SOURCE: “Elizabethan Civic Pageantry in Henry VI,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 244-64.

[In the essay below, Martin surveys Shakespeare's use of the emblems of Elizabethan civic pageantry to create his “reinterpretive presentation of history” in Henry VI.]

At the point in Henry VI Part One where the private quarrel between Somerset and York is about to turn into open conflict marking the start of the Wars of the Roses, their respective supporters Vernon and Basset ask the king to arbitrate between wearing either red or white roses as badges of dynastic superiority. Henry spurns their dispute as frivolous, however, and demonstrates his point by casually plucking the closest rose to hand:

I see no reason if I wear this rose, [Putting on a red rose.]
That any one should therefore be suspicious
I more incline to Somerset than York:
Both are my kinsmen, and I love them both …
But your discretions better can persuade
Than I am able to instruct or teach. …

(1 Henry VI, IV.i.152-9)¹

He calls upon the rival factions instead to unite against the French and then departs with his counsellors, leaving Warwick to soothe York by explaining that Henry was trying to be conciliatory and really intended no show of partiality by his choice. York cuts short an angry outburst and exits with everybody except Exeter, who remains on stage to interpret as any ‘simple man’ would the dangers implied by Henry's performance and York's reaction:

’Tis much when sceptres are in children's hands;
But more when envy breeds unkind division:
There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.

(192-4)

The interplay among characters at this crucial moment in Shakespeare's historical trilogy—Vernon and Basset presenting rival political claims under apparently trivial guises, Henry replying unwittingly in a symbolic act, Warwick and York watching and judging both performances, and Exeter commenting on all—recalls the typical dramatic relationship among stage-performers, actor-watchers, and general spectators of Elizabethan civic pageantry. Shakespeare's audience, familiar with the conventions of contemporary figures performing in city pageants as part of their general political consciousness, would have recognized Henry's mistake in abdicating the leading role that Vernon, Basset, and the others expect of him. His ignorance of the power of political gesture and naïve attitude towards audience interpretation stand in contrast to Elizabeth's calculated and well-publicized reactions to civic pageants. As an actor-watcher progressing through the city, she would encounter various shows and respond to them in ways that left no doubt among spectators about either the single-mindedness of her policies or her willingness to assert them. During the 1559 coronation procession, for example, Elizabeth encountered five scaffold-stations on her way to Westminster. At the third of these, after watching a pageant depicting two commonwealths, one flourishing, another decayed, Elizabeth was presented with an English Bible by a figure representing Truth. Reception of it was clearly intended to signal her attitude towards reformed religion and thus indicate which commonwealth her policies would promote: ‘as soone as she had receiued the booke, [she] kyssed it, and with both her handes held vp the same, and so laid it vpon her brest, with great thankes to the cities therefor.’² Here, as at all other stations, Elizabeth signified her agreement with the pageant's message by her conspicuous gestures and extemporaneous responses, as noted with approval by the recorder of the day's events and, apparently, the street audience.

This is one of several places where Shakespeare draws on civic pageantry's characteristic style of scenic choreography, and in this paper I wish to study his use of it in the three parts of Henry VI. At some points Shakespeare's borrowings represent straightforward approaches to staging historically recurrent public rituals. As such these scenes gratify an audience's familiar association of certain symbolic roles and gestures with conventional political and social meanings. But at other times Shakespeare dislocates this association by using pageant forms to enact historical events which are neither predetermined nor predictable. The resulting clash between apparently assured form and spontaneous action challenges the idea of inherent meaning in the forms themselves, and perhaps an audience's received understanding of the event as well. Moreover, Shakespeare found in pageantry's representational language, officially designed to impose a single authoritative meaning on a political or social subject, an underlying capacity for multiple signification and generative conflict which he exploited when dramatizing Tudor chronicle history to lay open its single-perspective thematic and ideological presentation to plural interpretation.³ And from a wider perspective pageant modes contribute significantly to the entire mosaic of verbal styles and theatrical genres Shakespeare manipulates in Henry VI to create the ‘multi-voiced dramatic spectrum’ characteristic of his whole artistic practice.⁴ Although Part One may have been written later than Parts Two and Three, it seems to contain the clearest examples of Shakespeare (or him and others) drawing directly on pageant devices and imitating their emblematic manner of representation.⁵ This is not to say, however, that Henry VI's theatrical sequence parallels pageantry's historical development from static tableaux with set speeches to quasi-dramatic exchanges of dialogue and action.⁶ In fact Shakespeare uses both rigid and freer pageant forms in all three plays. Nonetheless, Parts Two and Three take these forms further away from models of thematically linked episodes and typological characterization towards a complex dramatic narrative constituting a reinterpretive presentation of history.

It is not my intention to be exhaustive; rather I shall concentrate on the relationship between Henry VI and two aspects of Elizabethan pageantry: the dynamic generated by a scene's performance, actor-watcher and larger audience, either in stationary or processional form; and the pageant triumph.

It is not surprising that many of the basic stage structures—castles, forts, mountains, ships—used (and reused) to mount royal-entry or mayors' pageants in London and the provinces suggest stability and even impregnability. For in terms of how pageants use visual and aural languages to address their audiences, they can be seen as a series of interlocking and defensive layers of signification. Elizabethan shows were mechanically ingenious and profusely ornate, yet their intended messages were rarely ambiguous.⁷ Whether concerned with lauding the Queen or an incoming lord mayor for promoting peace, order, or unity, or instructing them on appropriate policies to maintain these, praise, advice and/or warnings were presented through explicit historical, mythological, and allegorical representation. Allegory in particular demanded explicitness because of its potential for generating variant interpretations among independent watchers and listeners, and in reading the comparatively few written accounts of Elizabethan pageants one senses in these shows a virtual obsession with clarity. To try to restrict diversity of public response, pageants treated signification quantifiably, equating authority of expression with duplication of representation. Tableaux were framed with copious verbal and written explanations to repeat the signification of visual display and thus fix as far as possible a single political or social lesson. On the coronation procession's ‘seate of worthie gouernance’ pageant, for example, each personage depicting a vice or virtue had

not onlie their names in plaine and perfit writing set vpon their breastes easelie to be read of all, but also euery [sic] of them was aptelie and properlie apparelled, so that his apparell and name did agree to express the same person, that in title he represented. Euery voide place was furnished with proper sentences commending the seate supported by vertues, and defacing the vices. (The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Biii^v-Biiii^r)

