The French are characterized as opposite to the English in a number of other ways as well, and here too Nashe’s claims are suggestive. Talbot, the English hero, exemplifies the aristocratic ideals of chivalric warfare and noble lineage that Nashe associates with a glorious English past. When Talbot is captured, the French initially offer to exchange him for “a baser man-of-arms by far,” but Talbot refuses, declaring that he would rather die than be so cheaply valued (1.4.30–33). He will not allow himself to be ransomed until the French agree to exchange him for a brave captive of noble rank. In his defense of stage plays, Nashe castigates their opponents as lacking not only patriotism but also nobility and manhood—two qualities that are exemplified by Talbot but notably lacking in Pucelle. In fact, the play constructs a schematic opposition between the two: Talbot is old, and Pucelle is young; Talbot is a gentleman, Pucelle a peasant. He fights according to the code of chivalry; she resorts to dishonorable stratagems.

  Pucelle and the French forces she leads embody the disorderly objects of present fears, the very people and values that Nashe identifies as threatening traditional order. Salisbury’s death, which Talbot denounces as an act of treachery, comes at the hands of a French boy sniper. Even at the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, the French have no regard for the chivalric values that animate Talbot. The Dauphin is delighted by the “happy stratagem” (3.2.18) that Pucelle uses to capture Roan: she has disguised herself as the peasant she truly is to enter the city on the pretext that she and the soldiers who accompany her are simply “Poor market folks that come to sell their corn” (3.2.15). The French Countess of Auvergne graciously invites Talbot to visit her castle, but when he arrives, she insults him and treacherously attempts to take him prisoner.

  The fact that both Pucelle and the Countess are women is crucial to their identity as opponents to the ideals associated with English heroic history. For Nashe, the sight of “our forefathers” on stage constituted a “reproof to these degenerate, effeminate days of ours.”9 In Henry VI, Part 1, the death of Henry V threatens to leave England with “none but women left to wail the dead” (1.1.52). The infant Henry VI turns out to be an ineffectual, effeminate king, and the remaining representatives of heroic English manhood are threatened by enemies who are literally female.

  Like Pucelle, the Countess explicitly threatens the historic record of English military glory. It is not simply Talbot that she attempts to destroy: it is also his heroic reputation. When Talbot enters, she mocks,

  Is this the scourge of France?

  Is this the Talbot, so much feared abroad . . . ?

  I see report is fabulous and false.

  I thought I should have seen some Hercules,

  A second Hector, for his grim aspect

  And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.

  Alas, this is a child, a silly [i.e., feeble] dwarf!

  It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp

  Should strike such terror to his enemies.

  (2.3.15–24)

  Such insults suggest that Talbot’s role was originally assigned to a small actor. In contrast to Nashe’s claim that the sight of heroes like Talbot onstage would inspire the playgoers, the Countess argues that Talbot’s appearance shows that the reports of his remarkable exploits are “fabulous and false.” But she does not have the last word. “You are deceived,” says Talbot: “I am but shadow of myself” (2.3.52–53). His true “substance, sinews, arms, and strength,” he explains, consist of the crowd of English soldiers he immediately summons to the stage to thwart the Countess’s plan to capture him (2.3.65) and verify the heroic reputation she has attempted to discredit. The dialogue would have had a double resonance in Shakespeare’s playhouse: the word “shadow” is likely to have reminded Shakespeare’s first audiences that the Talbot they saw onstage was quite literally a “shadow” of his true self, since actors were often called “shadows.” The French woman reminds the audience of the inadequacy of the physical body they see, but the English man speaks for a heroic history that eludes the testimony of the senses.

  Pucelle, like the Countess, also invokes the evidence of the senses to challenge Talbot’s heroic reputation. Late in the play, Sir William Lucy, not knowing that Talbot has been killed, looks for him on the battlefield. He asks the Dauphin,

  where’s the great Alcides of the field,

  Valiant Lord Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury,

  Created for his rare success in arms

  Great Earl of Washford, Waterford, and Valence,

  Lord Talbot of Goodrich and Urchinfield,

  Lord Strange of Blackmere, Lord Verdon of Alton,

  Lord Cromwell of Wingfield, Lord Furnival of

  Sheffield,

  The thrice victorious Lord of Falconbridge,

  Knight of the noble Order of Saint George,

  Worthy Saint Michael, and the Golden Fleece,

  Great Marshal to Henry the Sixth

  Of all his wars within the realm of France?

