recourse, Jacques Amyot had advised in his prefatory discussion to the English edition of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) that history ‘is a certaine rule or instruction, which by examples past, teacheth us to iudge of things present, & to foresee things to come: so as we may knowe what to like of, & what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschew’.¹⁵ Indeed, in post-Reformation England, the widespread commitment to the reading, writing, translation and commentary of historical texts might contribute all too significantly to addressing a keenly felt cultural void: such accounts might acknowledge a profound desire to venerate that which had hitherto been reserved for the ageless relics, sacred spaces and precious rituals of Catholic Christendom. Yet the indomitable fascination and awe shared by Shakespearean characters (and audiences) in the Histories for recessive narratives is inevitably accompanied by a keen and growing realisation on- and offstage of the penetrating experiences of lack, loss and absence in the present.

The Henry VI plays evoke with graphic assurance what Camden termed ‘that wofull war betweene the houses of Lancaster and Yorke’,¹⁶ or, what Locke would coin over a century later as ‘the wars of the roses’.¹⁷ They portray King Harry’s son as a figure bequeathed absolute political priority. However, the vexed dramatic function which reverts to him is ultimately to articulate his power to suffer and his most flawed humanity, unrelieved by even parental tenderness. His subjectivity is wholly communicated on stage in terms of his remorseless experiences of dispossession and his eagerness to bear witness from the margins of a world which should be shaped by his governance. As such, these plays may indeed be scrutinising a version of what, in more recent times, Giorgio Agamben has termed the cultural paradox of the homo sacer – ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’.¹⁸ In this instance, Agamben focused upon a juridical conundrum taken from Roman law in De verborum significatione by Pompeius Festus: the homo sacer is recognised as an ‘homo malus atque improbus’ (a bad or impure man) who is both invested with a sacral character (thus becoming, ‘incompatible with the human world’) and yet one whose death will go unpunished. Equally strikingly, the extraordinary status of this figure in Agamben’s thesis continues to define those who survive him: thus, perplexingly, in the homo sacer ‘we are confronted with a residual and irreducible bare life, which must be excluded and exposed to a death that no rite and no sacrifice can redeem’.¹⁹ While Henry VI may not be perceived as wholly malus atque improbus, this sovereign is condemned to the unstinting enactment of moral, political and affective failure as the plays unfold. Indeed, he repeatedly unveils for audiences on- and offstage a profound appreciation of his own insufficiency, a rich sensitivity to the staging of his own victimisation and a febrile expectation of his own imminent demise.

Lex Loquens – Speaking and Stifling Sovereignty

Mikhail Bakhtin argued that ‘Greatness always makes itself known only to descendents, for whom such a quality is always located in the past (it turns into a distanced image); it has become an object of memory.’²⁰ The emotionally charged quest for heroic transcendence and the unslakeable appetite for violent political mobility remain key mechanisms for narrative progression throughout the Henry VI plays. Paradoxically, the very scaffolding of these plays is both built upon and dismantled by ‘That ever living man of memory,/Henry the Fifth’ (VI¹: IV.iii.51–2). Beaufort praises the late ruler in markedly extravagant terms as one who stood ‘Unto the French, the dreadful judgement-day/… The battles of the Lord of Hosts he fought’ (VI¹: I.i.29, 31). Ultimately, the shrouded body of Henry V comes increasingly to act onstage as a most eloquent, if forbidding magistrate for the decaying political fortunes of the Lancastrian dynasty.

For the English camp and, at one remove, for the audience, the spectre of the dead king continues to haunt his son’s newly inherited kingdom with its newly empowered warlords: the ceaseless regimes of militarised attrition to which the realm is subjected inevitably engender their own coarsened strains of identity and history. Thus, the hyperbolised memory of Henry V (or Richard II in the second tetralogy) is not only repeatedly awarded cultural priority in the political discourse of subsequent generations, it also offers a key vantage point from which to observe the seemingly apocalyptic fracturing of the commonweal. In this context, Mary Warnock remains timely in her reminder that memory is not purely the retrieving of the past, it is also the knowledge brought about by the past.²¹ In the disorderly world of Becoming to which the warring parties of the Yorkists and Lancastrians condemn the nation, memory and violence offer precious hermeneutic modes with which to resist the unremitting experience of marginality and trauma. The determination to think historically, to position (what Bakhtin termed in his account of epic narrative) a foundational or ‘“absolute past” of gods, demigods and heroes’,²² is in this way linked intimately to the desire not to have subjectivity and social discourse wholly defined by the chaos and carnage of the present. Beaufort affirms that the late Henry V ‘was a king blest of the King of Kings’ (I.i.28), and his determination to pay fulsome tribute to the dead king is shared by many of the peers who survive to frame – or, rather, unframe – the English court. At this point, dramatic attention is not monopolised by the unharnessed brutality which the state is enduring (both within and without), but concentrates rather on the painful labours of memory for, what Robert C. Jones wittily identified as, the Shakespearean phenomenon of the ‘lost leader’.²³

The corpse of the fallen ruler may represent political rupture and communicate to the selective meditations of those who remain a fantasied memory of plenitude. However, in a play such as 1 Henry VI, it also speaks directly to the insatiable appetite within that society for stainless gods as military commanders – an appetite which exploits energetically the narratives of a radically edited past. When Richard Plantaganet strives to have his noble status restored in the wake of King Harry’s death, he reminds his adversaries of the fragility, nay possible erasure, of their own, present political fortunes: ‘I’ll note you in my book of memory/… Look to it well and say you are well warned’ (VI¹: II.iv.101, 103). At the opening of 2 Henry VI, if the beguiled king believes that he has at least secured a strategic advantage in the recent French wars through his alliance with Margaret of Anjou, for his uncle Gloucester the union may be read under quite different terms: it violates England’s abiding commitment to national renewal through foreign conquest and, equally disturbingly, indicates that the court is now governed by a particularly self-serving and most destructive political creed. In the event, few onstage are minded to give credit to the lacklustre renewal of King Harry’s deeds by his son or to stifle their misgivings over the new king’s policies of capitulation and withdrawal. The young Henry is greeted with a profoundly disaffected court on his return to England. Indeed, Gloucester, proposes that, rather than triumphalism, the nation would do well to have recourse to jeremiads.

Thus, if the arrival of this new queen, along with that of the returning native forces, signals a key moment in the dissolution of Henry V’s political legacy, it also points to an equally painful realisation that the new king and his aristocratic company have sought refuge in the consolations of amnesia. Given this state of affairs, Gloucester is unsurprisingly remorseless in his chastising of an already dejected English court:

Gloucester’s interventions at this juncture serve to chart for audiences the grave shortcomings of the nation’s elite and the most limited capacities of a naïve and unremarkable king who has sought to disguise his own failings with extravagant ceremony – a ploy exploited by a far from negligible number of Shakespearean monarchs. In response to the consequent political haemorrhaging, it takes just a short time for the realm to rupture into warring factions led by the ruthless magnates. Nonetheless, the vigorous recourse to civil violence and adversarial politics makes little difference to the collective investment in retrospection. As the realm begins to groan under the inordinate pressures of Yorkist and Lancastrian ambitions, the resources of memory are seen again and again to offer the promise of some kind of dignity of purpose for or verdict upon the commonplace butchery of the present. In such a dramatic world, the law may be spoken from the throne (lex loquens), but it is rarely prosecuted from this seat of power.