Some of these ‘annotations’ were recited by participating figures, others left to convey their messages silently. Besides these aural and inscribed languages of the show itself, a presenter in the stage's forefront introduced the pageant as Elizabeth approached, interspersed verbal commentary, summed up its moral message, and underlined its thematic contribution to the day's events as a whole.⁸

This consciously didactic design, intended to focus and contain public interpretation, is complemented by the stage relationship between tableaux being performed and their several audiences. By her physical placement between the show and the street observers as both its thematic focus and a participant through her verbal and physical responses, Elizabeth became a crucial mediator and thus an active contributor to a pageant's total generation of meaning. She served to clarify political ideology as the chief authority empowering its common currency, and provided an orthodox interpretation of its representation for a mass audience. Her courtiers could also play actor-watcher roles and exercise a similar authoritative function. For two days at Bristol in 1574 a pageant representing ‘ciuill broyle’ staged mock battles with forces of War (spurred by Dissension) attacking a fort called Feeble Policy. On the third day, some of Elizabeth's courtiers, bringing her relief of ‘mutual loue and agreement,’ joined in the defence and converted the fort into a bastion of Peace.⁹

Both these characteristic elements of presentation evidently provided Shakespeare with ideas when he came to stage either historical events for which no dramatic situation was given or suggested in the chronicles, or invented scenes which imaginatively flesh out received historical records. He clearly has in mind a presenter's role, for example, when he has Exeter deliver part-choric, part-didactic speeches directly to the audience at the end of III.i and IV.i. York appears in the same light when pronouncing an embittered eulogy for the deceased Mortimer (II. V), while Lucy moralizes openly at the end of IV.iii after failing to persuade York to co-operate with Somerset by sending aid to Talbot:

Thus, while the vulture of sedition
Feeds on the bosom of such great commanders,
Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss
The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror,
That ever-living man of memory,
Henry the Fifth. Whiles they each other cross,
Lives, honours, lands, and all, hurry to loss.

(47-53)

These characters remain individualized in so far as their observations arise from the preceding action, but in their identical placement at the end of each scene and drawing out of moral implications they sustain the effect of a universalizing gloss, subordinating the impact of individual events to a controlling theme announced in the play's first scene: internal dissension at home leading to national shame and lost conquests abroad.

Yet Shakespearian characters performing such roles operate in a different context from their pageant counterparts, and thus create different theatrical effects. The heavy-handedness one senses about Exeter or Lucy's commentary in Part One would be mitigated by certain practical concerns in the performance of civic shows. First, the vast street-crowds made pageants noisy affairs, causing Elizabeth difficulty in hearing performers speak. By giving her the gist of a show's meaning, a presenter allowed Elizabeth to respond appropriately for the instruction of her wider audience. Second, allegorical tableaux of royal-entry pageants portrayed figures from many different sources, again creating a potential for confused or variant interpretation among ‘simple’ spectators. As early as Henry VI's return to London from Paris in 1432, royal entries combined elements from biblical, legendary, political, and local trade-guild history.¹⁰ Classical elements were added later and became especially prominent in lord mayors' shows towards the end of the sixteenth century. To unify these around a single political theme, presents were as useful as the usual written explanations. Such a context does not obtain for Shakespeare's plays, however, where the chronicle material is not dominantly allegorical. As a result, 1 Henry VI's use of quasi-presenting characters becomes obtrusive and tends to isolate scenes into episodes. By thus impeding transitions in a narrative sequence, it limits an audience's freedom to interpret historical moments variously or dialectically. In the Second and Third Parts, on the other hand, while characters continue to appear at the close of scenes addressing comments to the audience, they appear less often and in changed roles. The First Gentleman's exclamation after witnessing the execution of Suffolk (‘O barbarous and bloody spectacle!’ [2 Henry VI, IV.i.144]) prefaces his plans for carrying Suffolk's body back to Henry and Margaret but does not grow into a homily. So too in 3 Henry VI, III.iii.256ff, Warwick vents his fury after being duped by Edward's surprise marriage and reaffirms his intention to back the Lancastrians' return to power. In both instances the speeches impel an audience into new considerations and look forward to coming action, whereas the equivalent ones in Part One reiterate obvious implications and retard the dramatic sequence. The later speeches also mark a change in the nature of the subject being presented. As in the pageants, the presenting style of speech focuses audience interest on the utterance itself as a subject rather than the (usually emblematized) figure speaking, whereas those in Parts Two and Three throw attention on the character as a subject in his own right, possessing an independent personal consciousness which may conflict with public statements he or she makes elsewhere.¹¹ In other places Shakespeare's transformation of such pageant roles goes further. When in Part Two York lingers at the end of I.i and III.i to announce his political goals, his tone is confidential rather than declamatory. More than anybody else to this point in the trilogy, he expresses his emotions and ambitions in what is now recognizably a soliloquy, through which we can gauge his superior acumen in comparison to political rivals. Nonetheless York's speeches, as in comparable passages by vice figures in morality plays (to which Part Two is partly indebted), remain colloquies with an abstract presence in the theatre; we are eavesdroppers on his plans, not accomplices. It is not until Richard of Gloucester's soliloquies in Part Three (III.ii and V.vi) that an audience is actualized as participants when Richard cajoles our complicity by providing us with his own psychological case history. And Shakespeare goes beyond the first two plays' quasi-presenting roles (and York's morality antecedents) to develop an ironic twist: Richard's impudent defiance towards the ethically bound audience his direct appeals have realized in the theatre.

