SOURCE: Newman, Karen. “Englishing the Other: ‘Le tiers exlu’ and Shakespeare's Henry V.” In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, pp. 95-108. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Newman analyzes the way language is used to represent social and gender differences in Henry V.]

At his departure in search of a northwest passage, the English explorer Martin Frobisher was exhorted by Queen Elizabeth to bring back some of the native peoples he encountered on his voyage. Elizabeth betrayed her characteristic ambivalence toward colonial enterprise: she desired to see the “spectacle of strangeness” but at the same time ordered Frobisher not to compel the Indians against their wills. In his account of the voyage (1577), Frobisher reveals that despite Elizabeth's warning he laid hold of his captive forcibly. Worried about the well-being of his “strange and new prey,” he also took a woman captive for his prisoner's comfort. Here is the account of that meeting:

At their first encountring they beheld each the other very wistly a good space, without speech or word uttered, with great change of colour and countenance, as though it seemed the griefe and disdeine of their captivity had taken away the use of their tongues and utterance: the woman at the first very suddenly, as though she disdeined or regarded not the man, turned away, and began to sing as though she minded another matter: but being againe brought together, the man brake up the silence first, and with sterne and stayed countenance, began to tell a long solemne tale to the woman, whereunto she gave good hearing, and interrupted him nothing, till he had finished, and afterwards, being growen into more familiar acquaintance by speech, they were turned together, so that (I thinke) the one would hardly have lived without the comfort of the other. And for so much as we could perceive, albeit they lived continually together, yet they did never use as man & wife, though the woman spared not to doe all necessary things that appertained to a good housewife indifferently for them both, as in making cleane their Cabin, and every other thing that appertained to his ease: for when he was seasicke, she would make him cleane, she would kill and flea the dogs for their eating, and dresse his meate. Only I thinke it worth the noting the continencie of them both: for the man would never shift himselfe, except he had first caused the woman to depart out of his cabin, and they both were most shamefast, least any of their privie parts should be discovered, either of themselves, or any other body.¹

This remarkable description of the Eskimos' domestic relations is of interest as much for what it reveals about the captors as for its description of the Eskimos themselves. The English found the Eskimos particularly troubling because they were both savage and civilized: they wore sewn leather clothing, unlike their southern counterparts; they “dressed” their meat, that is, prepared and cooked it; their complexions were as white as those of many Englishmen. But they were also savage: they sometimes ate raw flesh washed down, according to contemporary observers, with ox blood; they lived underground in caves or burrows with holes for doors; they were nomads, “a dispersed and wandering nation … without any certaine abode.” Frobisher's account demonstrates the English attitude; he and his men watch their captives as if they were animals in a cage.

But Frobisher not only constructs the alien; he fashions the Eskimos into an English man and wife. She is chaste, silent, and obedient, blushing modestly at first sight of her fellow, listening in silence to him speak, a good housewife in attending to “house” and “husband.” Frobisher marks the man as speaking first, in monologue, “with sterne and stayed countenance,” sublating the woman's initiative in breaking silence with her phatic singing. The man is comically helpless, almost pompous; the woman cares for him in sickness and prepares his food. Both show what for the English sailors seems a surprising sexual continence and modesty: Frobisher is amazed that being “turned together … they did never use as man & wife” and betrays his incredulity with expressions of doubt—the qualifying “I think” and “for so much as we could perceive.” However willing the English are to see the strangeness of Eskimo customs—domiciliary, dietary, sartorial—heterosexual relations are always the same. For the English explorer, gender—and particularly womanhood—is a given of nature rather than a construct of culture; it is transhistorical and transnational, to be encountered by Englishmen in their colonial travels the world over.

In Frobisher's account, ethnography is domesticated: he constructs the Eskimos' relations as an English marriage—domestic, naturalized, immanent. In doing so, he suppresses the Eskimos' strangeness not only for the Elizabethans but for modern readers of Renaissance texts as well, and thereby obscures the contingency of gender and sexuality. In his brilliant analysis of Renaissance culture and its response to the other, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Steven Mullaney casually remarks that Frobisher “brought an Eskimo couple back from his second voyage,” though Frobisher's own account makes the status of the two Eskimos' relation perfectly clear.² Mullaney observes that “difference draws us to it; it promises pleasure and serves as an invitation to firsthand experience, otherwise known as colonization.” But as Mullaney's elision of the Eskimos' relation suggests, the pleasures of sexual difference invite essentialist assumptions about gender and heterosexuality.