  (4.7.61–73)

  Lucy here identifies Talbot by listing the heroic titles that designate his noble lineage and great military achievements. It is not the Dauphin who replies but Pucelle; and, like the Countess, she focuses on Talbot’s body to discredit the idealized history recorded in the glorious names that Lucy has just recited:

  Here’s a silly stately style indeed.

  The Turk, that two-and-fifty kingdoms hath,

  Writes not so tedious a style as this.

  Him that thou magnifi’st with all these titles

  Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet.

  (4.7.74–78)

  Pucelle’s vigorous language, based in earthy, material fact, threatens to topple the imposing formal edifice that Lucy has erected with his list of titles. Like the Countess’s scornful description of Talbot’s diminutive body, it subjects the proud language of English heroical history to the challenge of a skeptical female voice.

  Shortly thereafter, Pucelle’s voice is silenced. After York captures her in battle, they have a brief dialogue in which the object of contention is whether Pucelle will be allowed to speak. First, she curses; York responds by ordering “hold thy tongue”; Pucelle replies “I prithee give me leave to curse awhile,” but York refuses, leading her offstage instead (5.3.39–44). Pucelle will appear in only one subsequent scene, and there she is thoroughly degraded, first denying that she is the daughter of the humble shepherd who has, he says, sought for her far and near, and then attempting to evade execution by a series of frantic, futile, self-contradictory lies. Instead of discrediting English historical mythmaking, Pucelle’s speech now serves only to discredit herself, reducing her to the object of her English captors’—and the playgoers’—ridicule.

  Nonetheless, the play does not end happily for the English. No sooner does York lead Pucelle from the stage than Suffolk enters with another French woman in hand. Suffolk’s captive is Margaret of Anjou, soon to become the treacherous queen of Henry VI and to prove, in the subsequent plays that depict the remainder of Henry’s reign, a much more serious threat to the preservation of English heroic history than Pucelle or the Countess. As the Duke of Gloucester foretells, the marriage between Henry and Margaret will be “fatal” to the English nobility, “cancelling” their “fame,” “blotting” their “names from books of memory,” “razing” the records of their “renown,” “Defacing monuments of conquered France,” and “Undoing all, as [if] all had never been” (Henry VI, Part 2 1.1.104–08). Henry VI, Part 1 initiates that lengthy process of undoing. For readers and playgoers who prefer happy, triumphant endings, it has long proved a disappointment. But now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when triumphant conclusions no longer seem so convincing, the play may well be due for a major revival.

  * * *

  1. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (London, 1592), sig. H2r.

  2. Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London, 1777), pp. 49–50.

  3. Quoted in David Bevington, “The Henry VI Plays in Performance,” in Henry VI, Parts One, Two, and Three, by Shakespeare (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. xxv.

  4. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1849), 1:187.

  5. Clive Barnes, “Troupe’s ‘Henry VI’ Fit for a King,” New York Post, March 8, 1995; Thomas M. Disch, “Regarding ‘Henry’—Highly,” Daily News, March 7, 1995.

  6. Wilborn Hampton, “3 into 2: History Plays Rearranged,” New York Times, March 7, 1995.

  7. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (London, 1595), sigs. I4v–K1r.

  8. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, sig. H2r.

  9. Ibid.

  Further Reading

  In addition to the following books and articles, see www.folger.edu/shakespeare and www.folger.edu/online-resources.