Similar changes occur between Part One and Parts Two and Three as Shakespeare arranges physical stage movements in imitation of the multiple performer-watcher relationships of civic pageantry. In one instance—Eleanor Cobham's public penance in 2 Henry VI—the chronicles themselves suggest some kind of pageant staging. Stow records that Eleanor walked in a four-day procession through London, ‘at all which times the Maior, Sherifes, and Craftes of London, receyued and accompanyed hir.’¹² Before it comes into view in II.iv, Gloucester introduces the approaching spectacle and directs his servants to give their attention. Eleanor then enters as a ‘wonder and a pointing-stock’ walking barefoot in a white shift and carrying a taper before the ‘giddy multitudes’ who offer their mock solicitude. (Neither the Quarto nor the Folio directions make provision for spectators, despite Eleanor's explicit references; the BBC production, however, had them fleering from galleries.) Earlier she had vowed to win a part in ‘Fortune's pageant,’ discontented with social definition in terms of her husband's ‘base and humble mind’ (I.ii.61-7). Rather than the sovereign role she expects, however, Hume's betrayal merely redefines the nature of her subjection, and by drawing attention to her humiliation she in effect acts as presenter of her own show, rather like her appearance in another Fortune's pageant, The Mirror for Magistrates.¹³ Moreover, with papers of accusation pinned to her back, she becomes one of the play's several stage motifs of ‘betraying parchment’ as well as a public warning for Gloucester, now watching and responding as an on-stage audience.¹⁴

Shakespeare makes different use of this kind of framed scene for the two Keepers' seizure of King Henry in Part Three. As they lie waiting in a covert, Henry passes by in disguise from his captivity in Scotland. The Keepers overhear him describing Margaret and Warwick pleading before King Lewis in terms which sound very much like the performance of a dumb-show:

… Margaret may win him,
For she’s a woman to be pitied much:
Her sighs will make a battery in his breast;
Her tears will pierce into a marble heart;
The tiger will be mild whiles she doth mourn;
And Nero will be tainted with remorse,
To hear and see her plaints, her brinish tears.
Ay, but she’s come to beg, Warwick to give;
She on his left side craving aid for Henry:
He on his right, asking a wife for Edward.
She weeps, and says her Henry is depos’d:
He smiles, and says his Edward is install’d;
That she, poor wretch, for grief can speak no more;
Whiles Warwick tells his title, smooths the wrong,
Infereth arguments of mighty strength,
And in conclusion wins the King from her. …

(III.i.35-50)

Henry's tableau, with its emotionally exaggerated gestures, recalls the one staged earlier on the evils of civil war (II.v) where a Son who has killed his Father laments on one side of Henry, while a Father who has killed his Son does so on the other, the king acting as the focus of their performances and moralizing them for the audience. Commentators often remark upon this scene's connections with morality-play themes and language, yet its stylized presentation also shares affinities with pageant staging. The neat symmetrical action used to sharpen moral states is reminiscent of the coronation pageant's polarized representations of Mary Tudor's reign and Elizabeth's:

And in the same pageaunt was aduaunced two hylles or mountaynes of conuenient heyghte. The one of them beyng on the North syde … was made cragged, barreyn, and stonye, in the whiche was erected one tree, artificiallye made, all withered and deadde, with braunches accordinglye. And vnder the same tree at the foote thereof, sate one in homely and rude apparell crokedlye, and in mournyng maner, hauynge ouer hys headde in a table, written in Laten and Englyshe, hys name, whiche was Ruinosa Respublica, a decayed common weale. … The other hylle on the South syde was made fayre, freshe, grene, and beawtifull, the grounde thereof full of flowres and beawtie, and on the same was erected also one tree very freshe and fayre, vnder the whiche, stoode vprighte one freshe personage well apparylled and appoynted, whose name also was written bothe in Englyshe and Laten, whiche was, Respublica bene instituta. A Florishyng commonweale. (The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Ciii^v-Ciiii^r)

Despite the similar dramatic conception of II.v and III.i, however, Henry's imagined tableau represents a historical event, not a symbolic one. So when Shakespeare stages the episode of Margaret, Warwick, and Lewis in III.iii, it is at odds with the scenic blueprint Henry has apparently carried over from his participation in II.v. Neither Margaret nor Warwick speaks in the stilted manner Henry imagines, nor do their actions simply mimic one another. Although Warwick initially wins Lewis's support on behalf of Edward, he immediately reverses himself after receiving news of the king's marriage to Lady Grey. This scene pointedly discredits Henry's reductive presentation—and conventionalized grasp—of political events, and therefore the stabilizing and idealizing premises underlying it. Instead Shakespeare turns history away from premeditated (and pre-ideologized) stage metaphors towards a dramatic narrative where mutating sequences of scenic forms signify resistance to determinacy and imply a view of the past that merges inherited facts and interpretation with destabilizing particularity, without resort to subduing the latter under a controlling theme or myth.

Shakespeare takes this development further by using the same scenic unit again in IV.v. This time Richard, Hastings, and Stanley lie waiting for Edward to pass by hunting in the Archbishop of York's park, where Warwick has confined him. Although the opening visual arrangement is identical to III.i, and thus leads an audience to anticipate its action working in the same way, the scene fails to develop simply as another ambush because, as Richard explains, Edward knows beforehand of their coming; he merely walks up to his friends on cue.¹⁵ Shakespeare reveals his original form, initially useful for giving dramatic shape to bare chronicle detail, to be obsolete as he foregrounds its staginess and allows it to be overtaken by an event which is historically accurate but dramatically banal. His use of scenic repetition in III.i and IV.v observes pageantry's typical strategy of accumulating meaning across visually congruent shows to outline an overriding theme (cf The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Div). But where this pageant structure is intended to close audience interpretation, the way Shakespeare reveals his scenic forms to have changeable validity opens possibilities for diverse readings of events and creates overall a metacritical perspective on his presentation of history. This last scene's instability also contributes to what Philip Brockbank calls the feeling of ‘pantomime’ throughout acts III and IV as kings are swapped back and forth.¹⁶ Through patently mechanical stage action Shakespeare represents the devaluation of sovereignty as a suprapolitical quality.

