Hodgdon, Barbara. “Enclosing Contention: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI.” In The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History, pp. 44–99. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

  Combining performance criticism (mostly of RSC productions) with study of the play-texts, Hodgdon explores “closural strategies” in the three parts of H6. In the commentary specifically devoted to 1H6 (pp. 54–59), she draws heavily on Leah Marcus’s discussion of the provocative nexus (i.e., the composite sexual identity of the manly woman) linking Joan la Pucelle and Queen Elizabeth I to demonstrate how, contrary to critical tradition dating back to Thomas Nashe, 1H6 is “less the ‘Talbot play’ . . . than a ‘Joan versus Talbot play,’ ” an opposition central to the text’s narrative dynamic, to its displacement of early modern anxieties concerning female dominance, and to its “troubling, less than triumphant, and formally problematic close.” On the level of history, the war pits one nation against another in an international conflict. But because Joan functions “as a spectacular . . . site of gender display,” and thus condenses contemporary skepticism concerning the queen’s “claims to anomalous gender identity,” at the level of dramatic representation the international war becomes “a battle for the ownership of masculine gender.” The play’s most “authoritatively conclusive scene”—Winchester’s mandating the terms of the peace treaty whereby the French promise allegiance to the English crown (5.4)—seems to underscore male dominance. But three features demonstrate its “contaminat[ion] by gender”: (1) the deflection of attention away from the ritual of the negotiations to the imagined offstage burning of Joan, (2) York’s phrase “effeminate peace” (5.4.108), and (3) Lucy’s earlier prophecy (4.7.95–96) of a phoenix rising from the ashes to threaten France (a mystically regenerative image associated with Elizabeth). The final scene may suggest a “fugitive” gloss in the reference to Henry’s future queen (5.5.70–71), who recalls the unruly Joan and, for some audience members, the “misrule” of Elizabeth herself. That gloss is ultimately suspended, however, as the play ends with a decidedly male fantasy and a reassertion of male dominance in Suffolk’s prediction of his future rule over the new Queen Margaret, the king, and the realm itself (5.5.107–8). Later in the chapter, Hodgdon discusses the play’s stage life, especially its closing scenes, as performed in John Barton and Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses (RSC, 1963), Terry Hands’s “(relatively) uncut and unadapted” revival of the complete H6 trilogy (RSC, 1977), Michael Bogdonov’s The Wars of the Roses (English Shakespeare Company, 1988), and Adrian Noble’s The Plantagenets (RSC, 1988).

  Howard, Jean. “Stage Masculinities, National History, and the Making of London Theatrical Culture.” In Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin, pp. 199–214. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2006.

  Howard relates the performance of early modern gender roles to the role of theater in early modern culture to argue that in writing the first tetralogy, Shakespeare not only was exploring “the dynamics of civil war and the chaos occasioned by a weak king” but was also “experimenting with stagecraft, with the business of making good plays.” Howard’s particular focus concerns strategies the dramatist devised for delineating different “styles of stageable masculinity” as he wrote for a particular acting company composed only of male actors, whose physical attributes would be well known to him; at a time when the theatrical practice of doubling was a necessity; and in a genre—the history play—wherein male characters “wildly outnumber” women characters. One of the chief tasks the dramatist faced in differentiating one man from another was how to “create interesting fits” between the male role and the male actor called on to impersonate the character. In 1H6, the king’s “feckless masculinity” contrasts with the “chivalric masculinity” of Talbot and with the “masculinity of modernity” projected by the self-serving courtier Suffolk.

  Howard, Jean, and Phyllis Rackin. “Henry VI, Part 1.” In Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, pp. 43–64. London: Routledge, 1997.