  Henry VI, Part 1

  Abbreviations: Ado = Much Ado about Nothing;

  AYLI = As You Like It; Cym. = Cymbeline;

  1H6 = Henry VI, Part 1; 2H6 = Henry VI, Part 2;

  3H6 = Henry VI, Part 3; John = King John;

  JC = Julius Caesar; Mac. = Macbeth;

  MM = Measure for Measure;

  R2 = Richard II; R3 = Richard III;

  RSC = The Royal Shakespeare Company;

  TN = Twelfth Night

  Berry, Edward I. “1 Henry VI: Chivalry and Ceremony.” In Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare’s Early Histories, pp. 1–28. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

  Berry argues that a central theme throughout the first tetralogy is a pattern of dissolution and decay. In 1H6, it takes the form of social disintegration as manifested in the breakdown of ceremony and ritual. The chapter focuses on the meeting between Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne (2.3), a scene that articulates through Talbot an ideal of chivalric community rooted in ritualism that is elsewhere parodied by Joan la Pucelle’s “colloquial vigor and irreverence.” For Berry, it is not simply “the motif of the interrupted ceremony” (Hereward T. Price’s phrase)—first seen in the aborted funeral rites of Henry V (1.1)—that unifies the play at its deepest level but “the idea of ceremony itself,” which serves as “both theme and mode of dramatic action.” As the structural rhythm alternates between indecisive battles abroad and social disorder at home, “each communal gathering becomes increasingly divisive” until broken ceremonies break Talbot, the man who embodies ceremony. In 1H6, the concept of ceremony “serves as a static ideal against which the process of social decay is measured.” In the remaining three plays, that decay is explored in terms of justice and law (2H6), the family (3H6), and finally the self (R3).

  Bevington, David. “1 Henry VI.” In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 2:308–24. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.

  In his review of the play’s scholarship, Bevington notes how the pendulum on the vexed issues of authorship and chronology, which first began to swing from theories of disintegration in the nineteenth century to claims of unity and coherence in the twentieth, seems to be moving back to theories of multiple authorship (e.g., Nashe, Greene, and Peele) and a comparatively late date (i.e., one following the composition of Part 2 and 3). The survey begins with the topics of authorship and compositional date because of their relevance to “the central issue of the play’s unity and integrity.” Is 1H6 “a jumble of fragmented pieces, written in a distracting medley of styles,” or is it a cohesive whole? Bevington concludes that increasingly the critical tendency favors coherence, whether in terms of characters (chiefly Talbot and Joan), imagery (specifically patterns involving enclosure, birds in flight, and all sorts of predatory vs. weaker animals), or style (epic, ceremonial, emblematic). Critics have found a unified design in the play’s treatment of gender and family, in its reflection of contemporary attitudes toward witchcraft and the demoniacal, and in its rhetoric. Some have used staging to argue for a kind of theatrical coherence. Where E. M. W. Tillyard and his followers emphasize the “Tudor myth” and providential history, anti-Tillyardians point to the undercutting of order, justice, and moral equity in the plays, to pervasive bad luck, and to death as “wanton” rather than “divinely retributive.” David Scott Kastan brings a welcome balance to this particular debate with his observation that “providentialism” is present but “as a model of historical causation to be probed and challenged.” As a result of the anti-Tillyard corrective, critics opting for integrity of design seek it in themes of disorder, confusion, decay, and social disintegration. The ultimate verdict on the interrelated questions of authorship and aesthetic quality remains to be decided; but “[c]ertainly the debate adds materially to our interest in the play.”

  Blanpied, John W. “Henry VI, Part One: ‘Defacing monuments of conquered France.’ ” In Time and the Artist in Shakespeare’s English Histories, pp. 26–41. Newark: University of Delaware Press; Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983. (The chapter is a revision of the essay “Art and Baleful Sorcery: The Counterconsciousness of Henry VI, Part 1,” Studies in English Literature 15 [1975]: 213–27.)

  In his metatheatrical study of 1H6, Blanpied contends that the confusion and roughness intrinsic to the play reveal a record of the discoveries Shakespeare made about the instability of both the chronicle material he was dramatizing and drama itself, a form that is “fluid, active, temporal.” The author claims that the intentional design of Part 1, which deals with the decline and fall of England’s heroic past, can be found in a “counterconsciousness” and pervasive irony in the face of what spectators and readers experience as a “collapse of order and ceremony.” Throughout the play, the authoritative power of the “monumental past” is undermined by the playwright’s assertion of “those theatrical techniques [e.g., broad morality-type characters, a persistent declamatory style, and minimal narrative linkage] that seem designed to dignify it.” As a result of such theatrical subversion, “everything straightforward and sturdy turns doubtful and inconclusive.” Three scenes, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5—none bound by chronicle matter and conventional styles—show where Shakespeare’s interest really lay and thus hold the seeds of his future development as a playwright. In them, we can glimpse the playwright’s desire “to show a reality elsewhere in the future—a future that is not merely to be suffered passively, but is to be actively created: made drama.” Subjected to the pressures of Shakespeare’s dramatizing imagination, the “ground” of the play’s monumental, heroic past dissolves and “melts into a kind of dream of the waking present. . . . Stability is always in the past, it seems; the present is always the awareness of falling through space.”