Besides the instances of comparatively fixed stage placement I have been considering so far, Henry VI also incorporates certain processional pageant forms. Again it is Part One, when approaching the problem of bodying forth static chronicle events, that borrows such structures most directly. One instance is Hall's account of Burgundy's defection from the English. He records that after Henry had laid claim to all France and Bedford had become suspicious of his loyalties, Burgundy switched allegiances to Charles VIII after concluding that the English would no longer ensure him independent authority in his own regions.¹⁷ Shakespeare's staging suggests Burgundy's mixed motivations by using Joan, in a processional scenic unit, as their catalyst. After being repulsed from Rouen, the French approach Burgundy for help by following Joan's scenario (III.iii.17-20). Two processions cross the stage, first the English led by Talbot, then a ‘French March’ with Burgundy. As the latter passes, Joan calls for a parley and asks him to work his imagination from a fresh perspective to visualize the surrounding devastation:

Look on thy country, look on fertile France,
And see the cities and the towns defac’d
By wasting ruin of the cruel foe;
As looks the mother on her lowly babe
When death doth close his tender dying eyes,
See, see the pining malady of France;
Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds
Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast.
O, turn thy edged sword another way;
Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help!

(44-53)

Though she ultimately wins over Burgundy, her victory is ironic since it remains unclear whether he is responding more to what he calls Joan's ‘bewitching’ manner—her emotional and sexual suggestiveness in this fictitious encounter—or her words' rational appeal to ‘natural’ loyalties and self-interest—the chronicles' explanation for Burgundy's reversal. Like the encounter between Margaret and Suffolk in Part One, the one corresponds with Shakespeare's sense of the event's underdeterminacy in the face of scant received facts, the other with his sense of its conventional interpretation. Both significations jostle in an uneasy balance, resisting interpretive certainty.

Shakespeare repeats this type of interrupted processional movement in Part Three, V.i, when Oxford, Montague, and Somerset march by the Yorkists with their colours to join Warwick within the walls of Coventry. Clarence follows them across the stage and is plucked aside by Edward and Richard, who remind him of his wonted family allegiance. In keeping with the increasingly arbitrary reversals throughout this play's third and fourth acts, Clarence switches sides almost instantly and histrionically flings his red rose at Warwick, having succumbed to Richard's old Vice-trick of charming his ear with secret whispers. Shakespeare mediates the rationalized content of this scene through a hybrid stage form—part pageant, part morality—associated with ostensible surprises in action yet stability of moral meaning.

These encounters between moving watchers and entreating bystanders are basic to all royal pageants: Elizabeth proceeds en route until an actor-presenter attracts her attention and draws her aside to consider a new show: ‘ye Queenes maiestie … marched towarde Tēple barre. But at S. Dunstones where the childrē of thospitall wer appointed to stāde with their gouernours, her grace perceiuīg a childe offred to make an oracion vnto her, staied her chariot’ (The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Diiii^r-v). On this occasion the hospital children presented Elizabeth with petitions for charity towards the poor, as people in the streets had done earlier in the day; both times Richard Mulcaster reports that Elizabeth paused, listened attentively, and made sympathetic replies, thereby suggesting several interpretations for onlookers. Her street chat and acceptance of petitions emblematize the oft-invoked social contract between ruler and subject, while her sympathetic responses serve to sustain the political fiction that direct contact between Elizabeth and her people always results in a natural concord, with the queen acting to redress grievances over the heads of her mulish counsellors. At the end of his written account, Mulcaster specially praises Elizabeth's reactions in this regard (as well as her calculated reception of the English Bible), explaining that they display the most ancient of princely virtues.

Shakespeare uses this kind of encounter in Part Two to introduce Peter and Horner the Armourer, who will later take part in the (historical) combat at II.iii over allegations of York's treason. At the beginning of I.iii they and other Petitioners line the street to solicit the Duke of Gloucester's support for their grievances. ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ is associated with legal redress and written bills throughout Parts One and Two, as when in the former play Winchester tears up his petitions to King Henry (III.i). Part Two's scene stages this action in procession. Unfortunately, instead of Gloucester, Suffolk and Margaret walk by, with the Petitioners recognizing their mistake too late. Suffolk (perhaps Margaret too—the directions are ambiguous) tears up their requests and belittles their attempt to seek justice publicly (I.iii.6-40). By failing to follow through with the conventional scenario, Suffolk and Margaret send out the opposite signals from a performance like Elizabeth's and redirect orthodox political assumptions by seizing control of their normal public-display patterns. By Part Two, thwarting the expected outcome of conventional stage forms becomes characteristic of the way Shakespeare uses dramatic metaphors to re-enact historical and political change in Henry VI, allowing him to win independence over the thematic hegemony of contemporary chronicles. Henry's inability to invent or direct theatrical scenarios to assert political authority thus stands in negative relation to the playwright's facility and is compounded by his increasing diffidence towards managing any kind of symbolic display, either as the show itself or as its thematic focus. Ultimately he resigns the representation of royal power to Warwick and Clarence as joint Protectors. His last public gesture (3 Henry VI, IV.vi) is a prophecy over young Richmond, suggesting that at this point all he can do is try to project a moral determinacy on to future events, being unable to master human conflict in the present.

Shakespeare underlines the credibility of Margaret's participation in an otherwise exclusively male contest for power through demonstrations of her dramatic inventiveness and stamina: even at the end of the trilogy she is able to conjure up an elaborate verbal tableau of a storm-tossed ship to allegorize the state of Lancastrian fortunes and rouse her troops a final time before Tewkesbury (V.iv.3ff). In her opening ‘quid for quo’ encounter with Suffolk, on the other hand, when he temporarily ignores her by speaking to the audience as a kind of presenter, Margaret challenges his privileged claim on the audience's attention by addressing it directly herself, turning Suffolk into an alternative show which she presents (‘Perhaps I shall by rescu’d by the French; / And then I need not crave his courtesy’). Her assertion of political dominance through audience mastery occurs most notably in the climactic baiting of York in Part Three, I.iv. Here political rivalry is objectified by competing stage scenarios. After setting York bound on a molehill, Margaret vilifies him as a political scapegoat, his fury acting as self-evident confirmation of guilt. But York rejects this role, presenting himself as a man of sorrows and ritualizing his victimization through gestures and instruments suggestive of the Passion (as hinted by Holinshed's description of the scene). He thus forges an associative link with Clifford's slaughter of the innocent Rutland (I.iii) and rebounds cumulative responsibility on his tormentors. As the scene's competing presenter, Margaret fails to mediate York's performance to elicit a uniform reaction from either the on-stage audience (Northumberland weeps in sympathy for York) or the theatrical one (judging from the comments of most critics). Her final resort to violence with Clifford becomes an implicit acknowledgment of York's theatrical victory and, despite his death, his faction's political ascendancy.