The early modern English fascination with the strange and alien has been widely documented. Explorers who returned from their voyages with native peoples often turned their captives to account, as Stephano and Trinculo plan to do with Caliban. Ostensibly brought back to be Christianized and to learn English language and customs so as to return one day to “civilize” their fellows, new world peoples were displayed like freaks and wild animals for viewers willing to pay a few pence for the sight. Ballads, almanacs, pamphlets, travelogues, and plays record not only the English interest in the other but the conflation of various discourses of difference—gender, race, class or degree, the nation state—in representations of difference. In Tamar Cam (1592), for example, there is an entry of “Tartars, Geates, Amozins, Negars, ollive cullord moores, Canniballs, Hermaphrodites, Pigmes,” a series that witnesses how the English set themselves off from their many others—sexual, racial, social. English culture defined itself in opposition to exotic others represented as monstrous but also in opposition to its near neighbors on which it had expansionist aims, the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots. As Mullaney observes, “learning strange tongues or collecting strange things, rehearsing the words and ways of marginal or alien cultures, upholding idleness for a while—these are the activities of a culture in the process of extending its boundaries and reformulating itself.”³

That extension of boundaries is often represented in drama linguistically, and nowhere more than in Shakespeare's Henry V. M. C. Bradbrook, C. L. Barber, Robert Weimann, and Steven Mullaney, Shakespeareans who approach the plays from widely varied perspectives, have all demonstrated how Shakespeare's language and stagecraft preserved or consumed the customs and voices of other cultures. The play is notable for what Bakhtin has called heteroglossia, its various voices or linguistic sociality.⁴ According to Bakhtin, language is stratified not only into dialects in the linguistic sense but also “into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth.”⁵

Unlike the earlier plays in the tetralogy, the social voices of Henry V are not represented only in the taverns but on the battlefield and in the palace. Its wealth of dialects, its proverbs and folk sayings, are in the mouths not only of Bardolph, Pistol, and the Hostess but of respected soldiers of the “middling sort,” and even the elite, as in the contest of proverbs between Orleans and the Constable of France. The linguist M. A. K. Halliday's distinction between dialect (language determined by who you are, your socioregional origins) and what he terms register (language determined by use and expressing the social division of labor) provides a useful schema for analyzing the way in which the play represents both social and gender difference linguistically.⁶

According to Halliday, register is affected by a number of variables including role relationships, social situations, and symbolic and ideological organization. Henry moves among a variety of speakers, situations and modes of speech; he can vary his linguistic register according to context. Whereas the soldiers are limited by their dialects and by sociolects of degree, Henry is represented by a flexible linguistic register: he speaks with the voice of monarchical authority and the elite at one moment, with the voice of a common soldier at another. With his bishops, his nobles, and the French he speaks a highly rhetorical verse that indicates his status as king and is marked by mythological and scriptural allusion, the royal “we,” the synecdochic figuration of the king's two bodies, and references to his genealogy and elite pastimes. With his soldiers on the field he speaks in another register, a prose of mercantile allusion, proverbial and colloquial.

Henry's linguistic flexibility and virtuosity enables him, unlike the other characters of the play, to move among and seemingly to master varied social groups. That seeming mastery is perhaps nowhere more prominent than in those speeches in which the king presents himself as constrained by “ceremony” rather than empowered by “place, degree, and form” and their appropriate rhetorics.⁷ Paradoxically, perhaps, Henry's self-conscious manipulation of linguistic register is in part what undermines the play's glorification of the monarch and has prompted recent ironic readings.⁸

A dialectical speaker is quite different; his language limits his status, role and mobility. Fluellen, MacMorris, and Jamy all demonstrate not simply the variety of Englishmen on the battlefield at Agincourt and their unity under Henry, as has so often been noted, but speech and behavior governed by socioregional variables. An early modern illustration of the kind of linguistic determinism Halliday posits would be the annexation of Wales in 1536 that “permitted only English speakers to hold administrative office.”⁹ The non-elite, then, are presented as linguistically disadvantaged by dialect or, in the case of Princess Katherine, excluded from English altogether by her mother tongue.