  Burckhardt, Sigurd. “ ‘I Am But Shadow of Myself’: Ceremony and Design in Henry 6, Part 1.” Modern Language Quarterly 28 (1967): 139–58. Reprinted in Shakespearean Meanings, pp. 42–77. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

  Burckhardt assumes that the Folio text of 1H6 represents Shakespeare’s deliberate effort to shape his source material into a coherent whole. He addresses the issue of dramatic integrity by examining 2.3, a scene that appears “irretrievably episodic” but that, through its depiction of the “real” Talbot, shows us the “real” play. In keeping with 1H6’s pattern of interrupted ceremonies, the Talbot-Countess encounter is “a ceremony [that of the taunt] . . . startlingly interrupted.” The Countess’s rhetoric, like the general mode of the play, is given to “ ‘high terms’ ceremonially put forward and ceremonially responded to,” to hyperbolic self-assertion, and to a style that is “impatient of indirection.” The surprise is that Talbot rejects “the verbal gauntlet” in favor of “ironic urbanity,” implicit counterplotting, and generous forgiveness, thereby refusing to play his expected “ceremonial” role in the exchange. For a brief moment, Talbot abandons his usual combative self-assertion as “hero” for gracious self-effacement (2.3.62–68) as “servant” in the larger cause of England, his substance lying in the “sinews, arms, and strength” of common, nameless Englishmen and “in the overall design [that begins with the turmoil in the reign of Richard II and ends with the restoration of order under Henry VII] in which they are made to act.” What the Auvergne episode proves is that the real hero of the play is not Talbot but the heroine England. Rather than finding the human analogue to God in an earthly king—the correspondence posited in the traditional Elizabethan world picture—Shakespeare, in writing this scene, discovers a new analogy: God as a dramatist who “planned, designed, plotted, employed stratagems, [who] . . . worked by indirection and implication[,] . . . [and who] . . . wrote histories which, though on the surface they might look like savage spectacles, moved in truth by careful plotting toward an ordered conclusion.” As the vehicle by which drama triumphs over ceremony, self-effacement over self-assertion, and the implicit over the explicit, Talbot becomes “the sovereign plotter” who has mastered the style and plotting of his divine counterpart.

  Harris, Laurie Lanzen, and Mark W. Scott, eds. Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the Criticism of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations, 3:11–164. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.

  This volume presents significant passages from published criticism on the three parts of H6. The set of passages is introduced by a brief discussion of the “date,” “text,” and “sources,” followed by a longer discussion of the “critical history” of the plays. Each entry, beginning with Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) and ending with Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981), is prefaced with a brief historical overview that places the excerpted document in the context of responses to the play. Of the almost sixty entries, early commentary derives from Thomas Nashe (1592), John Crowne (1681), Gerard Langbaine (1691), and such eighteenth-century editors as Nicholas Rowe, Lewis Theobald, Edward Capell, Samuel Johnson, and Edmond Malone; nineteenth-century critics are represented by such figures as William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hermann Ulrici, and Georg Gottfried Gervinus; entries from the twentieth century include excerpts from the writings of Carolyn Spurgeon, E. M. W. Tillyard, Hereward Price, Wolfgang Clemen, Muriel C. Bradbrook, Harold Goddard, David Bevington, Irving Ribner, Robert Ornstein, Michael Manheim, John Cox, and Larry Champion. A briefly annotated bibliography of fifty-five additional items concludes the section. A subsequent volume, edited by Michele Lee (2002), updates the criticism through the 1990s under such headings as “Character Study,” “Henry VI as Comedy,” “Playing with History,” and “Unity and Design” (63:113–218).