Besides this encounter, York's manipulation of pageant-related scenic forms as a validating expression of power is as telling as Margaret's. A straightforward instance occurs in the Temple Garden scene of Part One, where the connection between its stylized quarrel using red and white roses and pageant decoration has long been noted.¹⁸ But while this performance in ‘dumb dignificants’ respresents a dynastic contest, reversing for historical purposes the Elizabethan association of roses with unity, there is nothing in the emblems themselves to challenge the conventional basis of lineal descent and social hierarchy on which Somerset and York dispute their claims. There is only Vernon's remark that the limited available number of roses is incompatible with their use in freely representing notional values.

One can then compare this scene's presentation with that at the beginning of Part Three to see how Shakespeare redeploys stage emblems to signal a changed basis for reckoning authority. In the opening scene the Yorkists enter from the battle of St Alban's wearing white roses in their hats and start to vie for the duke's praise by describing their success in battle. Edward boasts of Buckingham's destruction, ‘I cleft his beaver with a downright blow: / That this is true, father, behold his blood’ (12-13), while Falconbridge shows his zeal by showing off the Earl of Wiltshire's blood. Never to be outdone in such business, Richard coolly steps up and tosses down Somerset's head—‘Speak thou for me, and tell them what I did’—to take first prize in this little contest: ‘Richard hath best deserv’d of all my sons.’ From this point on the ground of Part Three is continually drinking in blood, which becomes the play's dominant visual and verbal image.¹⁹ And in dramatic terms Shakespeare seems to validate the subversive implication of Vernon's earlier comment: the basis for asserting political authority and family heritage now becomes quantifiable as blood spilt, reducing the notional value of blood descent and its conventional stage symbols to mere cyphers.

York's political ‘seduction’ of Jack Cade and Cade's subsequent uprising are framed by Part Two's context of court intrigue to appear like a popular interlude. It is well known that Shakespeare's conception of these scenes draws by analogy on Holinshed's accounts of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as well as the anonymous Life and Death of Jack Strawe, printed in 1593/4. Straw also appears as a figure in the Lord Mayor's pageant installing John Allot in 1590, since Allot's guild association as a fishmonger connected him to William Walworth, the lord mayor who originally slew Straw. Bullough includes Thomas Nelson's device of the pageant in his collection of sources for the play, describing it as a ‘very remote analogue.’²⁰ A closer and more topical one for the opening Cade scene, however, may exist in a rising which took place during the summer of 1591, the same time Shakespeare is believed to have written Part Two. It concerns what contemporary reporters describe as the ‘pageant’ or ‘tragedy’ of William Hacket, a former manservant who advertised himself as an apocalyptic prophet and reformer, eventually claiming to be the messiah and king of all Europe. On the morning of 16 July 1591, Edmund Coppinger and Henry Arthington, having previously helped Hacket prepare anti-Catholic and anti-government pamphlets, were charged by him to go out in the streets and proclaim his allegedly divine mission. In the respective roles of Mercy and Judgment they proceeded from Broken Wharf collecting a huge crowd, so that ‘being quickely blowen through the citie, all was in a buzze.’²¹ Coppinger and Arthington mounted a cart at the cross in Cheapside to preach Hacket's creed of religious extremism and benevolent despotism. Later in the day two counsellors dispatched by the Queen from Greenwich arrived with the mayor and his officials to arrest Coppinger and Arthington, and afterwards did the same for Hacket. Hacket was tried and went to the gallows on 28 July before a mass crowd, furiously denouncing his opponents. Coppinger starved to death in jail soon after, while Arthington saved his life by writing an abject confession of his ‘seduction.’²²

Hacket's spectacular conspiracy was the most notable public event in London that summer, so it is tempting to see it as a general analogue for the Cade scenes.²³ There may also be specific connections with several non-historical details Shakespeare attributes to Cade. Like Hacket, Cade rests his extraordinary claims and descent partly on his ability to endure extremities of physical pain,²⁴ and vows reformation of the commonwealth by advocating a republican utopia without titles or degrees where all commodities are held in common.²⁵ A contemporary report ridicules Hacket's social background just as Dick the Butcher mocks Cade's, and also states that Coppinger and Arthington attracted a greater ‘concourse of the common multitude’ than had ever been seen in London streets.²⁶ This is suggestive of the Folio stage direction, considered to be Shakespearian, calling for ‘infinite numbers’ to accompany Cade. Moreover, when Iden confronts and kills him in IV.x, Cade like Hacket is defiantly unrepentent, conceding that he has been defeated only by going hungry.²⁷ Shakespeare may have transferred this detail to Cade from Coppinger, who died in Bridewell prison after allegedly ‘wilfully’ abstaining ‘from meate (as is said) seuen or eight daies together.’ If Hacket's rising is seen as a topical analogy for Cade's, it reveals Shakespeare drawing directly on spontaneous contemporary street shows for his scenic ideas as well as official public spectacles.

