Opening just after the demise of the powerful king, Henry V, 1 Henry VI begins with a vision of a world similar to that of the antitheatricalists’ theater: one with no men left in it. Gloucester makes of the late Henry V a demigod, a dazzling, frightening icon whose mere gaze was enough to repel his foes:
England ne’er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings:
His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
(1.1.8–14)
One wonders, upon reading these lines, what kind of play would ensue if the unrelievedly fearsome king they describe were its dominant character—perhaps another Tamburlaine, with its juggernaut of a conqueror, Taluslike, mowing down all that lies in his path.28 In the end, a Henry V like the one Gloucester remembers blocks even the speech that could record his greatness: “What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech: / He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered” (1.1.15–16). We are reminded of the cautionary dictum of Aristotle regarding what might comfortably be contained in epic, but not in the theater: unlike in an epic poem, in a play “sameness of incident soon produces satiety, and makes tragedies fail on the stage.”29
Although the play opens with longing for this mode of male authority, however, it also begins with no sense or hope that such an ideal king will ever return. Henry V’s absence leaves 1 Henry VI to match its aching nostalgia for the departed king with a foreboding sense of an approaching dismantling of order in the state—a dismantling that is almost immediately associated with what is feminine in the state: an “effeminate prince” (1.1.35); a proud Duchess of Gloucester who holds her husband in awe (1.1.39). Finally Bedford foretells a post-Henrician England inhabited by only women, in a nightmarish fantasy of nursing-turned-mourning:
now that Henry’s dead,
Posterity, await for wretched years,
When at their mothers’ moist eyes babes shall suck,
Our isle be made a nourish of salt tears,
And none but women left to wail the dead.
(1.1.47–51)
The principle of female disorder in the play comes to be embodied, of course, in Joan. But her dramatic self-possession then implies an equivalence between female disorder and theatrical activity, both of which are enabled by the demise of the epic ruler. This equivalence comes to be borne out by the contrast and conflict in this play between Joan’s schemes and conquests, which are nearly always acted out on stage, and Talbot’s heroic deeds, which are nearly always reported. Talbot, the only honorable English warrior left in France, exercises the remaining fragment of Henry V-style heroism, as Gloucester’s opening speech has portrayed it. But like Henry V, who in his ascent to iconic status has left only inadequate reportage to convey his memory, Talbot’s actions achieve greatness primarily in the telling. Throughout the play, Talbot’s authority continues to consist more in what is claimed for him, and by him, than in what he has actually done in our sight and hearing. Even when he does perform feats of arms on stage, like rescuing Ypung Talbot from his French assailants, the deed requires that Talbot retell what has presumably just transpired before us: “Then leaden age, / Quicken’d with youthful spleen and warlike rage, / … from the pride of Gallia rescu’d thee” (4.6.12–13,15). In fact, the portrait of Talbot’s heroism can best be painted after he is dead, when in Lucy’s speech he comes to equal Henry V in awesome power. Lucy claims for Talbot’s absence, not his presence, a truly ravishing power in which Talbot’s representation alone would bereave his onlookers of sense: “Were but his picture left amongst you here, / It would amaze the proudest of you all” (4.7.83–84). The fact that Talbot’s reputation as a man of valor is based on things recalled, not witnessed, associates him with the world of epic. Epic is, after all, always retrospective in nature, beginning in medias res and proceeding as a memorial reconstruction of events past; moreover, it also allows room for presenting heroic acts whose magnitude could never be reproduced on stage, or anywhere else but in memory.30 Act I’S sequential reporting of Talbot’s heroism (scene 1) and staging of Joan’s seductiveness (scene 2) therefore establish what amounts to a contest of literary modes, epic versus dramatic, as well as a contest between masculine and feminine.
Nowhere is the initial contrast between Talbot’s epic authority and Joan’s dramatic authority more apparent than in their martial encounter in Act 1, scene 5. Here Talbot himself is ravished by Joan, driven out of his normal senses. And significantly, he attributes this influence not to her force of arms (though she has just equalled him in hand-to-hand combat) but to a kind of stage-trick, as if Joan fights using mirrors:
My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel;
I know not where I am, nor what I do:
A witch by fear, not force, like Hannibal,
Drives back our troops and conquers as she lists:
So bees with smoke, and doves with noisome stench,
Are from their hives and houses driven away.
(1.5.19–24)
Here, as in Joan’s opening scene with the Dauphin, we find staged in small what the antitheatricalists claimed for the entire practice of theater: the conjuress steals the man’s senses, leaving him not knowing where he is, or what he does. Joan’s deeds are typically wrapped in charges of deceit—a common accusation against poetry as a whole, which feigns what is not true, but also against theater in particular, which embodies and clothes those feignings. Even Joan’s compatriots accuse her of cunning and falsehood after the English take Orleans, a charge that seems hardly fair, considering she is the one hurriedly composing ways to recoup their loss (2.1.50–77). And yet it is true that even Joan’s legitimate military stratagems have the air of Odyssean trickery. Her plan to recover Rouen, for example—by passing off herself and a few other French soldiers as grain-toting peasants—depends on her directing their disguise and accent. By referring to “Pucelle and her practisants” with what is evidently a Shakespearean neologism (3.2.20, my emphasis), the Bastard of Orleans directly labels Joan as either stage manager or play-actor, for the word “practise” in the Renaissance had as one of its meanings “to perform, act (a play)” (OED v. 1b).
Joan’s finest dramatic hour is her persuasion of the Duke of Burgundy to the French cause, which is staged like an antitheatricalist writer’s worst fantasy of being ravished by a seductive female theater. First Joan lays out her plan as depending on verbal