[In the following essay, Dickson contends that the world of Henry VI, Part 1 is one of chaos and upturned hierarchies, where the dead Henry V's role as prophet and sun king is ceded not to his own son, Henry VI, but to the French maiden Joan of Arc.]

LUCY:
O, were mine eyeballs into bullets turned,
That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!

(1 Henry VI, 4.7.79-80)

The opening scene of 1 Henry VI rehearses for us a variation on the familiar ceremony of succession. Ernst Kantorowicz locates the first significant use of the formula, “Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi,” to the accession of Henry VI. Henry V and Charles of France died within months of each other, and the Duke of Bedford raced to proclaim Henry's infant heir king of England and of France before the adult Dauphin could claim the Crown of France for himself. In this moment of crisis, the cry, “The king is dead! Long live the King!” is designed to permit no interregnum, no gap in the continuity of royal claims to territory and power (411-12). In its careful orchestration of presence and absence, the ceremony purports to remove any space for doubt, permitting the new Body Natural seamlessly to take up the space vacated by the old; death gives way to life, funeral to coronation in a process carefully managed to assert their difference (the king is dead; the living takes his place), while making the transition as smooth as breathing (long live the King, a power and presence which never dies).

This first scene opens, however, not with an image of rebirth and continuity, but with one of death and rupture, as England's peers pay their respects at the funeral of Henry V. Between the lamentations over the hearse of the dead monarch and Gloucester's declared intention to “proclaim young Henry king” (1.1.169) there intervene 169 lines concerned with praise for the king that was, news of foreign massacre, and the outbreak of civil broils. With his opening speech lamenting the loss of “King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!” (1.1.6), Bedford launches nearly 60 lines of praise for the dead king (with a short intermission for an exchange of spleen between Winchester and Gloucester). Occupying over 25٪ of a scene which covers as much ground as this one—from establishing the animosity between the Bishop and the Protector, to the loss of seven French cities and the chief English hero, to preparations for war and a coronation—such a eulogy for the old king leaves precious little space for the new. The absence of Henry V, signalled by his body inhearsed on stage, represents the physical, political and conceptual absence of his son, who makes no appearance until Act three, who, with only 157 lines out of a possible 2670, speaks a mere 6٪ of the play that bears his name, and whose speech, when we finally hear it, is invariably characterized by wheedling, deference, and disastrous misunderstanding. When he is mentioned at all in this scene, young Henry is an “effeminate prince” (1.1.35) offered up as an object of the peers' ambitious jarring. That the king is dead is loudly proclaimed. That a new king has taken his place is barely whispered.

The gap in the ceremony of succession that is revealed here, Shakespeare expands into the four plays dealing with the dynastic contention of the houses of Lancaster and York, turning the conventional pause for breath between the prayer for the dead king and the acclamation of the new into a vast chronicle of blood and social dismemberment. In the first of these plays, I Henry VI, Henry V's absence precipitates a destabilization of both hierarchical structures and systems of power and knowledge. Associated in the play with the sun, Henry V's panoptic vision grounds a discourse of power and epistemology in the mastery of the gaze. In the play, his absence is attendant upon a fall from panoptic vision and into perspective, a fall that challenges this visual mastery and precipitates a violent dismemberment of the body politic. Joan of Arc, an upstart crow who claims privileged vision, embodies this crisis, for, in going disguised as herself, she defies the power of the gaze to define, and thus, to contain her disruptive potential. Rather than stabilizing the visible economy of the play, her violent reintegration into the dominant order in the final scenes further challenges the primacy of the visible in discourses of truth and justice.

Between “the king is dead” and “long live the King,” the first scene of the play establishes the terms of the crisis of visibility that characterizes a fracturing of English identity and power. Dominating the conceptual space of the scene, Henry V's body, memory, fame and loss emphasize the impossible standards set for the young king whose physical absence is indicative of a political vacuum that enables factionism to flourish where monologic power should reign. Unlike the young king, Henry V is presented as the ideal embodiment of the penetrative spectacle of power:

England ne'er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command;
His brandished sword did blind men with his beams;
His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings;
His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than midday sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech.
He ne'er lift up his hand but conquerèd.