The last pageant form I wish to consider is the triumph, which during the 1580s and 1590s influenced the conception of literary and public spectacle considerably.²⁸ We can again start with a contemporary illustration of the general form: the Queen's visit to Lady Russell at Bisham in 1592. Upon approaching the house, Elizabeth was greeted by a pageant of Pan wooing two virgin shepherdesses on a hill. The latter reject Pan's blandishments, instead directing his attention to a worthier subject:

This way commeth the Queene of this Islande, the wonder of the world, and natures glory, leading affections in fetters, Virginities slaues: embracing mildnes with Iustice, Maiesties twinns. … One hande she stretcheth to Fraunce, to weaken Rebels; the other to Flaunders, to strengthen Religion; her heart to both Countries, her vertues to all. This is shee at whom Enuie hath shott all her arrowes, and now for anger broke her bow. …²⁹

The shepherdess portrays Elizabeth's arrival as the triumphal entry of Chastity, gesturing to allegorized representations of her virtues and achievements. Characteristically, this description combines the familiar classical grouping of a conqueror leading enthralled prisoners and battle trophies with personified virtues and vices substituted for historical figures. The Renaissance origins of this hybrid form lie in Petrarch's collection of verse portraits, Trionfi, which celebrate spiritual love in a procession of allegorical figures: Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Divinity. All appear in chariots drawn by beasts, successively subduing the preceding figure and her throngs. Although Petrarch's poem was widely translated, the triumph motif spread in European literature and art chiefly through visual reproductions, gradually losing direct contact with Petrarch's poem. All six triumphs are portrayed at Hampton Court in a series of tapestries, for instance, while Fame appears in two pageants already cited, the first day at Bristol in 1574 and the 1590 Lord Mayor's show.³⁰ Other figures were added to Petrarch's originals according to local artistic interests. In England, Fortune and its related de casibus theme, which came under the aegis of Death, became very popular triumph devices,³¹ while Death itself took on elements from the medieval danse macabre to influence funeral pageantry.³² By the end of the 1580s The Arte of English Poesie was able to define the ‘triumphall’ as both a literary and pageant genre celebrating three kinds of events: national peace, victories over foreign enemies, and ‘solemne feasts and pompes’ such as coronations, instalments to civic honours, marriages, and births.³³ Shakespeare has in mind the second type of event when staging Edward's return from Barnet in Part Three: ‘Flourish. Enter King Edward in triumph, with Richard, George and the rest. Thus far our fortune keeps an upward course, / And we are grac’d with wreaths of victory’ (V.ii.1-2). He also perhaps alludes to the conventional sequence of Death, Fortune, and Fame by placing Warwick's death, with its contemptus mundi overtones, immediately before this scene while following it with Margaret's argument to her forces that their glory will be that much greater, they having managed to fight beyond present misfortunes. In Part Two, York's return from Ireland to claim the throne falls under The Arte's third category when he imagines himself the centrepiece of a royal-entry triumph, with appropriate public festivities and symbolic instruments of sovereignty:

Ring, bells, aloud; burn, bonfires, clear and bright,
To entertain great England's lawful king.
Ah! sancta majestas, who’d not buy thee dear?
Let them obey that knows not how to rule;
This hand was made to handle nought but gold:
I cannot give due action to my words,
Except a sword or sceptre balance it.

(V.i.3-9)

Likewise, Edward proposes celebrating the defeat of his enemies at the end of Part Three with ‘stately triumphs, mirthful comic shows’ (V.vii.43). But here his suggestion is heavily ironic, since Richard has fixed the theme of the coming mise en scène with the Judas kiss he gives the infant prince.

In these instances Shakespeare uses the triumph as a practical device for staging action implied by historical events themselves. But in other places he encourages us to see such events as moments when historical characters merge with emblematic figures regularly represented in Elizabethan pageant triumphs, sometimes resulting in ironic theatrical effects. Joan La Pucelle's appearance in the first act of Part One, for example, deliberately recalls the frequent public celebrations of Elizabeth as virgin queen and national deliverer. Initially Joan is introduced as the shepherd's daughter of legendary history, transfigured by the Virgin's call to lead the French out of captivity. She foils Charles's ruse of disguising his identity and subdues him in single combat, whereupon he likens her to an Amazon and another Deborah. The former figure appeared often in Elizabethan pageantry personifying Chastity or acting as one of her lieutenants. Moreover, Joan's overthrow of Charles can be compared directly with a pageant presented to Elizabeth at Norwich in 1578 which staged a dialogue and combat between Cupid and Chastity. Cupid presented himself to Elizabeth, explaining how he and Venus had been exiled from Heaven, when suddenly Dame Chastity appeared with her four martial maids, Modesty, Temperance, Good Exercise, and Shamefastness. They ejected him from his chariot, declaring their weapons to be the spiritual armour of virtue, and Chastity then presented Cupid's bow to the Queen.³⁴ The action of this quasi-dramatic piece corresponds exactly with I.ii, although Shakespeare reveals Charles's figurative quality as Joan's adversary only after he is overthrown: ‘Impatiently I burn with thy desire; / My heart and hands thou hast at once subdu’d’ (108-9). Joan defends herself with lines that could have been written for Chastity at Norwich: ‘I must not yield to any rites of love, / For my profession's sacred from above’ (112-13). Shakespeare's audience could also have made a connection between Elizabeth and Joan through the figure of Deborah, another of the Queen's typological personas: Elizabeth was represented as ‘Debora the iudge and restorer of the house of Israel’ on the final scaffold of the coronation procession and in the second pageant at Norwich.³⁵ Joan continues her Amazonian role by easily holding Talbot at bay in I.iv (though in typically English fashion he demonizes her as a witch) and in leading the successful French relief of Orleans, where she enters in triumph as ‘Astraea's daughter’ with explicit references to popular pageant festivities: ‘Why ring not bells aloud throughout the town? / Dauphin, command the citizens make bonfires / And feast and banquet in the open streets / To celebrate the joy that God has given us’ (I.vi.11-14).³⁶ As Frances Yates has shown, Astraea was Elizabeth's imperial persona signifying the joint virtues of Chastity and Justice; as such she appeared in George Peele's Descensus Astraeae, written for the installation of William Webbe as lord mayor in 1592.³⁷

Yet Part One's inconsistent characterization of Joan very soon displaces any single allegorical interpretation. In particular, her portrayal in the last act as a necromancing whore shatters the composite Elizabethan image and so discredits its pageant-typological mode of signification, since it is unable to assimilate historical traits to a thematically mediated personality. In other words, it cannot accommodate the contradictions Shakespeare found in the chronicle accounts and continue credibly to essentialize Joan's character; instead it adds alien voices to create the kind of pluralist presentation Shakespeare recognized as genuinely historical.