  The chapter appears as part of a section dealing with “weak kings, warrior women, and the assault on dynastic authority.” The women in the histories play many roles but never that of protagonist, probably because in the aristocratic world of this genre “patriarchal domination is assumed and female characters marginalized.” Even when women enter the battlefield—“the privileged scene of heroic history”—as Joan and Margaret do in the H6 plays and Eleanor does in John, their usurpation of masculine prerogatives “always [runs] the risk of stigmatization.” This is especially true of Joan, the most powerful of the three female warriors, who is also depicted as “the most demonic.” Howard and Rackin relate the “alien” nature of women in the English histories to residual and emergent versions of national identity. The older model—feudal and dynastic—is privileged in 1H6, where “hereditary entitlement authorizes English claims to France, while the newer discourse of the nation [as defined geographically rather than dynastically] is associated with French resistance and a form of subversion that is gendered feminine.” When Joan, for example, persuades Burgundy to join her troops, she appeals to his loyalty to the French land (3.3.44–57); the English nobles, however, are appalled by his disloyalty to his nephew, the English king (4.1.50–54, 62–66). The authors also connect the marginalized status of women in English historiography to English antitheatrical invective, which condemned the “disreputable feminized world of the playhouse,” where boys wore female costumes and women were a “contaminating presence” in the audience. In 1H6, the leader of the French forces is not only female but also “insistently theatrical” as both an energetic, memorable stage presence and the embodiment of vices that polemicists associated with the theater. Idealized in heroic terms, the past in 1H6 becomes “the repository of English honor, and its loss is defined as a process of effeminization. . . . The entire play can be seen as a series of attempts on the part of the English to preserve [Henry V’s] fame, along with the fame of English martial heroes, and with them the manhood of the English nation.”

  Jackson, Gabriele Bernard. “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc.” ELR 18 (1988): 40–65. Reprinted in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, edited by Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps, pp. 142–67. London: Verso, 1995.

  In this influential topical analysis of 1H6, Jackson neither condemns Shakespeare’s misogyny nor defends him against that charge but rather argues that “the play’s presentation of Joan la Pucelle, like its dominant ideology, is not clear-cut.” The initial portrait as suggested by allusions connecting her to biblical, classical, and mythological figures (e.g., Deborah [1.2.107], Astraea’s daughter [1.6.4], and Amazons [1.2.106]) is positive. But because her victory over the English must inevitably be seen in a negative light, the representation worsens in Act 5, where she becomes associated with witchcraft and sexual promiscuity. In the late sixteenth century, fascination with the virago type coexisted with the need to neutralize her power by feminizing her, something seen in Joan’s terrified attempts to thwart death and in her claims of pregnancy. The contradictory presentation of Joan in 1H6—“one man’s Sibyl is another man’s Hecate”—draws on several topically relevant and interrelated roles: the Amazon, the warrior woman, the cross-dressing woman, and the witch. Such contextual variety permits her “to perform in one play inconsistent ideological functions that go much beyond discrediting the French cause or setting off by contrast the glories of English chivalry in its dying moments.” Like Leah Marcus, Jackson calls attention to similarities between Joan and Queen Elizabeth I, which can be read in a variety of ways that make it unclear whether topical criticism is intended. As another example of topical linkage fraught with ambiguity, Jackson cites Talbot and the Earl of Essex, who in 1591–92 had embarked on a controversial French campaign to besiege Rouen. “The coexistence of ideologically opposed elements is typical of the play’s dramatic nature, and foreshadows the mature Shakespeare.”

  Leggatt, Alexander. “The Death of John Talbot.” In Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, edited by John W. Velz, pp. 11–30. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996.

  The scene depicting the death of Lord Talbot (4.7) reveals a critical moment in Shakespeare’s artistic development that “reverberates” not only through Part 2 and 3 of the H6 trilogy but also through the dramatist’s later tragedies. What is often overlooked, and what is most significant about the scene, is that “it involves the death of not one hero but two,” Talbot and his son John. Like young Cato in JC and young Siward in Mac., John Talbot is the son of a famous father and seemingly “born only to die”; but unlike those sons, John mirrors his father in being “held up for contemplation.” The result of fusing the individual tragedies of two heroes—Shakespeare seems determined to show death as a rite of passage suffered both alone and together—is a sequence that reveals a conception of tragedy as deriving from “the most intimate relations, the most normal passages of life: the need for love, the demands of loyalty and piety, the turmoil of sexual awakening, the need to prove oneself at any cost.” As Shakespeare’s “first exploration of that kind of tragedy,” the Talbot death scene prefigures such later images as the dead Romeo and Juliet lying together and the hanged Cordelia cradled by Lear.

