Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (Vol. 39) | Talbot And English Nationalism
TALBOT AND ENGLISH NATIONALISM
... . Talbot is a figure for the nostalgia that suffuses the play, a dream of simple chivalric virtus like that enacted every year at Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts,55 a dream of true empire. He is designed to appeal to a popular audience, and his death scene where he calls for troops who do not appear is yet another demonstration of the destructiveness of aristocratic factionalism, a confirmation of the feelings aroused by the Messenger's rebuke in the first scene of the play, and a prefiguration of the death of good Duke Humphrey in 2 Henry VI, a man similarly destroyed by emulous politicians. J. C. Trewin describes Seale's effective direction of this sequence in 1953:56 'the old lion and those about him remained stock-still in the background while, down on the forestage, Sir William Lucy urges on first York, and then Somerset, to send Talbot immediate aid'.57 Indeed the sheer energy...
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