The acute sense of cultural strain and disorientation at the beginning of 1 Henry VI can only be communicated, it seems, in terms of military inertia (‘arms avail not now that Henry’s dead’) and linguistic collapse (‘What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech’; VI¹: I.i.47, 16). As a result, the young and most errant king is compelled to assume an ever expanding range of identities. On his return from the French wars, this beleaguered Lancastrian tries to affirm his sovereignty by unveiling what he believes to be a guarantor of peace and a valuable trophy: Margaret of Anjou. If, with this alliance, Henry seeks to foreclose contentious debate at his court, he is only exploiting a familiar paradigm inherited from his father who returned to the island kingdom with a new spouse, Catherine of Valois, drawn from the ranks of his French adversaries. Nonetheless, even in the later Henry V, audiences are not encouraged by any reassurance of lasting political settlement at the hands of a king who mistakes the exporting of war overseas for the exercise of government: ‘Is it possible dat I sould love de ennemi of France?’ (V: V.ii.163).

René Girard famously argued that ‘le sacrifice est une violence sans risque de vengeance’,²⁴Footnote ^a and it appears that it is with such sentiments in mind that Henry VI repeatedly enacts the surrender of his royal privilege: ‘O that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!’ (VI³: II.v.95). His reiterated desires are all too often expressed in terms of otium or cultural withdrawal – in this instance, culminating in the death wish. More generally, the young king seeks to mediate between the angry heavens and the blood-lusts of his overmighty subjects by affirming the desire to lead ‘a private life/… in devotion’ (VI³: IV.vi.42–3). In The Letter of Violence, a wide-ranging enquiry into the nature of cultural trauma, Idelber Avelar stresses that ‘The function of pain in the Bible is to provide the link that ties the subject to belief.’²⁵ Yet, in the context of Shakespeare’s Histories, the Henry VI plays do not ask their audiences to attend to any agonised commitment of faith on Henry’s part or to his deliverance from a fallen world. They depict a human environment (uncannily familiar to many subjects of late modernity) where there is diminishing traffic with the sacred and its claims to the authority of retributive violence have devolved to lesser agents.²⁶ Nevertheless, the narrative function of suffering in the relation of the human condition remains a compelling enquiry, then and now. As Terry Eagleton has underlined, ‘suffering is a mightily powerful language to share in common, one in which many diverse life-forms can strike up a dialogue. It is a communality of meaning … injury, division and antagonism are the currency you share in common … Sorrow implies value.’²⁷

In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, the staging of such suffering and pain comes emblematically to represent the bitter experience of failed transcendence. 1 Henry VI carefully contrasts the motions of cultural withdrawal on the part of the king with those of the champion of his French antagonists who is ‘A holy maid …/Which by a vision sent to her from heaven/Ordained is to raise this tedious siege/And drive the English forth the bounds of France’ (VI¹: I.ii.51–4). The Pucelle, who has been variously construed critically from ‘a virtual parody of the Marlovian prototype’ to a thinly disguised Morality devil,²⁸ becomes increasingly implicated in the age’s appetite for butchery, even offering to dismember her own body before her English captors save her the trouble. She bargains with her fiends, ‘I’ll lop a member off and give it you’ (VI¹: V.iii.14). However, her body is not within her gift: it is repeatedly claimed by others. Even her rejected father protests, ‘God knows thou art a collop of my flesh’ (VI¹: V.iv.18). More generally, these history plays repeatedly problematise the political status and dramatic implications of Henry VI’s declared piety and its relations with his subsequent psychic unravelling. In Richard II the fallen protagonist histrionically declares he would exchange his ‘gorgeous palace for a hermitage’ (III.iii.147). In both dramatic environments audiences are urged to consider these desires to withdraw with the utmost seriousness, querying whether they constitute a flawed abdication of political office or a resisting reading of the society’s belligerence. Henry VI declares to Warwick and Clarence, ‘I make you both Protectors of this land/While I myself will lead a private life/And in devotion spend my latter days,/To sin’s rebuke and my Creator’s praise’ (VI³: IV.vi.41–4). Whatever the status of this repeatedly voiced piety, we are left in no doubt that it remains wanting as a political endorsement of the Lancastrian cause or the responsible act of a pater patriae to a world grown increasingly expert in the art of killing.

Firmly inscribed within a discourse of reassuring polarities, a specially commissioned ‘Psalm and Collect of Thanksgiving’ in the year of the Armada thundered that the Spanish ‘communed of peace, and prepared for most cruel war; for they think that no faith nor truth is to be kept with us, but that they may feign, dissemble, break promise, swear, and forswear, so they may deceive us and take us unawares, and oppress us suddenly’.²⁹ As pamphlet literature, chronicles, martyrologies, epic poems and dramas proliferated during the course of the sixteenth century and continued to recuperate tales of blood-letting for newly minted mythologies of the nation, such evocations of unceasing violence also excited new forms of epistemology. They trained attention upon, what Paul Ricoeur has identified more generally in an account of historiography as ‘des possibilités oubliées, des potentialités avortées, des tentatives réprimées (une des fonctions de l’histoire à cet égard est de reconduire à ces moments du passé où l’avenir n’était pas encore décidé, où le passé était lui-même un espace d’expérience ouvert sur un horizon d’attente)’.³⁰Footnote ^a Thus, in the Henry VI plays, the unwieldy energies of rebellion, political factionalism or the wavering rhythms of the king’s political and mental collapse need not, as many critical studies infer, be driven by an emphasis upon narrative closure, upon political silencing or dynastic consolidation. Indeed, Shakespeare’s renewal of fifteenth-century England for late Elizabethan audiences devotes considerably more stage time to the enactment of froward passions than to the stifling of Cade’s insurrection in 2 Henry VI, to the unruly dynamism of Hotspur than to his destruction in 1 Henry IV. The repeating structures in the performative play of history may direct attention not to the quelling of sedition, but stimulate a reawakened consciousness of the multiplying possibilities of access to a most slippery political power. Again and again we are urged to concentrate on how competing political bids may be variously justified and heroised – and how the ever-fragile body politic may envisage and negotiate renewal through the terrifying availability of violence. This certainly proves to be an unexpected and bitter lesson for Henry VI when he seeks to respond to the shrill voices of dissent from his peers: ‘Henry the Fourth by conquest got the crown.’ York barks back, ‘’Twas by rebellion against his king’ (VI³: I.i.132–3). For this same generation of late Elizabethan audiences, Oxford’s Professor of Roman Law, Alberico Gentili, had underlined vexingly in De Iure Belli (1589), ‘if it is doubtful on which side justice is, and if each side aims at justice, neither can be called unjust’.³¹