The English lesson between the Princess and Alice at III, iv, the only scene in the play that takes place in a private, domestic space, powerfully represents Katherine's linguistic disadvantage. The dialogue locates and confines her not even to the comprehensible if comic dialect of the mother tongue spoken by the captains and soldiers but to a strange disfigured tongue and body. It is preceded by Henry's speech before the walls of Harfleur, often described as a generalized “disquietingly excessive evocation of suffering and violence,” but in fact suffering and violence rhetorically enacted on the aged, the helpless, and especially on women—their bodies, the products of their bodies, and the ideological positions they occupy in the family and the commonwealth.¹⁰ In these notorious lines, the expansionist aims of the nation state are worked out on and through the woman's body. Henry speaks to the men of Harfleur by means of transactions in women: violation and the rape of “fair, fresh virgins” and the slaying of mothers' “flow'ring infants.” The speech ends with a vision of familial destruction:

                                                                                                    look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
[Desire] the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

(III, iii, 33-41)¹¹

In Henry's speech, the power of the English army is figured as aggressive violence against the weak, and particularly as sexual violence against women. In the dialogue between Katherine and Alice that follows, the “English” also conquer the woman's body. The bawdy of the lesson, the Princess's helpless rehearsal of gross terms, as Steven Mullaney calls it, confines woman discursively to the sexual sphere.¹² The “lesson” moves from sexually unmarked, if potentially eroticized, parts—the hand, fingers, nails, neck, elbow, chin—to sexually specific puns that name the sexual act and women's genitals. Katherine is dispersed or fragmented not through a visual description of her body as spectacle, as in the blason and its variants in Renaissance love poetry, but through an o/aural wordplay that dismembers her. Nancy Vickers suggests that this synecdochic mode of representing woman as a fragmented body was disseminated in Petrarch's Rime Sparse.¹³ She outlines a history of such modes of representing woman and her body, from Latin love elegy to the novel and contemporary film. The most powerful theorization of this mode of representation has been articulated in contemporary film theory describing a fetishized female body, scattered, fragmented, and mastered—by a male gaze.¹⁴ In drama, which lacks the mastering perspective of the look (cinematic or authorial), spoken language—and particularly the variable register—becomes the means of mastery, a linguistic command imposed not on, as in cinema or in Petrarch, “the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning” but on woman as speaker. The dialogue at III, iv, literally “Englishes” Katherine and her body, constituting her as a sexual object that, as the final scene demonstrates, will be disposed of in a sexual exchange, another form of communication that binds men to men, England to France.

The sexual exchange at Act V is framed by Burgundy's speech representing France as a rank, wild, and overgrown garden (V, ii, 23-67). Peace, personified as a poor, naked woman has been chased from “our fertile France,” and through a slippage in pronouns, France itself is feminized, a fitting figure for the following courtship scene resulting in the marriage of “England and fair France.” Henry tells Burgundy quite clearly that “you must buy that Peace / With full accord to all our just demands” (V, ii, 70-71). Though most modern editions shift to lower case in Henry's response, thereby expunging the personification of Peace as a woman, the Folio extends the figure. Gender and the “traffic in women,” as Gayle Rubin has dubbed it, have already a figurative presence before the wooing scene proper even begins.¹⁵ Henry, called England in this scene in the Folio, continues, “Yet leave our cousin Katharine here with us: / She is our capital demand” (V, ii, 95-96).

Henry's wooing participates in a long tradition, dating at least from the troubadours, that conflates courtship and pedagogy: it stages an erotic education. Though the king begins by asking Katherine “to teach a soldier terms / Such as will enter at a lady's ear / And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart,” she is his pupil throughout. Henry speaks the same prose to the princess he uses with his captains and regulars, his social inferiors. He talks bawdily of “leapfrog,” of taking “the Turk by the beard,” uses colloquialisms like “jackanapes,” and refers to himself proverbially as the “king of good fellows.” Eleven of his eighteen speeches addressed to her end with questions to which he prompts her responses. He enumerates the tasks “Kate” might put him to for her sake, only to refuse them and substitute his own. His refusal to use the conventional language of love and his self-presentation as a plain king who knows “no way to mince it in love” are strategies of mastery, for they represent Henry as sincere, plain-spoken, a man of feeling rather than empty forms. He renames her “Kate” and finally teaches her to lay aside French manners for English customs—specifically, the kiss. The wooing scene replays the conventional female erotic plot in which a sexual encounter transforms the female protagonist and insures her destiny.¹⁶