Part One's major pageant motif, however, is the triumph of Death, although like the presentation of Joan its thematic dominance eventually fragments into the various emblematic perspectives of Parts Two and Three. Shakespeare alludes to Death's power or realizes it in the form of funeral rites more often than any other emblem in the trilogy, and until the end of act IV it consistently accents the play's helter-skelter events in a way that parallels the moralizing observations of quasi-presenters such as Exeter and Lucy. In the opening scene the triumph-of-death motif mocks the English effort to glorify Henry's memory by conserving his heroic achievements:

Upon a wooden coffen we attend;
And Death's dishonourable victory
We with our stately presence glorify,
Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

(I.i.19-22)

Here, despite a crowded stage of mourners and a dizzying flow of bad news from France, the funeral bier acts as a visual loadstone, its heraldic instruments set off by black drapery hung around the stage in imitation of contemporary funeral practice.³⁸ Yet for the participants its totemic power apparently diminishes through successive bickerings and exits, so that by the end of the scene it is borne out virtually forgotten.³⁹ Bedford's and others' attempts to assign transcendent value to Henry V's exploits is therefore shattered not only by the Death emblem Exeter sees reflected in the funeral cortège but also by the lords' bustling assertion of private political agendas. While like any Elizabethan funeral the implied purpose of this moment is to affirm lineal and political succession as part of an eternal natural order, its symbolic shading and dislocated ritual exposes such a connection as purely contingent. Moreover, it is this redefined value rather than any compelling heroical inheritance that Shakespeare then projects into the play as ritual displays of dead and dying men recur. When Bedford opens the funeral of Salisbury with words echoing those proclaimed over Henry V, he reverses the priority of light and dark:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

(I.i.1)

The day begins to break, and night is fled,
Whose pitchy mantle over-veil’d the earth.

(II.ii.1-2)

But the coffin on stage acts as a visual reminder of Exeter's earlier triumph-of-death conjuration, as do the scene's formal movements: Salisbury's coffin is carried in, his reputation eulogized, and like Henry V the coffin is borne out unremarked upon after the Countess of Auvergne's invitation to Talbot has diverted attention from the ceremony.⁴⁰ Three scenes later the dying Mortimer is brought forth in a sick-chair to rehearse his pedigree and sanction Richard Plantagenet's claim to Richard II's inheritance. The moment's solemnity is heightened by contrast with the factious energy of those before and after—in the Temple Garden and continuing jars between Winchester and Gloucester—but also again dislocated by Richard's sardonic eulogy which co-opts Mortimer's dynastic and moral energy towards redress of his own wounded pride. The dying Bedford is also carried sick in a chair before the walls of Rouen in III.ii to rouse the English troops, a situation repeating Mortimer's desire to infuse heroic energy into his battle-heirs. But this hope is also cut down, this time by Joan's redefinition of the moment, both vigorously allegorical and flatly realistic: ‘What will you do, good grey-beard? Break a lance / And run a tilt at Death within a chair?” (III.ii.50-1). And in what is now a familiar sequence of movements, Bedford dies and is carried out after witnessing the French defeat, is promised a worthy funeral and then eulogized. Beyond this point and towards the climactic battle near Bordeaux, Shakespeare intensifies Death's emblematic presence with verbal texturing so that by IV.vii ‘Triumphant Death, smear’d with captivity’ almost becomes a tangible entity:

Thou antic Death, which laugh’st us here to scorn,
Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,
Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,
Two Talbots winged through the lither sky,
In thy despite shall scape mortality.
O thou whose wounds become hard-favour’d Death,
Speak to thy father ere thou yield thy breath!
Brave Death by speaking, whether he will or no;
Imagine him a Frenchman and thy foe.
Poor boy! he smiles, methinks, as who should say,
Had Death been French, then Death had died to-day.

(18-28)

As Talbot ‘enhearses’ his son's body in his arms, he strikes a final pose in Death's gallery, inscribed by Lucy's memorializing (and marmorealizing) epitaph (60-71). This moment also marks the climactic confrontation between Part One's two opposing scenic impulses: iconic historical representation, and documentary history re-presented in mutable stage forms generating counter-interpretive perspectives: ‘Here is a silly-stately style indeed! … Him that thou magnifiest with all these titles, / Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet’ (72-6). With the introduction of new business concerning Somerset and Margaret in preparation for Parts Two and Three, Shakespeare switches triumph devices from Death to Fortune, yet now only as a periodic leitmotif and not the powerful and linear emblematic force of Part One.⁴¹

Notes

1. Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, ed Andrew S. Cairncross (London: Methuen 1962). All quotations are taken from this edition, as well as Cairncross's Part Two (1957) and Part Three (1964).

2. [Richard Mulcaster], The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before her Coronacion, facsimile edition, ed James M. Osborn (1558; New Haven: Yale University Press 1960), Ciiii^v-Di^r. This pageant ‘epitomizes the chief characteristics to be found in all royal entries and represents a high achievement of this dramatic form’ (David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1971], 12).

3. Besides Bergeron, previous studies I have found useful include Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1969); Gordon Kipling, ‘Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry,’ Renaissance Drama, 8 (1977), 37-56; Michael Neill, ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March:” Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage,’ Stephen Orgel, ‘Making Greatness Familiar,’ and Bruce R. Smith, ‘Pageants into Play: Shakespeare's Three Perspectives on Idea and Image,’ all in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed David M. Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1985); John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 4 vols (1823; New York: Kraus Reprint Company [n.d.]); Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson 1977); Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols (1918-20; New York: B. Blom 1963); Alice S. Venezky, Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage (New York: Twayne 1951).

4. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977), 15. See also Jones's four chapters on Henry VI.

5. The older view that Part One is a collaboration has been revived by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987), 217-19. They suggest that Parts Two and Three may also be collaborative, 175-8, 197-9.

6. Bergeron, 4-5.

7. Bergeron observes that the show presented to Elizabeth at Bristol in 1573 costing around £1,000 was typical of contemporary expenditure on royal pageants, while that for lord mayors rose from £151 in 1561 to £747 by 1602 (English Civic Pageantry, 26-7, 126-37). Mechanical sophistication is evident from the earliest pageants; e.g. Charles V's visit to London in 1522, when a tableau representing England contained moving animals and fishes (Withington, I, 177). For a general discussion of stage structures and properties see Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1959-81, vol 1 rev 1980), II, pt 1, 209-25.