After the rigours of parleys between Henry VI and York, royal authority cannot be expressed, only ventriloquised with the rhetorical expertise of a Margaret of Anjou or of a court henchman like Clifford. Yet, by the time these latter agents are called upon to promote the cause of the House of Lancaster in 3 Henry VI, the governance of England has become little more than a spectator sport for the king himself. Terrifyingly, figures such as Margaret and Clifford are able to match their words with deeds, but Henry VI (prefiguring the later Lear) is reduced to mouthing, rather than imparting his sovereignty. In 1 Henry VI, when he welcomes Richard Plantaganet back to the company of his lords as Duke of York, the fledgling king announces, ‘my loving lords, our pleasure is/That Richard be restored to his blood’. However, the seemingly unbiddable court requires the force of Warwick’s echoics (‘Let Richard be restored to his blood’) before the authority of the Crown may be confirmed (VI¹: III.i.158–60). By the close of 3 Henry VI the polity of England is able to support no internal systems of deference or restraint and so Henry’s own ill-fated son, Prince Edward, attempts in vain to have the newly instituted Edward IV ‘[s]peak like a subject’: even this youth acknowledges ‘I am now my father’s mouth’ (VI³: V.v.17–18). At such moments, audiences may conclude, as Ralegh had advised in the posthumous publication Instructions to his Sonne and to Posterity (1632), ‘Speaking much, is … a kinde of vanitie; for hee that is lavish in words, is a niggard in deeds, and as SALOMON sayth, the heart of a Foole is in his mouth.’³²

Inheriting the Past

H. M. Richmond contended that ‘The very choice of the weak Henry VI rather than the dashing Talbot as the play’s pivot is curious … it is not a piece of useful political propaganda for the Tudors, like the conventional treatment of Richard III.’³³ Indeed, it might be argued that Henry VI remains incapable of assuming this dramatic function – a function more persuasively performed by the potent memory of his father. When Salisbury is slain in action in France, he is remembered by Talbot not only as one who ‘In thirteen battles … o’ercame’, but as symbolising a precious link with the heroic legacies of a swifly receding past: ‘Henry the Fifth he first train’d to the wars’ (VI¹: I.iv.78–9). Furthermore, it occurs to Henry VI, himself eclipsed in the presence of Talbot, ‘I do remember how my father said/A stouter champion never handled sword’ (VI¹: III.iv.18–19).

In Temps et récit, Paul Ricœur is at pains to stress the wonted motions of the human psyche and how, again and again in our collective dealings, ‘Le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé de manière narrative.’³⁴Footnote ^a In the Henry VI plays, the endlessly renewing narratio of an absent patriarch not only calibrates all subsequent forms of political agency in the kingdom, it also exposes how an enduring appetite for violence has come to fashion political discourse itself: 1st serving-man – ‘Ay, and the very parings of our nails/Shall pitch a field when we are dead’ (VI¹: III.i.102–3). If Paola Pugliatti argues convincingly that ‘Among Shakespeare’s war leaders, Talbot is the one who most nearly approaches the ideals of knighthood’, Alexander Leggatt has concluded more grimly that Talbot is ‘a hero in a practical world in which he is first destroyed and then forgotten’.³⁵ The memories of military commanders such as Henry V, Talbot, Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet and the younger Antony, amongst many others, are often found to haunt Shakespeare’s theatrical worlds. Yet, as the historian Rory Rapple has persuasively underlined, encounters with the past might not be limited to the wooden O, or even to the leaves of Hall’s or Holinshed’s chronicles. As was witnessed in the previous chapter, in such publications as Ralegh’s, cultural expectations of retrospection (if not regression) frequently characterised early modern productions of non-European worlds. Nonetheless, these were underpinned by deeply historicised expectations of a land much closer to home where English projects of plantation had been in progress since Anglo-Norman times. In 2 Henry VI Beaufort cautions York that ‘The uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms/And temper clay with blood of Englishmen’ (VI²: III.i.310–11); and, in turn, Rapple stressed that to the minds of many of the English ‘seneschals, constables and captains’ located in early modern Ireland, ‘the way in which factionalism and theft stalked the land was obviously retrograde, a throwback to an English status quo ante, the horrors of the Wars of the Roses’.³⁶

Scriptural study among an ever-growing community of readers in post-Reformation England might easily revive the knowledge that kingship had been accorded by Jehovah to nations tainted by spiritual failure:

Moreover, the sixteenth century did not lack voices to remind its readers of their moral and devotional shortcomings. The humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives had submitted in De Tradendis Disciplinis (1531) that ‘it is not to be doubted that our minds are now less powerful than they were before that first transgression. Now, we are more crafty in our wickedness.’³⁷ A decade later in The lamentacyon of a Christe[n] agai[n]st the citye of London (1542), Henry Brinkelow unveiled the Tudor capital in the final years of ‘oure most Soueraygne Lorde Kynge Henry the eight’ as populated with ‘inordinate riche styfnecked Cytezens, [who] will not haue in their howses that lyuely worde of our soules … but abhorreth and disdayneth all those which wolde lyue according to the Gospell’.³⁸ Indeed, by the close of the century in John Rainolds’ The overthrow of stage-playes (1599), the Oxford printer, John Lichfield, might be found complaining that ‘th’usual flocking and gadding … to these Play-Houses and idel places of entercourse … doth sufficiently discry a farre off of what mettle we are made, and wherein the treasure of our hart consisteth’.³⁹ In the most fallen world of the Henry VI plays, audiences might be repeatedly given to speculate how a political system of monarchical sovereignty (founded scripturally on evidence of decaying faith and human sinfulness amongst God’s chosen people) could not return to its flawed origins. These plays chronicle the plight of a realm imploding as human existence reverts to an orgy of blood-letting. Indeed, as Gregory M. Colon Semenza persuasively argues, ‘Burgundy’s warning that war will become indistinguishable from sport – through a process of emasculation – is merely the most explicit statement of a general concern that runs throughout the entire trilogy. In early modern England it was assumed that sport would turn, or be turned, into war.’⁴⁰

As these plays unfold, solemn exhortations to remember and desperate bids for political ascendency are articulated repeatedly in terms of a blood-lust – the grossest expression of the drive for social mobility in times of political flux. In the closing scenes of 1 Henry VI, York threatens to ‘plague’ the French with ‘incessant wars’ if they do not submit to the demands of the English Crown (VI¹: V.iv.154). When we are asked to recall the fields of confused slaughter against what Exeter terms ‘the subtle-witted French’ (VI¹: I.i.25), or those at a more familiar proximity for the London audiences, such as Towton, St. Albans or Tewkesbury, it comes as little surprise that these military crises are being communicated synecdochically onstage as key phases in the dissolution of a failing state. Moreover, at a time when English imperial achievements on the continent are being swiftly consigned to the fastness of memory, Gloucester intones at the heart of the nation’s supposed centre of power, the court, ‘Is Paris lost? Is Rouen yielded up?’ (VI¹: I.i.65). As this study indicates, the armed conflicts conjured up in early modern drama repeatedly offer anatomies of the racially and geographically polarised (as well as psychically transformative) discourses of war circulating more widely at the time. Yet, if in 1 Henry VI, Warwick prophesies that the ‘brawl …/… in the Temple-garden’ between Yorkists and Lancastrians ‘Shall send, between the red rose and the white,/A thousand souls to death and deadly night’ (VI¹: II.iv.124–7), the history plays, more generally, often remain remarkably (and, for some critics, perplexingly) even-handed in their identification of cultural alterity.

In his liues of the III. Norman Kings of England William the first. William the second. Henrie the first (1613) Sir John Hayward protested, ‘what heart should the Souldiers fight, when they haue not his presence for whom they fight? … The presence of the Prince is worth many thousands of ordinarie Souldiers: The ordinary Souldier wil vndertake both labour and danger for no other respects so much, as by the presence of the Prince.’⁴¹ However, in the Henry VI plays, the erring king is repeatedly expelled from the proliferating fields of combat and abandoned as a paltry witness to the successive misfortunes of his realm. From this perspective, Henry VI’s feverish observation of the battle of Towton (‘Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea/… Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea/Forced to retire by fury of the wind’ (VI³: II.v.5, 7–8)) intimates a telling instance of our own diminishing abilities to ascribe moral probity or justness of cause to either warring party in this terra nulla of anarchic England.