  Levine, Nina S. “The Politics of Chivalry in 1 Henry VI.” In Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, pp. 26–46. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998.

  While Shakespeare’s early histories (1, 2, and 3H6; R3; and John) rewrite the Tudor chronicle record so as to acknowledge the importance of women in ensuring patrilineal succession, Levine contends that they also “generate a critique of patrilineal inheritance and legitimacy” that speaks to the Elizabethan present in which the plays are “situated.” The author is especially interested in how the H6 trilogy uses political contexts—“both on- and offstage”—to frame and qualify negative stereotypes of women. The chapter on 1H6 examines the confrontations between Joan la Pucelle and England’s heroic warriors “in relation to both Hall’s chronicle and to the chivalric fictions of the Elizabethan court . . . to argue that the play points out the limitations of a national identity grounded in gendered oppositions.” Levine uses the Accession Day tilting ceremonies, in particular, to better understand Shakespeare’s representation of the nation-state in the play. Like these yearly rituals, which allowed the queen and nobility to come together to negotiate long-standing conflicts of power and privilege, 1H6 “rewrites medieval myths of chivalry for the Elizabethan present.” But instead of refurbishing the past in an attempt to accommodate chivalric fictions, the play presents a story of loss and division that underscores the very tensions the court sought to control. Levine notes how at the time Shakespeare was writing the H6 plays, decorous chivalry at the annual tilts was giving way to more militaristic, aggressive displays of masculine courtier power. “Qualifying the authority of both aristocratic males and the ruling female, [1H6] endorses no alternative to the double bind of contemporary gender politics. . . . In the absence of a positive, and clearly defined, model of authority, we must locate the play’s politics in its double critique of ruling women and self-interested aristocratic warriors.”

  Marcus, Leah. “Elizabeth.” In Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, pp. 51–105. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

  In this frequently cited “local” (i.e., topical) reading of Shakespeare through the “lens of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century events, gossip, [and] personalities,” Marcus provides chapter-length studies of 1H6, Cym., and MM. The chapter on 1H6, titled “Elizabeth,” deals with the play under the subheadings “The Queen’s Two Bodies,” “Astraea’s Daughter,” “Ritual Burning,” and “Speculations and Ramifications: Relocating ‘monstrous regiment.’ ” Marcus contends that the play’s many parallels between the character Joan la Pucelle and the historical Queen Elizabeth I are presented so insistently as to argue a “deliberate strategy”; the result is a subversive meaning that counters the traditionally privileged patriarchal patriotism associated with Talbot. The most important parallel—the “composite identity” of a woman who “acts like a man” and who, consequently, “arouses male anxieties about female dominance”—is evidenced in Joan’s male attire and martial bearing and in Elizabeth’s use of armor and manly rhetoric in her famous Armada speech before the troops at Tilbury in 1588. Throughout her reign, the queen appropriated the term “prince” to construct a manly identity in her vocabulary and sanctioned portraits: like all kings she had two bodies, but in her case the public one was male, the private female. The airing and displacing of “suppressed cultural anxieties about the Virgin Queen” onto the character of the enemy Joan transforms a post-Armada play into a potentially subversive triumph of English warriors over the ultimate “unruly woman.” In 1H6, “[i]t is as though despising female dominance is a necessary part of being male, English, and ‘Protestant.’ ” But, as Marcus emphasizes, since the parallels are “half-formed . . . [and] equivocal,” Shakespeare’s intention is ultimately “unreadable because it can be read in too many different ways,” a point she illustrates by examining the idol/witch burning ordered by the queen herself while visiting the home of a Catholic aristocrat in Norwich—an event that resembles the ritual burning of Joan in 1H6. In light of such events, the “potential for subversion is at least partially defused.”

  Pendleton, Thomas A., ed. Henry VI: Critical Essays. Shakespeare Criticism Series. New York: Routledge, 2001.