In Henry V, Henry systematically denies Katherine's difference—her French maidenhood—and fashions her instead into an English wife. He domesticates her difference, refashioning the other as the same. When Burgundy reenters, he asks, “My royal cousin, teach you your princess English? … Is she not apt?” At the end of this second language lesson, Katherine is not only “englished” but silenced as well by the witty banter at her expense between Henry and Burgundy that excludes her from the dialogue.¹⁷ When Henry asks the French king to “give me your daughter,” he responds:

Take her, fair son; and from her blood raise up
Issue to me; that the contending kingdoms
Of France and England, whose very shores look pale
With envy of each other's happiness,
May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction
Plant neighborhood and Christian-like accord
In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance
His bleeding sword 'twixt England and fair France.

(V, ii, 366-73)

As this passage makes clear, the giving of Katherine to Henry in marriage insures relations among men, or in Lévi-Strauss's often quoted formulation: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, … but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners.”¹⁸ For Lévi-Strauss, the exchange of women and the male bonds it constitutes are the origin of social life. Feminists have pointed out two related consequences of Lévi-Strauss's claims. First, Julia Kristeva has debunked the seeming centrality of woman as desired object: “site of occultation or valorization, woman will be a pseudo-center, a center latent or manifest that is blatantly exposed or modestly hidden … in which man seeks man and finds him.”¹⁹ Luce Irigaray has looked not at the woman in this system of exchange but at the male bonds it insures:

The exchanges that organize patriarchal societies take place exclusively between men, … [and if] women, signs, goods, currency, pass from man to man or risk … slipping into incestuous and endogamous relations that would paralyze all social and economic intercourse, … [then] the very possibility of the socio-cultural order would entail homosexuality. Homosexuality would be the law that regulates the socio-cultural economy.²⁰

For Irigaray, the traffic in women is revealed in its coarsest aspect, deromanticized, mercantile, hyperbolic. She eroticizes the ties between men Lévi-Strauss posits to point out a continuum—which she expresses through her pun “hom(m)osexualité”—that encompasses an entire array of relations among men from the homoerotic to the competitive to the commercial. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has appropriated the term “homosocial” from the social sciences to describe “the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic exchange—within which the various forms of the traffic in women take place.”²¹

In contemporary analyses of systems of exchange, woman's status as object is hypostasized: she is goods, chattel, substance. The category of object, and conversely that of subject—the partners in the exchange (men)—is unquestioned, despite theoretical challenges to a unified subjectivity. Feminist literary readings of exchange systems are too frequently, to parody current literary parlance, always already read. But more disturbing, such readings may reinscribe the very sex/gender system they seek to expose or change. Such a crude confrontation between subject and object betrays a naive realism: the communication between men, what Sedgwick has called homosocial relations, does not always work smoothly but is often “pathological” in ways that disrupt the traffic in women.

In his essay on the Platonic dialogue, Michel Serres explores the “pathology of communication,” in which what he terms noise or the phenomena of interference—stammerings, mispronunciations, regional accents, as well as forms of technical interference such as background noise, jamming, static—become obstacles to communication. He notes that Jakobson and other theoreticians of language have described dialogue as a sort of game in which the two interlocutors are united against phenomena of interference and confusion. In such a conception of dialogue, the interlocutors are in no way opposed, as in the traditional notion of dialectic, but

are on the same side, tied together by a mutual interest: they battle together against noise. … To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety—or a variation—of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the demon, the prosopopoeia of noise.²²

I want to call this third man a woman and to reconsider Serres's model of pathological communication in terms of sexual difference. Noise, in such a revision, the phenomena of interference, is not only dialects and mispronunciations, static and backgound noise but specificities, details, differences. Within a sex-gender system in which woman is the object of exchange, dialogue is homosocial, between men, and woman is the “tiers exclu” or what in a later extended meditation on this problem Serres calls “le parasite.”²³ What makes Serres's model of the “tiers exclu” useful in a discussion of gender and systems of exchange is that it complicates the binary Same/Other that dominates analysis of sex/gender systems and recognizes the power of the excluded third.²⁴ For as Serres insists, “background noise is essential to communication”; the battle against the excluded third “is not always successful. In the aporetic dialogues, victory rests with the powers of noise” (67, 66).