More generally, Shakespeare’s age, like our own, was thoroughly conversant with the regime of ‘incessant wars’, and deeply exercised by the triage of multiple conflicts which might warrant the nation’s attention. As was witnessed in the previous chapter, Ralegh warned in 1593 that ‘Therbe also others in Irland that lye in waite not suspected, which I most feare … Wee ar so busyed and dandled in thes French warrs, which ar endless, as wee forgett the defens next the hart.’⁴² The staging of endlessly duplicating cycles of armed hostilities in Henry VI not only urges onlookers to remember what the nation has been, but also how that past bleeds through into the present human continuum of unremitting carnage.⁴³ The evocation throughout Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 of political diminution and deterritorialisation inevitably leads to the erosion of the expectations and practices of lordship, service and protection, so central to the feudal functioning of the medievalised polity: ‘Guyenne, Compiègne, Rheims, Orléans,/Paris, Gisors, Poitiers, are all quite lost’ (VI¹: I.i.60–1). In receipt of such constantly updated communications, the English peers are left to contemplate their own incompleteness with a highly charged politicised language of vacating spaces. York laments ‘Anjou and Maine are given to the French,/… ’Tis thine they give away and not their own’ (VI²: I.i.211, 218). Warwick finally perishes with his thoughts wholly devoted to his own dislocation: ‘My parks, my walks, my manors that I had./Even now forsake me, and of all my lands/Is nothing left me but my body’s length’ (VI³: V.ii.24–6). At such moments, late Elizabethan audiences might all too easily recall the collective experiences of anxiety and paranoia of a realm which had faced the threat of one Armada and had good reason to suspect that others were in preparation. One John Bonde informed the authorities in London in June 1588 that ‘The best gentlemen in Spain cast lots who shall have England.’⁴⁴

Negotiating Violence and Difference

The brutal factionalisation of the commonweal in the Henry VI plays can, as we have seen, be expressed in terms of slippery fealties, changeful topographies and unharnessed violence on and off the field of conflict. Nonetheless, in contrast to the dramatic narratives of the second tetralogy, these earlier plays offer sustained analyses also of the adversarial politics surrounding gendered engagement in the res publica. In 1 Henry VI, Suffolk declares in summary fashion of Margaret, ‘She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d;/She is a woman, therefore to be won’ (VI¹: V.iii.79–80). Away from the misrule of the battlefield in 2 Henry VI, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, acknowledges the normative gender codes operating within her society, remarking bitterly, ‘Follow I must; I cannot go before’ (VI²: I.ii.61).

Early modern print culture offered ample evidence of the gender-marked expectations which conventionally informed any discussion of military combat in this period. In De Iure Belli, Gentili stressed that ‘women, because they cannot handle arms, are treated like the clergy and excluded from feudal relations’⁴⁵ – but those who could ‘handle arms’ inevitably became a source of enduring fascination. Ralegh confessed in the Discouerie that he arrived (like his Iberian predecessors) in the New World seeking to reproduce Old World knowledge and to query its myths: he was ‘very desirous to vnderstand the trueth of those warlike [Amazons], bicause of some it is beleeued, of others not’.⁴⁶ Shakespeare’s Talbot is bewildered by the cultural inversions in this new military world where ‘A woman clad in armour chaseth men’ (VI¹: I.v.3). Moreover, the Pucelle remains adamant that she will ‘ne’er fly from a man’ in the heat of battle and the Dauphin hails this ‘Amazon … [who fights] with the sword of Deborah’ (VI¹: I.ii.103–5). Encounters with what was perceived as culturally deviant excited fierce speculation both on- and offstage in the early modern period, and this fascination is exploited in a systematic manner as the Henry VI plays unfold. Indeed, at points, Bedford is left to function onstage as a choric voice, articulating for audiences near and far the perplexing aporia surrounding the Venus armata – ‘A maid! and be so martial!’ (VI¹: II.i.21).

A Yorkist chronicle, published in 1485, but with prefatory material dating from the final months of the reign of Edward IV, perhaps unsurprisingly promoted Henry VI’s alliance with Margaret of Anjou as ‘a dere mariage for the realme of englond’. The latter had relinquished Anjou and Maine as ‘the keye of Normandie for the frenshmen to entre’:

If the Lancastrian cause was to enjoy renewed impetus with the arrival of Henry Tudor at, what Shakespeare terms in Cymbeline, ‘blessèd Milford’ (III.ii.59) in 1485, the political legacy of the Lancastrian queen does not appear to have enjoyed any significant rehabilitation at the hands of the Tudor chroniclers. In the last part of the Mirour for Magistrates (1578), Edmund, Duke of Somerset, stands accused all too convincingly of conspiring upon the life of the regent, Henry VI’s uncle, Gloucester, but he himself indicts, ‘dame Margaret the Queene,/By whose malice this mischife first began,/Did she (trow yee) her selfe not ouerwene/Death to procure to that most worthy man?’⁴⁸ A few years later, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1583) bewailed ‘the vnprofitable and vnhonourable mariage betweene the kyng & Lady Margaret daughter of y^e Duke of Angeow’. Here, Margaret was extravagantly demonised as a

Nina S. Levine’s critical study Women’s Matters (1998) analyses such early modern gender expectations with particular reference to these early 1590s history plays, stressing ‘that representations of women in power – whether in the plays themselves, in their chronicle sources, or within Elizabethan society – are shaped not by cultural myths of gender alone but by the intersection of these myths with specific political situations’.⁵⁰ However, Levine’s subsequent contention that ‘In writing women onto history’s stage, Shakespeare’s plays invited a scepticism about representations of power, both past and present’ engages strategically with the broader exposition in the Henry VI plays of the very provisional nature of any attempt at conflict resolution.⁵¹

Both at home and abroad in 1 Henry VI, audiences (on- and offstage) are repeatedly invited to encounter the alien, the potent force of cultural alterity, in the shape of the symbolic challenges posed to English nationhood by foreign, female agency: the Pucelle of Orleans, the Countess of Auvergne, and England’s newly adopted French queen, Margaret of Anjou. Nonetheless, unlike the Pucelle, Margaret maintains her own role of Venus armata for the length of Henry’s reign and demonstrates that she can thrive when her adopted land begins to test the further limits of its appetite for butchery. Margaret is as profoundly stimulated as any of the male adult members of the political elite by the spectacle of savagery and acknowledges that arresting acts of violence may indeed serve to confirm group allegiances. In De Ira Seneca reasoned that his understanding of this most unmasterable humour differed little from that of Aristotle, ‘iram esse cupiditatem doloris reponendi’.Footnote ^a Yet the Roman philosopher was also at pains to caution his reader that ‘Among the various ills to which humanity is prone there is this besides – the darkness that fills the mind, and not so much the necessity of going astray, as the love of straying.’⁵²Footnote ^b The Henry VI plays address most specifically this pleasure principle, and Margaret continues to stage-manage her entries into this ruthless world of armed combat (from which the distaff sex is more generally barred in the later, second tetralogy) with carefully rehearsed performances. These performances are clearly executed to tempt the palates of audiences (on- and offstage) and we are left querying our own complicity in these compelling narratives of horror – complicity in what the philosopher R. G. Collingwood later termed a particularly tempting strain of ‘malice’:

In a dramatic world where the profession of killing appears to be the only means by which political players may distinguish themselves, Henry’s queen unsurprisingly refuses to confine blood sports to the battlefield. She reserves the exquisite pleasures of Senecan torment for more intimate encounters with her abject victims:

Baited by his captors, York insists that even ‘the hungry cannibals/Would not have touch’d’ his boy Rutland (VI³: I.iv.152–3). Yet he has strategically forgotten that Margaret, like himself, exploits the spectacular power of violence to command attention when she finds herself unable to wield political auctoritas. In these dramatic worlds, the persecutor determines to deny victims any form of agency, insisting that they warrant no further response from the surrounding society than the discipline of brutality. Thus, in the context of early modern terrorism, Robert Appelbaum has underlined that ‘violence operates not only by destroying or harming, but also by communicating’.⁵⁴ Equally solemnly, the jurist Alberico Gentili concluded for his own sixteenth-century readers that

As Gail Kern Paster has demonstrated, men’s bodies opened and wounded were frequently gender-marked as feminine in the early modern period.⁵⁶ In direct comparison with the actions of many of her male counterparts in these plays, Margaret’s interventions, here as York’s tormentor, are not designed to produce legitimacy or truth. Her words are the verbal counterpart of Clifford’s rapier, an instrument of pain, a closing down of York’s subjectivity to that of superlative victim, robbed of human status. In her endeavour to divest her prey of any autonomy, she constructs him as culturally illegible in the power games of her caste – and, thus, as violable. Earlier, the bereaved York had argued that women should be ‘soft, mild, pitiful and flexible’ (VI³: I.iv.41), and in this way sought to contain his adversary within language, to reduce her to a controllable stereotype. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of these stratagems soon becomes evident. The beleaguered Duke has failed to recognise that the hitherto inviolable laws of cultural difference have collapsed in the radical disordering of the nation, and that those seeking the very highest social advancement have an irrepressible need to spawn impotent subordinates, to coerce others into being eligible victims. Gentili contended in De Iure Belli that ‘we are treating the laws of men, and we here follow the ways of men’, but vexingly begged the question ‘If a woman fights, why should she not allow war to be made upon her?’⁵⁷ One of the final acts of revenge of the Yorkists in 3 Henry VI is to visit epistemic violence upon Margaret of Anjou, to consign her to the past, to stunted forms of political intervention, indeed to the silent limits of language itself. Richard of Gloucester queries, ‘Why should she live, to fill the world with words?’ (VI³: V.v.44).

Maurice Charney argued persuasively that ‘Violent scenes in Elizabethan drama have a shock effect that forces us to draw immediate conclusions. Murders on stage, for example, are often used to shift our sympathies toward the victim, even if he [sic] has consistently alienated our sympathies during the play.’⁵⁸ Yet, in the Henry VI plays, audiences may be swiftly drawn to question the very efficacy of human sympathy itself as a viable response to trauma in a world given over to the gruesome festivities of a moral holiday. With a tenacious investment in normative gender codes, the grieving York unleashes an arresting vituperatio directed at the murderous queen, ‘How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child [?]’ (VI³: I.iv.138) – a vituperatio suggestive, perhaps, of the fact that even if the dramatic world has exhausted its capacity for pathos, this may not be the case beyond the stage. The father has been publicly unmanned by Margaret’s ambition to sound the uttermost depths of his anguish, to annul his future, to stage his own particular Day of Judgement while still in the company of mortals. In these endeavours of the Lancastrians to secure a monopoly of violence, the Yorkists are compelled to reassume their status as irrational political subjects, as amateurs in slaughter, as indulging in specifically private grievances. For the entertainment of the general company, the Queen is now bent on affirming that York has been conclusively (and creatively) eclipsed in his own chosen vocation of killing. As Garrard affirmed in The arte of warre, ‘Experience of late daies hath taught vs, that those Nations which follow the warres, inuent euerie way how they may endomage the enemie in all their enterprises.’⁵⁹

Earlier, in The Discourses, Machiavelli had repeatedly invited his reader to meditate the instrumentality of violence, arguing that although

Even more grimly in the Henry VI plays, the promise of redress and order ever exceeds the grasp. Thus, audiences may be less inclined to award any performance of violence a degree of legitimacy when neither party has earned ethical priority on stage. Both factions are passionately devoted to brutal, partisan courses. If Margaret’s zealous attempts to whet the Duke’s suffering clearly move some of her fellow combatants (Northumberland – ‘hardly can I check my eyes from tears’, VI³: I.iv.151), it seems that these peers were not alone amongst Elizabethan audiences. Famously, such was the arresting stature of Shakespeare’s Margaret and the verbal pyrotechnics of his verse in the early 1590s that Robert Greene was able to parody York’s outburst against his tormentor (‘O tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!’, VI³: I.iv.137) in his own invective against the ‘upstart’ dramatist ‘with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’.⁶¹

As the Henry VI plays succeed one after the other, the war-seasoned, like Margaret of Anjou, York and Warwick, seek out conclusive statements of violence on and off the battlefield to communicate in metaphoric terms the unassailable nature of their grip on power. In the event, it soon becomes evident that their acts are partial, metonymic in nature, denoting episodic supplements in an unending narrative of retaliatory politics. In the brutish world of Shakespeare’s Histories, Margaret can secure no more lasting advantage than any of the other players and her political fortunes are irrevocably crippled when her own son, Edward, endures the same fate as York’s child, Rutland. The duke’s sons stab Prince Edward to death, and so ensure that Margaret does not bring her career at court to a close without being held in subjection by this grisly entertainment.

War and its Mythologies in Henry VI

In the final years of the sixteenth century, Henri IV’s envoy to Elizabeth’s court, André Hurault de Maisse, duly noted in his more general observations of the English court that the queen

Whatever the depth of knowledge that Elizabeth had gained of the Church Fathers, it was clear that they were continuing to hold a significant influence over many of the leading intellectuals amongst her subjects, such as Donne, Foxe, Hooker and Ralegh. In the Confessions, Augustine famously promoted memory as a key axis along which to plot the formation of subjectivity, declaring, ‘It is I who remember, I who am mind … Indeed the power of memory is something I do not understand when without it I cannot speak about myself.’⁶³ Nonetheless, if the English court at the beginning of 1 Henry VI is notable for its excessive investment in recalling the past to restore a fragile, if diminishing link with an age of human greatness (read, military triumph), audiences quickly become aware that this realm’s irrepressible appetite to remember is accompanied by a corresponding loss in cultural momentum. The inability on the part of the English peers to forget, or innovate, can render them hostages to outdated information and wholly limited by the contingencies of prior experience. In such a context, we may be reminded, as Jacques Le Goff has argued, that ‘Trop privilégier la mémoire c’est s’immerger dans le flot indomptable du temps.’⁶⁴Footnote ^a Indeed, Michel de Montaigne revisited this debate inherited from antiquity on numerous occasions in his Essais, and provocatively submitted in ‘Des menteurs’ that ‘il se veoid par expérience … que les memoires excellentes se joignent volontiers aux jugements debiles’.⁶⁵Footnote ^b