  The volume’s fourteen original essays include two that focus solely on 1H6: James J. Paxson’s “Shakespeare’s Medieval Devils and Joan la Pucelle in 1 HVI: Semiotics, Iconography, and Feminist Criticism” (pp. 127–55), and J. J. M. Tobin’s “A Touch of Greene, Much Nashe, and All Shakespeare” (pp. 39–56). Several essays deal in part with the play: Harry Keyishian’s “The Progress of Revenge in the First Henriad” (pp. 67–77), Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea’s “Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled?” (pp. 79–96), Nina da Vinci Nichols’s “The Paper Trail to the Throne” (pp. 97–112), Frances K. Barasch’s “Folk Magic in HVI, Parts 1 and 2: Two Scenes of Embedding” (pp. 113–25), Yoshio Arai’s essay on the H6 trilogy in Japan (pp. 57–66), and Irene Dash’s “Henry VI and the Art of Illustration” (pp. 253–71). The volume also contains several essays on performance: Thomas A. Pendleton’s “Talking with York: A Conversation with Steven Skybell” (Duke of York in Karin Coonrod’s production) (pp. 219–34), H. R. Coursen’s “Theme and Design in Recent Productions of Henry VI” (with the emphasis on Michael Kahn’s and Karin Coonrod’s revivals in 1996) (pp. 205–18), and Patricia Lennox’s “Henry VI: A Television History in Four Parts” (Peter Dews’s An Age of Kings in 1960, Peter Hall and John Barton’s Wars of the Roses in 1965, Jane Howell’s BBC revival in 1983, and Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington’s Wars of the Roses in 1988) (pp. 235–52). Pendleton’s introduction provides an overview of the scholarship, especially as it relates to issues of text, authorship, date, sequence, relationship of the plays as parts of a tetralogy, and critical assessment. Much attention is paid to the providentialist views of Tillyard (Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1944), who has served “both as stimulant and irritant” and thus “has had an enormous effect” on the criticism of the H6 trilogy. The past fifty years have seen scholarly interest move beyond questions of text and authorship; as a result, the three parts of H6 are now discussed and appreciated more than at any time since they were first performed.

  Rackin, Phyllis. “Patriarchal History and Female Subversion.” In Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, pp. 146–200. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. (The chapter incorporates portions of “Anti-Historians: Women’s Roles in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Theatre Journal 37 [1985]: 329–44.)

  Rackin describes Renaissance historiography as a male enterprise, written by men to glorify masculine heroism; the goal was to preserve the names of past heroes and record their patriarchal genealogies. Within such a record, “women had no voice.” In Shakespeare’s histories, women “can threaten or validate the men’s historical projects, but they can never take the center of history’s stage or become the subjects of its stories.” However, Shakespeare does give them a voice to “challenge . . . the logocentric, masculine historical record.” Rackin begins her examination of women as “anti-historians” in the patriarchal world of the histories by looking closely at 1H6 (discussed on pp. 148–57, 197–200), where the “pattern of masculine history-writing and feminine subversion can be seen in its simplest terms.” By emphasizing the antagonism between Talbot, the English champion, and Joan, his French female adversary, Shakespeare defines the conflict between England and France in terms of masculine and feminine values: “chivalric virtue versus pragmatic craft, historical fame versus physical reality, patriarchal age versus subversive youth, high social rank versus low, self versus other.” The scenes involving Talbot and his son (4.5, 6, and 7) and Joan’s final exit (5.4), along with Lucy’s litany of Talbot’s many titles (4.7.61–73) and Joan’s debunking of them (4.7.74–78), illustrate Rackin’s (male) historian versus (female) anti-historian thesis. Two other women in the play—the Countess of Auvergne and Margaret of Anjou—also threaten the values of English patriarchal history. Like Joan, the Countess is a nominalist, who, in her desire to confront Talbot, values physical evidence over historical report. The link between Joan and Margaret has to do with sexual transgression: Joan’s promiscuity and Margaret’s future adultery, which is foreshadowed in Act 5. Although her adulterous relationship with Suffolk has no real impact on the action of the H6 plays, it does underscore the fact that legitimacy of the bloodline, so essential to patriarchal authority, depended on the woman’s word concerning paternity: an adulterous woman makes a mockery of patriarchal succession and thus threatens the masculine historical project. Shakespeare will develop this type of female subversion more fully in John. In 1H6, “the subversive female voice . . . prevail[s] for only a moment,” ultimately being contained by the values and impulses of patriarchal ideology.