Katherine's speech, with its mispronunciations, consistently deflects Henry's questions and solicitations. In response to his request that she teach “a soldier terms / Such as will enter at a lady's ear / And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart” (V, ii, 99-101), Katherine responds, “I cannot speak your England.” When the king asks “Do you like me, Kate?” she answers “Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell wat is ‘like me.’” When he plays on her response, saying “An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel,” she must ask Alice “Que dit-il? que je suis semblable à les anges?” And at her “Oui, vraiment” and his “I said so, dear Katherine, and I must not blush to affirm it,” she returns, “O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies” (115). Throughout the scene, Henry ends his speeches with questions: “What sayest thou then to my love?” and “Canst thou love me?” and Katherine responds equivocally “Is it possible dat I sould love de enemy of France?” “I cannot tell wat is dat” and “I cannot tell.” Finally in response to his reiterated question “Wilt thou have me?” she responds “Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père.” Assured he is so pleased, she acquiesces only to allow “Den it sall also content me.” Their dialogue represents a pathological communication in which phenomena of interference both thwart the exchange and at the same time enable it. Shakespeare, unlike his analogue, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fift, represents Katherine at a linguistic disadvantage: she speaks not only French but a comically accented English and a similarly comical macaronic version of the two; but that very disadvantage becomes a strategy of equivocation and deflection.

Many readers have noted the troubling ironies generated by Henry's public justifications and private meditations, and by his military threats and disguised sojourn among his common soldiers; but his relations with Katherine, which, after all, produce the play's sense of closure, have received scant attention. Since Dr. Johnson claimed that “the poet's matter failed him in the fifth act,” critics have lamented the “comic” scenes and particularly the play's ending, describing it as an “anti-climax” and Henry's wooing as “ursine.”²⁵ Readers who bother to justify the fifth act do so with the lame defense that the ideal hero must marry and Act V is therefore the completion of Henry's character.²⁶ More often than not in recent “political” readings of the play, the scenes with Katherine are ignored or used to show that Henry V is a falling off from the earlier plays of the tetralogy. Mullaney, for example, suggests that the comic scenes exemplify Marx's “notorious” proposal “that the major events of history occur twice, once as tragedy, and again as farce”²⁷ and reiterates the well-worn claim that the language lesson was “borrowed” from French farce (though it certainly owes more to the popular and cheap French phrase books fashionable in socially mobile late sixteenth-century London).²⁸ Political readings tend to ignore the scenes altogether, thereby falling prey to the conventional assumptions of an outmoded political history that excludes social relations and gender from the domain of politics.²⁹

Banishing the women's dialogue to the margins of critical discourse on Henry V, whether as a footnote to literary borrowing, a coda to the discussion of Falstaff and popular culture, or an absence in the “socio-political perspective of materialist criticism” is to erase gender as an historical category.³⁰ Gender is also the missing term in Bakhtin's enumeration of heteroglot voices.³¹ Commentators have claimed that what Bakhtin terms “carnivalization” collapses hierarchic distinctions. Role reversals and the evocation of the body/bawdy are said to turn the world upside down, collapse distinctions between high culture and low, king and soldier, domination and submission. But the world turned upside down, the exchange of positions, absolute reversal, “the phase of overturning,” is not enough. Reversal preserves the binary oppositions that ground sexual and social hierarchies: “the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself.”³² The disfiguring power of wordplay in the women's language lesson enables gender hierarchies, mastering the female body by dismembering it; but at the same time that very instability of linguistic meaning, the interference of noise, the o/aural dispersal of the female body, threatens linguistic mastery and successful communication not by means of reversal but through dissemination—of the body and of words.

Notes

1. R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1600), ed. Walter Raleigh (Glasgow, 1903-5), VII, 306-7.

2. Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Representations 3 (1983): 40-67. We know from other records that these two “Eskimos” eventually did “use as man & wife” because a child was born to the couple in England.

3. See Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 82.

4. In Bakhtin's formulation, heteroglossia is only possible in the novel and certain other genres from which it developed because of the dialogic organization of novelistic discourse, the presence of an authorial or narrative voice in dialogic relation to the many-voicedness of characters and genres. In drama, Bakhtin complains, “there is no all-encompassing language that addresses itself dialogically to separate languages, there is no second plotless (nondramatic) dialogue outside that of the (dramatic) plot.” Though the dramatic immediacy of theatrical representation obscures the fact that the audience watches a constructed world, theatrical representation on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, so different from the naturalistic “fourth wall” bourgeois theatre that Bakhtin seems to have in mind, provides a formal equivalent to an authorial voice, to a narrator, and particularly in Henry V with its choral preludes that remind the audience of the conventions of theatre. The conventions of the Elizabethan theatre, including acting styles, transvestism, prominent use of rhetoric and of micro-generic intrusions—from the novella to letter writing—establish a dialogic relation with the characters' voices and prevent what Bakhtin calls the domination of “unitary language.” M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 266.