As we have witnessed, recollections of King Harry’s sovereignty dominate the beginning of 1 Henry VI, but they are soon forced to compete for their place against earlier medieval precedents of the exercise of power. At Rouen, Talbot’s thoughts are monopolised by the memory that ‘in this late-betrayed town/Great Coeur-de-lion’s heart was buried’ (VI¹: III.ii.82–3), whereas in 3 Henry VI, Oxford is prompted to remind his auditors of ‘great John of Gaunt,/Which did subdue the greatest part of Spain’ (VI³: III.iii.80–1). In Shakespeare’s recoveries of a fifteenth-century England, the warlords may mourn the hero of Agincourt, yet they never fail to proffer their own accounts of a profoundly tractable medieval past. Moreover, in a further recessive plane in this intertextual mise-en-abîme, we are urged to invest in ever more distant mythologies of belonging. Warwick may become a Ulysses or a Hector (VI³: IV.ii.19, IV.viii.25), and Talbot, an ‘Alcides’, in the company of his son becomes Daedalus supported by his Icarus (VI¹: IV.vii.60, IV.vi.54–5). Fleeing the Lancastrian cause, Clarence declares that ‘To keep that oath were more impiety/Than Jephthah’s, when he sacrificed his daughter’, while Richard of Gloucester acknowledges his role as Judas at the heart of Edward IV’s court (VI³: V.i.93–4, V.vii.33). The very varietas of this collective, feverish exploitation of proliferating antiquities unmasks the pervasive cultural quest to secure inviolable political authority by rehearsing its hallowed origins from the earliest records.

Confronted with the triumphing English armies in 1 Henry VI, Alençon acknowledges that ‘Froissart, a countryman of ours, records,/England all Olivers and Rowlands bred’, but now they appear on the battlefields as ‘none but Samsons and Goliases’ (VI¹: I.ii.20–30, 33). Elsewhere, the hounded players in the mêlée of England’s politics take refuge in mythologies of heroic origins. In the company of Richard Plantagenet, the dying Mortimer confesses himself ‘Nestor-like’, held captive by a past of political failure (VI¹: II.v.6). York casts himself as ‘Ajax Telamonius’ (VI²: V.i.26), and Suffolk emerges for his enemies as ‘ambitious Sulla’ (VI²: III.ii.117, IV.i.84). Margaret heroises herself as Dido (VI²: III.ii.117), and if the Pucelle’s gifts of prophecy, we are told, excel those of ‘the nine sibyls of old Rome’, she reputedly drives back the English troops ‘like Hannibal’ (VI¹: I.ii.56, I.v.21) – yet for York this ‘ugly wench’ appears more like Circe (VI¹: V.iii.34–5). Henry bids farewell to Warwick, celebrating ‘my Hector, and my Troy’s true hope’ (VI³: IV.viii.25), and styles himself as Daedalus at the end of the play imprisoned by a Minos-like Richard of Gloucester (VI³: V.vi.21–2).

Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin argue that ‘although the early plays tend to demonise female characters, they also record women’s power as orators, as warriors, as custodians of dynastic legitimacy. Institutions often depend on the very elements they feel compelled to dismiss or derogate, such as women’s labour.’⁶⁶ Like the Pucelle and Margaret of Anjou, the Countess of Auvergne seeks to enter the one significant field of cultural intervention for her nation: that of Mars. In this instance, she aims to capture the celebrated warrior Talbot by spectacularly violating her own sacred act of hospitality. In the attempted execution of this daring act, the Countess proclaims she ‘shall as famous be by this exploit/As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus’ death’ (VI¹: II.iii.5–6). The constant iteration of all these competing narratives of antique heroism bequeathed from the past not only demonstrates the multifarious exempla which this dramatic community may deploy in the assertion of its many and various political ambitions, but how remote these heroic agents now appear in the midst of the grubby realities of an ailing state. The extravagant and yet endlessly fracturing allusiveness of the Henry VI plays is in many ways symptomatic of the anxiety-ridden investment its subjects have in the past, but also of the desperate urgency with which they seek out some form of political justification for their sordid acts of slaughter and betrayal.

More generally, the most unheroic dramatic worlds of the Henry VI plays are obsessively interested in analysing how their communities of persecutors seek to stage-manage the deaths of others. If the dramatic emphasis frequently falls upon how warlords, such as Suffolk, Clifford, York and Warwick, are robbed of any semblance of dignitas at their own destruction, Henry VI is singular onstage in his potent desire, repeatedly articulated, to become a fugitive from a hostile reality – a reality which acknowledges both his exceptional office and his exceptional unworthiness to occupy that office. The distinctly materially minded York spurns Henry’s commitment to piety as symptomatic of a flawed exercise of power, having earlier condemned his centripetal sovereignty in more profane terms as a ‘bookish rule [which] hath pull’d fair England down’ (VI²: I.i.256). Leggatt argues persuasively that ‘the first half of 1 Henry VI, like the Roman plays, is set in a kingless world’.⁶⁷ However, this state of affairs is never remedied. In fact, it is only further aggravated as the plays succeed one another. In the political vacuum generated by the waning authority of this ‘easy-melting king’ (VI³: II.i.171), each of the warring parties comes to express its ambitions through a discourse of substitution. In a world unable to nourish lasting hopes of political settlement, there is perhaps inevitably little attention reserved for a commitment to spiritual transcendence. Instead, desire is excited in its inhabitants by the rather more earth-bound, rhetorical possibilities of ethopoeia – the redemptive ideal of assuming (or, rather, of violently appropriating) the identity of another extends even to figures beyond the pale of the stage: Talbot declares of Falstolf that he ‘Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight’ (VI¹: IV.i.40). Thus, if in 2 Henry VI the reluctant monarch confesses ‘I do long and wish to be a subject’, his desires for transformation are widely confirmed by the unruly band of political players who surround him: ‘Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood,/I would remove these tedious stumbling-blocks’ protests Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (VI²: IV.ix.6, I.ii.63–4). Subsequently, the cornered Suffolk rails, ‘O that I were a god, to shoot forth thunder/Upon these paltry, servile, abject drudges!’ (VI²: IV.i.104–5). Such extravagant performances of self-drama are facilitated in the plundered realm of a king who eagerly seeks to have himself impersonated by others: ‘My lords, what to your wisdoms seemeth best,/Do or undo, as if ourself were here’ (VI²: III.i.195–6). Indeed, his own followers advise him to ‘depart the field:/The queen hath best success when you are absent’ (VI³: II.ii.73–4). By 3 Henry VI, ‘the easy-melting king like wax’ is characterised all too plausibly by his detractors as one who ‘slily stole away and left his men’ (VI³: I.i.3).

After the fainthearted Henry has stripped his own son of his birthright in their favour, Warwick and Clarence unite (albeit provisionally) in defence of the Lancastrian cause and rejoice in their new-found roles as ‘Protectors’ of the realm. Prefiguring the dramatic crisis occurring in the later King Lear, Warwick resolves with Clarence to

In both of these plays from very different phases of Shakespeare’s career, we are asked to ponder the efflorescence of violence in a realm where a king seeks a ‘kind nursery’ away from the duties of governance and leadership – ‘while we/Unburdened crawl toward death’ (King Lear I.i.122, 38–9). Moreover, in direct comparison with other Shakespearean creations such as Richard II and Hamlet, Henry VI may be seen to warrant our attention most of all for the manner in which he remains acutely receptive to his own supersession. Thus, in many ways, his greatest dramatic achievement becomes the forensic interrogation of his own political displacement and of his impermanent status in the affections of others: ‘I know not what to say, my title’s weak’ (VI³: I.i.134).