(1.1.8-16)

Positioned as the model of kingship, Henry V, according to Gloucester's speech, both sets and controls the terms and conditions of the visible and of his spectacular presentation. His eyes are both the receptors and the source of penetrating light that “dazzles” his enemies, depriving them of sight and monopolizing for himself the privileged perspective, a dragon's wing vantage that encompasses all. Vision conjoined to the sword, the image of Henry's “sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,” yokes together knowledge and violence in a powerful act of seeing that “[drives] back his enemies” like “midday sun fierce bent against their faces.”

With these accolades, Shakespeare is mobilizing familiar Elizabethan imagery of sovereign power. The most famous representation of Queen Elizabeth, Isaac Oliver's Rainbow Portrait, encapsulates a whole mythology from which Shakespeare draws in this speech. In her hand the Queen holds the rainbow, the symbol of peace; on her sleeve is a snake, symbolic of knowledge; on her dress are multiple eyes, ears and mouths, referring to her prodigious network of spies. Typical in its lack of reference to the real, actual person of the Queen, with its flattened features and its fascination with the iconography of costume, this portrait declares that what we see is not Elizabeth, but her power and Office, not her openness to our gaze, but her ability to see us, completely. The eyes in this, as in other depictions of the Virgin Queen, are dark and piercing, and are the most arresting aspect of this unearthly representation. In its iconography, the painting reverses the relationship of the observer (us) to object (the painting and, through it, the Queen), a reversal that is integral to the penetrative spectacle of power.¹ In reading the iconographic language of the portrait, we as gazers are redefined as objects before a gaze; the very act of reading the portrait challenges our sense of visual mastery over the image of monarchical self-display, for we are captured by the iconography of vision even as we “grasp” its meaning. The portrait exemplifies what is for Christopher Pye “the exquisitely dissecting gaze” of Elizabeth I, “as it ‘pearse[s]’ and lays bare every artery and vein [and] mimes the force that dismembers, eviscerates, and exposes all in the ceremony of punishment” (Regal Phantasm 139). Like Elizabeth's “dissecting gaze,” Henry's eyes “replete with wrathful fire” have the power to enact violence upon the bodies of these who stand, and fall, before them. To be the object of this martial gaze is to be opened, known and finally, overthrown.

In its use of a well-known vocabulary of spectacular power, the eulogy for Henry fulfils the Rainbow Portrait's caption, “Non sine sole iris: No rainbow without the sun,” where the latin, iris, refers simultaneously to the rainbow of peace and to the all-seeing eye of the sovereign who is herself the sun. Appropriating the Elizabethan image of the sun, Henry's spectacular presence is a violent, penetrating light that conquers where it shines: aloft, seeing to all horizons, transforming where it touches, and most importantly, too bright to be gazed upon directly. As in the portrait, the sovereignty made visible in Gloucester's speech precludes the mastery of the returning gaze even as kingship declares its presence before it: Henry, as the sun, can see without himself becoming the object of the gaze. Based on the structure of the anatomy, a rhetorical mode of “dissection” most associated with visual mastery and knowledge, Gloucester's description of Henry's royal person is here couched in terms of blinding light that defies the return of the gaze. Gloucester's speech culminates in the admission that the king and his power cannot be contained within the anatomy's epistemological desire: Henry's “deeds exceed all speech,” even this one, which itself must capitulate at the moment of its highest praise to the overwhelming force of a vision that blinds. It is this position of mastery of the visible that the scene marks as an irretrievable loss, and the scenes that follow on the battlefields of France are driven by the struggle to regain this privileged position. The rapid entrance of messengers immediately following the speech, the news of losses in France, and the rising rancour between the peers at home seem a playing out of prophesy: No rainbow without the sun.

If Henry “ne'er lift up his hand but conquerèd,” the victories are those of England and the body politic of which he is the head. In his absence, the customary identification with this power is transformed into the humiliating exposure of the triumph, a state Exeter laments:

Henry is dead and never shall revive.
Upon a wooden coffin we attend,
And death's dishonorable victory
We with our stately presence glorify,
Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

(1.1.18-22)