8. Smith discusses the presenter's role in ‘Pageants into Play,’ 225-6.

9. Thomas Churchyard, The First Parte of Churchyardes Chippes (London, 1575), fol 100^v-101^r. Also Nichols, I, 396-407.

10. Withington, I, 141-7.

11. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London and New York: Methuen 1985), 42-54.

12. John Stow, The Chronicles of England (London, 1580), 646.

13. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed Lily B. Campbell (1938; New York: Barnes and Noble 1960), 432-44.

14. Although this detail, referred to at line 31 and by the Quarto stage direction, does not derive from Shakespeare's identified chronicle sources, it was a common part of the public humiliation of criminals. Stow's Annales of England (London, 1592) records the case of Thomas Lovelace, who was indicted in 1586 for forging letters implicating his cousins in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth by which he hoped to inherit their lands. As punishment Lovelace was carried on horseback with ‘a paper on his backe, wherein to be written: For counterfeiting of false and trecherous letters against his own kindred containing most trayterous matter against his maiesties person’ to the pillory at Westminster where his ear was cut off. His ‘progress’ continued to pillories in Cheapside, Kent, Rochester, and Canterbury, ‘and at euery the foresaid places, the order taken touching his offence, to be openly read’ (1218).

15. The BBC production conveyed this effectively by having Richard, Hastings, and Stanley begin downstage in the same corridor frame where the Keepers overheard Henry in III.ix.

16. J. P. Brockbank, ‘The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI’ Early Shakespeare, ed John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1961; New York: St Martin's Press 1966), 93.

17. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (London, 1548), cvi^v, 147.

18. The first show of the 1559 coronation pageant consisted of a genealogical tree intertwined with red and white roses depicting the ‘vniting of the two houses of Lancastre and Yorke,’ mounted on a castle with child actors in its niches playing the principal figures of each House (The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Aiiii^v-Biii^r). The same emblematic red and white roses were used at Norwich in 1578. See Thomas Churchyard, The Ioyfull Receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highness Citie of Norwich (London, 1578), 380. Also Venezky, 110-11.

19. The word ‘blood’ or related forms occurs fifty-three times in Part Three; compare Macbeth's thirty-seven times.

20. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1960), III, 91.

21. Richard Cosin, Conspiracie, for Pretended Reformation: viz. Presbyteriall Discipline (London, 1592), 59. Also Stow, Annales, 1289.

22. The Sedvction of Arthington by Hacket especiallie … Written by the said Henrie Arthington, the third person, in that woful Tragedy (London, 1592).

23. Brents Stirling proposed a connection between Hacket and Cade in The Populace in Shakespeare (1949; New York: Columbia University Press 1965), 105-19, but dwelt solely on the Puritan-Anabaptist motivations he claimed Cade's rebellion was alluding to. Part Two, however, makes little or no suggestion of religion as a motivating factor; if any analogy exists between Hacket's conspiracy and the play it lies in the scenic dynamic of a popular uprising. Jane Howells's 1981 BBC television production was especially suggestive in this regard, having Cade perform a demagogue's role from an elevated platform.

24. III.i.376-9, IV.ii.53-6; Cosin, 24-5, Arthington, 12-13.

25. IV.ii.61-6; Cosin, 34.

26. IV.ii.31-50; Cosin, 2-6, 56.

27. For further discussion of the play's open-ended view of Cade's rebellion, see Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (New York and London: Methuen 1985), 89-90.

28. Lord Morley's Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke, ed D. D. Carnicelli (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1971). My historical information is indebted to Carnicelli's introduction, especially pp 54ff, and Venezky, 188-205.

29. Speeches Delivered to Her Maiestie this Last Progresse, at the Right Honorable the Lady Rvssells, at Bissam … (Oxford, 1592), Aiii^v. Also Nichols, III, 134.

30. Three of the Hampton tapestries are reproduced in plates 7-9 of Carnicelli's edition.

31. Venezky, 124.

32. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf 1981), 118-19, and Neill, ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March,”’ 162-5.

33. The Arte of English Poesie, ed G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1936), ch xxiii, ‘The forme of Poeticall reioysings,’ 45-6.

34. Thomas Churchyard, A Discovrse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (London, 1578), Di^v-Dii^v; Nichols, II, 188-98. See also the entertainment at Sudeley in 1592 depicting a conflict between Daphne and Apollo, where Daphne flees to Elizabeth, ‘for whither should Chastety fly for succour, but to the Queene of Chastety’ (Nichols, III, 139).

35. The Quenes Maiesties Passage, Diii^r-v; Churchyard, The Ioyfull Receyuing, 383; Anglo, Spectacle, 354; Strong, 134.

36. ‘In his speech praising Pucelle, the Dauphin incorporates such elements of the street shows as Astraea, the garden, the pyramid, and the assurance of everlasting fame for the one honored. In addition, further well-known features of the civic celebrations are ordered—bonfires, pealing of bells, and feasting in the streets’ (Venezky, 124).

37. The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed David P. Horne (New Haven: Yale University Press 1952), 214-19; Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977), 66.

38. As Michael Neill observes (‘“Exeunt with a Dead March,”’ 162), while the explicit connection between Elizabethan funeral pageantry and stage representation is not always determinable, records such as Shakespeare's company's place in the funeral procession of their patron Lord Hunsdon in 1596 make it likely.

39. Cairncross inserts a direction for the coffin's removal at line 45 which does not exist in the authoritative Folio text and is inconsistent with lines 62-4; ‘Before dead Henry's corse / Speak softly, or the loss of those great towns / Will make him burst his lead and rise from death.’

40. Again the Folio requires the coffin to remain on stage throughout the scene.

41. This paper was presented at a seminar on Henry VI during the 1989 meeting of Shakespeare Association of America and has benefited from comments by Phyllis Rackin, Linda Micheli, and Michael Bristol.