The Sons and Daughters of Mars

At the dawn of the modern period, Marx evoked the cumulative pressure of historical precedent in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) as ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighing like a nightmare upon the brain of the living.’⁶⁸ This sense of the foundational weight of the past pressing down upon those who survive is remorselessly figured forth in the Henry VI plays. In direct comparison with Old Hamlet, King Harry’s principal legacy to surviving generations is that the efficient art of governance is inextricably linked to the profession of violence and that the proliferation of conflict zones abroad may be usefully sought out to exhaust the blood-lust of companies at home.⁶⁹ While, in the theatre, audiences are transported back to the deadly contests of the Wars of the Roses, those onstage find themselves compulsively resurrecting the knowledge of earlier medieval divisions to understand the trajectory of their own lives. The English peers constantly urge audiences to look beyond the living memory of Henry V to stress their own superior bloodlines and claims to cultural priority. Somerset, for example, is hastily reminded by Warwick that Plantagenet’s ‘grandfather was Lionel Duke of Clarence,/Third son to the third Edward King of England’ (VI¹: II.iv.83–4). Serving a similar cause (read, the legitimation of future violence), Mortimer reminds auditors on- and offstage that ‘Henry the Fourth, grandfather to this king,/Deposed his nephew Richard, Edward’s son,/The first-begotten and the lawful heir’ (VI¹: II.v.63). In short, the English camp is deeply exercised by the attempts of its own warring elites to lay claim to the future of the nation through editorial violence enacted on the past. Warlords, like York, Somerset, Clifford and Warwick, remain eager to attend to the exemplars lifted from clan memory and to police rigorously any attempts by rival factions to appropriate national histories for present emergencies.

If Shakespearean history returns attention again and again to the stress-ridden politics of a kingdom wracked by remorseless violence (both epistemic and material), it concentrates equally vigorously upon the exchanges of meaning which may be enacted across wonted principles of cultural difference. Initially, it may seem that the habitual codes of social priority and power transferral are radically scrambled in 1 Henry VI. Sir William Lucy disdains the terms advanced by the enemy commander: ‘Submission, Dauphin! ’tis a mere French word;/We English warriors wot not what it means’ (VI¹: IV.vii.54–5). The desperation of Lucy’s embassy to maintain linguistic distinction feeds into a much larger, feverish dramatic debate concerning what English political subjectivity might be: ‘my lords, remember where we are’, cautions the Lancastrian monarch: ‘In France, amongst a fickle wavering nation’ (VI¹: IV.i.138–9). Such experiences of hostility and estrangement were certainly uppermost in the mind of Robert, Lord Rich, when he wrote to the Earl of Essex from Rouen in 1596 during the English campaign to assist Henri IV in the French Wars of Religion:

Yet, in the dramatic worlds of Henry VI, as we travel through foreign lands and uncharted political crises, the conditions of human existence remain eerily comparable.

The bitter reality occasioned by Henry V’s death, that of England’s collapsed imperium abroad and political insufficiency at home, can only be masked provisionally with fugitive memories of heroic authority – memories such as those revived on the battlefield by Talbot. His very name (‘“A Talbot! a Talbot!” They fly’, VI¹: II.i.78) appears to have a talismanic, apotropaic quality which seeks to keep destruction at bay for the nation. The iteration of the warrior’s name not only transforms the signified, but also the signifier, and each political faction competes for a stake in his warrior mythology. Such is the lavish cultural capital associated with Talbot that it may even be renewed, nay ventriloquised, on the lips of a common soldier: ‘The cry of “Talbot” serves me for a sword’ (VI¹: II.i.79). However, as one cycle of the nation’s tribulations succeeds the next, the moral or political distinctions that the characters wish to affirm evaporate in this vision of universal carnage. The profoundly changeful environment inhabited by ‘Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish’ (VI¹: I.iv.105) is rendered all the more unmasterable in the misrule of battle when the invading forces meet with ‘A woman clad in armour [who] chaseth men’ – a woman who has herself already claimed ‘I exceed my sex’ (VI¹: I.v.3, I.ii.89).

Crucial to narratives of cultural indiscipline (then and now) is the frightening inability to locate or predict violence – most especially at a time when the relatively formalised arena of the battlefield was (and is) no longer monopolising the wider theatre of conflict. This question of the defendability, or porosity, of any community haunts the first tetralogy as much as it characterises the condition of late modernity. At the opening of 1 Henry VI, a play which Maurice Morgann dismissed in the eighteenth century as ‘that Drum-and-trumpet thing’,⁷¹ the ultimately hopeless endeavour to establish some fixity of purpose (and allegiance) at the heart of the English court swiftly buckles as the besiegers are besieged at Orleans, and back across the Channel we move from the vicissitudes of imperium to those of most ungoverned urbs. Thus, at a moment of acute political crisis for the English nation across the Channel, at the Tower of London the armed companies of Winchester and Gloucester are discovered in violent disorders. Gloucester’s retainers thunder, ‘Open the gates unto the Lord Protector,/Or we’ll burst them open if that you come not quickly’ (VI¹: I.iii.27–8). At such points, we are urged to question the status and function of these privileged sites of supposed cultural opposition (sieges at Orleans or the city of London) – to question the precise locus of the adversarial threat, the very identity of a barbaric Other and, for that matter, the validity of any form of violent intervention.

On Shakespeare’s many and various stages, at the Tower of London, in the mise-en-abîme of the besiegers besieged at Orleans, beneath the walls of Ang[i]ers in King John, or in the initial blood-letting at Corioli in the company of Caius Martius, the hitherto reassuring oppositionality between native/foreign, allegiance/ambition, Self/Other becomes vexed, perplexingly imbricated. We are compelled to engage in interpretative strategies of analogy, rather than difference. In being asked to recall erstwhile enemies in the shape of French forces in 1 Henry VI, King John or Henry V, London playhouse audiences were not plunged into the oppositional politics of war with its familiar discourses of cultural belatedness and demonic agency. Instead, in the frenzied exchanges of invective, the various strains of enmity are evenly weighted and only serve to indicate that in this dramatic world we are navigating a complex cultural environment subject to terms of troubling similitude. The Bastard of Orleans thinks Talbot ‘a fiend of hell’, whereas Talbot himself dismisses the Pucelle as ‘that railing Hecate’ (VI¹: II.i.46, III.ii.66).

When, in 2 Henry VI, York intones for audiences on- and offstage the meandering genealogies of the royal line of kings with a litany of Edwards, Richards and Henrys (VI²: II.ii.), or when in 1 Henry IV the battlefield of Shrewsbury spawns seemingly endless versions of the usurper Bolingbroke/Henry IV with which to bewilder enemy forces, audiences are alerted forcefully to the very aleatory nature, the sobering reversibility with which the narrative of history may be configured: ‘Another king! They grow like Hydra’s heads’, protests Douglas in 1 Henry IV (IV¹: V.iv.24). After the slaughter of Clifford in 3 Henry VI, Warwick instructs Richard of Gloucester ‘From off the gates of York fetch down the head,/Your father’s head, which Clifford placed there;/Instead whereof let this supply the room’ (VI³: II.vi.52–4). Indeed, similarly trapped within duplicating conditions of existence, Shakespeare’s Richard rails at the close of his own reign: ‘I think there be six Richmonds in the field:/Five have I slain today instead of him’ (Richard III: V.iv.11–12).

