Although I discuss both historical tetralogies in this chapter, I dwell primarily on 1 Henry VI and Henry V, the first and last plays in that sequence, which show the Shakespearean history play at its extremes of courting and refusing theater’s alliances with the powerful woman.
Female Power and Its Alternatives in the Henry VI Plays and Richard III
As Leah Marcus has analyzed in detail, Joan La Pucelle’s appearance in 1 Henry VI calls up a wealth of associations between the French woman warrior and the Queen of England.13 Marcus focuses on the way Joan’s martial skills, which violate gender distinctions, establish Joan as the counterpart of Elizabeth, who not only envisioned her public, ruling identity as male, but also was portrayed by England’s own poets as “the Amazonian Queen.”14 This association of Joan with Elizabeth, reinforced by a host of topical references in the play, serves to air (and ultimately, Marcus asserts, to contain) an entire complex of anxieties about the purportedly oxymo-ronic phenomenon of female authority.15 But whereas Marcus locates a queen’s threat in her confusion of gender categories, her usurpation of male authority in a woman’s body, my sense is that it is the prospect of a purely feminine authority, freely wielded, that is truly threatening. We may see this danger in Joan’s first appearance in the play, when it is her perceived overwhelming sexuality as much as her prowess in arms that brings the Dauphin to his knees before her. “Impatiently I burn with thy desire,” he tells her immediately after she has defeated him in combat, “My heart and hands thou hast at once subdu’d” (1.2.108–9)—as if she has ravished him, substituting her desire for his self-command. Here Joan seems the direct heir of all of Spenser’s disturbingly authoritative females who suspend male self-consciousness. Foreign, marginal, and sexually loose, she is able, like Duessa or Acrasia, to entrance nearly every man she approaches, meanwhile enforcing her desires with the military skill of a Britomart or a Radigund.
But the character of Joan requires a reading in the light of not only Elizabethan fears about queenship, but also the theater’s motives for dwelling upon those fears. Marcus offers no real reason for theater’s desire to air such anxieties on stage, other than that they were anxieties culturally available to the English in the late 1580s. But such an explanation does not credit the theater with any agenda apart from, or more refined than, a cathartic one, as if the theater’s aims were exactly coextensive with its audience’s collective cultural psyche, or as if theater never sought to shape that psyche. More specifically, such an explanation of 1 Henry VI does not account for the way in which Joan is compelling for the theater, as well as frightening for the audience—compelling not only as a leader for the misguided French, but as a theatrical presence. And not simply as a “strong character” within the play: rather, Joan is identified within the text as possessing a specifically theatrical power that depends upon her verbal, physical, and dramaturgical presentation of herself, one that unveils itself as unmistakably female.16 Joan’s histrionic skills, I will argue, set a puzzle for the play: is theatrical success necessarily bound up in the triumph of the female? Though 1 Henry VI will work at this “puzzle” (a sobriquet punningly applied to Joan herself by the English) and will propose some provisional solutions, it will also bestow the terms of the problem upon its history-play successors, so that Richard III may be seen as an awful but in many ways convincing answer to the challenging precedent of Joan.17
To begin to investigate the association posed between theater and the powerful woman, let us return to Joan’s first appearance in Act I, scene 2, where she persuades the Dauphin and his companions that she can, indeed, aid their cause. Joan wins them over by means of a display that might be called magic, or trickery—but in either case, an adept, carefully managed performance. She convinces her on-stage French audience of what cannot be: that she can recognize the true Dauphin, even when he has put Reignier forward in his place; that she, an untutored girl, can defeat a trained swordsman. And these are only preludes to her verbal overthrow of the Dauphin, which conclusively proves her a master of rhetoric as well as of staged legerdemain.18 Coupled with the thaumaturgy of her seeming omniscience and omnipotence, Joan’s verbal power grants her the status of simultaneous dramaturge and theatrical spectacle. The progress of this scene in turn links the powerful woman’s theatrical skill to her sexual charms, so that the experience of being her willing audience is one of being ravished. “Look gracious on thy prostrate thrall,” exclaims the Dauphin, giving himself up as Verdant to Joan’s Acrasia: “Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth, / How may I reverent worship thee enough?” (1.2.117, 144–45). Joan’s presentation of herself to the Dauphin, then, defines feminine theatricality as a mode of seduction. Faced with the combination of overwhelming feminine sexuality and entrancing speech, the audience can only surrender, producing a hierarchy of sexual authority entirely contrary to what the Renaissance perceived as normative and natural.
Overtly, this situation is entirely contrary to one of the primary moral objections generally voiced by Elizabethan and Jacobean antitheatricalist writers: that women audience members would be the only ones easily carried away by smooth talk from the stage, which would pave the way for their literal seduction once they had left the theater. As Anthony Munday writes in his Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, “The Theater I found to be an appointed place of Bauderie; mine owne eares have heard honest women allured with abhominable speeches.” When women venture into the theater’s public arena, they open themselves up to all manner of enticement.19 Yet once drama’s “abhominable speeches” have been imagined as alluring, it is difficult to consider only the female members of an audience as ravished by theater. In The Schoole of Abuse, Stephen Gosson objects to theater on the grounds of its sensual invasiveness, with language that proceeds to convert the sensual into the sexual:
There set [poets] abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence: and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust. Therefore of both barrelles, I judge Cookes and Painters the better hearing, for the one extendeth his arte no farther then to the tongue, palate, and nose, the other to the eye; and both are ended in outwarde sense, which is common too us with bruite beasts. But these by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.20
With no gender specified, Gosson clearly means us to imagine all audience members, men and women alike, sexually conquered—ravished through “privie entries” with “gunshotte of affection.”
When we consider that the scene Gosson describes is one of male actors delivering honeyed speeches to a largely male audience, we might label his ire as homophobic in origin. Such anxieties are more explicitly expressed by the Oxford don John Rainolds, who is much concerned with the homoerotic liaison established between a male audience and a playing company of boys dressed in women’s clothes, playing women’s parts. And yet what is uppermost in Rainolds’s argument is that the players, though male, are effectively feminized by their actions and garb; and it is as women that they work their invasive, debilitating seductions: “can wise men be perswaded that there is no wantonnesse in the players partes, when experience sheweth (as wise men have observed) that men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastitie by comming to such playes? that the senses are mooved, affections are delited, heartes though strong and constant are vanquished by such players? that an effeminate stage-player, while hee faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love?”21 Later Rainolds makes the point that it hardly matters who or what takes the woman’s part, since the effect is the same: “For men may be ravished with love of stones, of dead stuffe, framed by cunning gravers to beautifull womens likenes.”22 Regardless of the absence of genuine women on the stage, the stage’s own theatricality depends upon playing out the feminine, appropriating a “feminine” model of seduction to structure its own effect.23
For antitheatricalist writers—as Laura Levine has incisively analyzed the situation—what is ostensibly a fear for female spectators’ chastity thus deconstructs itself into a fear for male spectators’ sexual integrity. Levine describes the theater’s dissolution of masculine gender as a kind of “dark