5. Bakhtin, 272.

6. M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 35.

7. J. H. Walter, ed., Henry V (London: Methuen, 1954, rpt. 1984), IV, i, 250-55. All references are to this edition, which relies primarily on the Folio text.

8. See, for example, Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 33-62. But as Stephen Greenblatt observes, “the very doubts that Shakespeare raises serve not to rob the king of his charisma but to heighten it, precisely as they heighten the theatrical interest of the play. … prodded by constant reminders of a gap between real and ideal, facts and values, the spectators are induced to make up the difference, to invest in the illusion of magnificence, to be dazzled by their own imaginary identification with the conqueror”; “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversions, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen, 1985), 43. Greenblatt assumes too easily this imaginary “identification with the conqueror,” thereby ruling out contestatory voices and producing a monolithic audience, marked here by the definite article—ungendered, unclassed. The female spectator is faced either with a kind of specular masquerade in which she dons a masculine subject position and identifies with the conqueror, or alternatively, masochistic identification with the doubly subject Katherine, woman and synechdochic representative of a conquered France.

9. Cited in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 224.

10. Dollimore and Sinfield, “History and Ideology,” 226.

11. Rowe emended the Folio's “desire” to “defile,” which Walter accepts in the Arden edition. Though “defile” is, of course, consistent with “dash'd” and “spitted,” the Folio's “desire” stresses the sexual violence against women I am emphasizing here.

12. Mullaney, “Strange Things,” 87.

13. Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-80.

14. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; Paul Willemen, “Voyeurism, the Look and Dwoskin,” Afterimage 6 (1976), esp. 44-45.

15. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

16. On female destinies and the erotic plot, see Nancy Miller, The Heroine's Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

17. Kathleen McLuskie observes of Shakespeare's plays generally that “sex and sexual relations” are “sources of comedy” and “narrative resolution” rather than part of the conflict or the serious business of war and politics. See “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 92.

18. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, tr. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 115. For a fuller discusion of exchange and feminist theory, see my “Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects and the Politics of Exchange,” differences 2 (1990): 41-54.

19. Julia Kristeva, Texte du roman (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 160.

20. Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, 189, my translation. …

21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne and Male Homosocial Desire,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984), 227. See also her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

22. Michel Serres, “Platonic Dialogue,” Hermes, Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 67.

23. Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980).

24. Serres's notion of dialogue and the tiers exclu in particular helps to make sense of that final moment in The Elementary Structures of Kinship when Lévi-Strauss admits women “could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person, and since in so far as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs … in contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value,” 496.

25. Walter, xxviii; Herschel Baker, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 931.

26. Walter, xxviii.

27. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, 87.

28. The “source” of this attribution of influence is M. L. Radoff, “The Influence of French Farce in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor,” MLN 48 (1933): 427-35. The cornerstone of his argument is the pun on “con,” which turns up in contemporary French farces and “would seem a highly improbable … mere coincidence,” 435. He neither cites the farces nor gives evidence they were available in England. More importantly, puns on “con” are ubiquitous. James Bellot's French phrase book, published during the Huguenot immigrations to England, offers several clear correspondences with the phonetic renderings of Katherine's accented English, “dat” for “that,” “de” for “the,” “den” for “then,” “wat” for “what,” and “fout” for “foot.” Familiar Dialogues (London, 1586), unique copy at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

29. An exception is Walter Cohen, in Drama of a Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), who is interested in precisely the problem of the incompleteness of the generic kinds, “romantic comedy” and “national historic drama.” He notes that “the basic fallacy of the history play is to assume that politics is everything and consequently to minimize the impact on national affairs of social relations between the aristocracy and other classes,” 220.

30. Dollimore and Sinfield, “History and Ideology,” 214.

31. For Bakhtin's formulation of carnival, see Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); see also Critical Inquiry 10 (1983), a forum on Bakhtin. See also Wayne Booth's discussion of Bakhtin's work on Rabelais, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 45-76.

32. Jacques Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 41-42.