In the English camp, the loss of Henry V is followed by the brutal sacrifice of Talbot, whose ideals of service no longer bear relevance or meaning in a world where the resources of government (indeed, self-government) have been squandered. In the French camp, the Bastard of Orleans seeks to remedy the ‘cheer appalled’ of his dispirited confederates by producing a rival form of legitimacy, one worthy of devotion: ‘A holy maid’ who ‘by a vision sent to her from heaven,/Ordainèd is to raise this tedious siege/And drive the English forth the bounds of France’ (VI¹: I.ii.51–4). As we have seen, this desperate (and, clearly, universal) search for a military saviour excites the meditations and imaginative life of the combatants much more powerfully than any profession of religious faith or commitment to the ever-dwindling territory of the realm. Excited by the spirit of victory which appears to attend on the Pucelle, Charles exclaims, ‘Was Mahomet inspirèd with a dove?/Thou with an eagle art inspirèd then’ (I.ii.140–1). However, such references prepare Elizabethan audiences for the seemingly irrevocable alien-ness, the perceivedly unnatural presence of this woman who will ultimately be discovered communing with fiends. France is limned in terms of a growing integrity as it builds allegiances with such diverse, fickle figures as the Pucelle, the Countess of Auvergne and, eventually, Burgundy. However, the island kingdom, abandoned to a youth, is characterised by a beleaguered hero such as Talbot or, conversely, corrosive forces of self-interest expressed by its warlords. Thus, the dramatic world tilts back and forth precariously in cycles of violence: Dauphin – ‘Late did [Mars] shine upon the English side;/Now we are victors; upon us he smiles’ (VI¹: I.ii.3–4).

In their vigorous evocation of conflicted nation-building, the Henry VI plays constantly remind us that the early modern battlefield remained an arena in which religious professions, territorial acquisitiveness, trading ambitions as well as the defence (and the coveting) of regal power might be regularly set in play. For Elizabeth’s own Accession Day festivities of 1595 an oracle was erected and, amongst the verses with which it was inscribed, the onlooker was informed: ‘No nation breeds a warmer bloud for warre.’ However, directly after, s/he was promptly reassured, ‘And yet She calmes them with her Majesty.’⁷² The presence of the spirit of Mars amongst England’s political elite warranted, it seems, regular comment. Thomas Churchyard looked forward to Essex’s arrival in Ireland, ‘When MARS shal march, with shining sword in hand.’⁷³ However, such guardian spirits of war might be fickle, as Essex learned in 1599, and as Shakespeare’s Antony discovers when the ‘music i’th’air’, or the passing of ‘the god Hercules’, signals the waning of his authority in the Eastern empire (Antony and Cleopatra: IV.iii.10, 14).

In 1 Henry VI the Dauphin proclaims by way of tribute to the victorious Pucelle, ‘A statelier pyramid to her I’ll rear/Than Rhodope’s or Memphis’ ever was’ (VI¹: I.vi.21–2). Equally anxiously, Walter Benjamin contended four centuries later that ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’.⁷⁴ As this discussion has sought to indicate, the Henry VI plays recreate, rather than recount, a highly selective account of the nation’s narrative in order to engage specifically with representations of cultural experience which had currency with late-sixteenth-century audiences. If M. M. Reese insisted that the Henry VI plays were ‘essentially didactic’, offering ‘a straightforward moralising of the Tudor pattern of history, with only an occasional glimpse of real people and recognisable human predicaments’, Robert Ornstein reprised the discussion, insisting more persuasively that the plays’ ‘concern with the flesh and blood reality of politics and history is contrary to the conceptualistic and allegorical impulse of the Moralities’.⁷⁵ On further examination, it may prove that more urgent cultural pressures are shaping these dramatic narratives for a nation which Sidney allegedly believed was ‘apt … to corrupt with peace’.⁷⁶

The longevity of Talbot, his son and Margaret of Anjou on Shakespeare’s stage far exceeds that of their historical lives. Talbot never met the Countess of Auvergne, and the siege of Orleans did not coincide historically with the demise of Henry V. Acknowledging the tensions released when we excavate the past, Pierre Nora has identified an attritional relationship between Memory and History in which ‘L’histoire est la délégitimation du passé vécu’:

Nonetheless, it might be argued that such a ‘continuité rétrospective’ always exceeds our grasp, whether we deal with the grand narratives of revolution and empire or the memorial distillations of our daily lives. Surely, nowhere is this more apparent than in the textual recuperation of the intensely volatile, partisan and fragmented environments of human warfare evoked in the first tetralogy. Henry VI himself declares, ‘my state, ’twixt Cade and York distressed,/Like to a ship that, having scaped a tempest,/Is straightway calmed and boarded with a pirate’ (VI²: IV.ix.31–3).

The fine operations of selection, ellipsis, erasure and supplement, to which Shakespearean history is subject, may be found to shadow the arresting practices of acceleration, imposition, enhancement, excision, fragmentation and disjunction all too frequently evident in the narrativisation of the nation. The artfulness, or creative forgetfulness, invested in the narrative editing of Henry VI’s reign for the Elizabethan stage allows for a questioning and insistent re-questioning of the political values of natio, patria, pater and gens which chronicles espoused with such regularity. Shakespeare’s Histories exercise a power of intervention in late Elizabethan cultural debates in a highly strategic manner by invoking the civil disorders of the earlier century. Concertina-ing in inventive and provocative ways the narratives inherited from earlier sources, these plays stretch and compress the lives and ambitions of the political players who shape these dramatisations of the national life.

In his own introductory discussion to Shakespeare’s ‘play of History’, John Turner argued tellingly that ‘in all the plays, whatever their genre, the imperfect cadences of their endings serve to create the imperfection of the world that has survived, and help us to articulate the sense of loss by which it may be judged’.⁷⁸ It is this relentless narrativisation of cultural dissonance which continues to speak so urgently to twenty-first century audiences. At the heart of the dramatic experience of the Henry VI plays lies the interpellation, the problematisation of the spectator: we are called into question. Addressing precisely these moral protocols of human exchange, Emmanuel Lévinas contended that ‘Le spectateur est acteur. La vision ne se réduit pas à l’accueil du spectacle; simultanément, elle opère au sein du spectacle qu’elle accueille.’⁷⁹Footnote ^a Such contentions lead irrevocably in his philosophical discourse to an ethical undertaking: ‘Je suis en principe responsable … Autrui nous engage dans une situation où vous êtes obligé sans culpabilité mais votre obligation n’en est pas moindre. C’est en même temps une charge.’⁸⁰Footnote ^b The crises of interpretation in the Henry VI plays are excited by the very congested nature of the vicious acts depicted. Then as now, the harried onlooker all too often finds precious little time or opportunity to articulate resisting readings of what human life might constitute. Instead, in the theatre and beyond, we are condemned to bear witness to conditions of existence which sustain only radically imbalanced power relations and the terrifying availability of violence.