Exeter begins with a reassertion of absence and loss and then moves immediately from the ritual of mourning to that of the triumph, where the vanquished are paraded before the victors as objects of spectacle humiliation. With the king's death, the peers are themselves transformed into the objects of a powerful and defining gaze, a taunting, common gaze that mocks nobility's “stately presence” with its sudden debasement. While this ceremonial debasement is part of death's pageantry in this speech, just a few lines mark a shift from death's “dishonorable victory” to that of the “subtile-witted French” whom Exeter suspects of contriving Henry's end “[b]y magic verses” (1.1.25-27). This shift from death to the French indicates a related shift in the nobleman's understanding of his identity. When Henry was alive and victorious, his gaze encompassed the nobles, not as objects, but as part of a national politic body, and the violence of the penetrating gaze was reserved for those “enemies” driven back by his sunlike brilliance. The invocation of the French in the context of the triumphal parade and spectacle humiliation marks a shift from this early identification with the gaze to an awareness of the self as its opened and overthrown object. The triumphal gaze appropriates its object, consuming in a kind of scopic cannibalistic ritual the nobility of the vanquished. To be the victor means being able to rewrite the meanings of nobility's visible symbolism, for the victor's glory is proportionate to the distance the vanquished have fallen, and the triumphal parade is the externalized index of that fall. The loss of this sense of identification is, for the peers, a challenge to national identity, reflected in the fracturing of territory that continues throughout the scene. In this context, the fracturing of identity is a kind of disenfranchisement, exile, or, in keeping with the body politic metaphor, a form of dismemberment.

Overcome with the sense of England's loss, Bedford declares, “Instead of gold we'll offer up our arms, / Since arms avail not, now that Henry's dead” (1.1.46-7). The arms of war he proposes to lay upon the altar are no less than the limbs of the body politic which are now paralysed and ineffectual without the royal head. With the loss of the privileged perspective of royal presence, the humiliation of the triumphal parade before the enemy's gaze leads to political and marshal impotence. Not soon to be cured, this malaise, Bedford prophesies, will visit future generations' “wretched years” until “Our isle be made a nourish of salt tears, / And none but women left to wail the dead” (1.1.48-51). Although Bedford invokes the dead king's ghost (significantly not the new king's presence) to “Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils!” (1.1.53), his conjuration is cut off mid-sentence by the messenger's news “Of loss, of slaughter, and discomfiture” (1.1.59) in France. Enacting this progress from visual mastery to humiliation to mutilation of the body politic, this scene establishes the pattern of the ensuing conflict of the play as the English encounter, not just the soldiers and the peers of France, but the prophetic, common gaze of the upstart, cross-dressing Joan la Pucelle.

Directly following this eulogy for the lost light of England—“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!” (1.1.1)—the setting shifts to France where the Dauphin and his peers, amazed at the ability of the lean and hungry English to strike on like clockworks even after they have been starved and beaten, prepare to withdraw and “let them alone” (1.2.41-44). At this point Joan makes her first appearance in the play, introduced by the Bastard of Orleans as a maid “Which by a vision sent to her from heaven / Ordainèd is to raise this tedious siege // The spirit of deep prophesy she hath / Exceeding the nine sibyls of old Rome” (1.2.52-56). Presented as a savior of the French cause, Joan is recommended, not for her skills in battle (although these will become apparent), but for her ability to see. Her first exchanges with Charles emphasize both her extraordinary vision and her ability to control her spectacular presentation: “I know thee well, though never seen before. / Be not amazed, there's nothing hid from me. / In private will I talk with thee apart. / Stand back, you lords, and give us leave awhile” (1.2.67-71). She is not fooled by Reignier's attempt to stand in for the Dauphin, and easily demotes him from Prince-pretender to peer, demonstrating that she knows a sovereign gaze when she sees it, and it does not sit in Reignier's eye.² Having demonstrated in this first overture her ability to know sovereignty and to use her mystic sight to name and un-name it, Joan establishes for herself the position of visual mastery, claiming a panoptic and uniquely privileged gaze from which nothing, even the future, is hidden. Furthermore, in drawing Charles apart with a commanding “Stand back, you lords,” she attempts to manipulate the conditions of her presentation, the terms by which she is seen, and, in doing so, disrupts the protocols of position by presuming to command.

Joan's description of the genesis of her power resonates with the spectacular identification with an ideal gaze and, through it, with a sense of national identity that the English in the opening scene of the play have lost:

God's Mother deignèd to appear to me,
And in a vision full of majesty
Willed me to leave my base vocation
And free my country from calamity.

(1.2.78-81)

Chosen to return the gaze in a vision of “complete glory” (1.2. 83) Joan becomes identified with that heavenly perspective; having seen the vision, she now claims to partake of an absolute vision from which “nothing is hid.” The transformative power of this gaze, which will turn French defeat into “assured success,” (1.2. 82) is written upon her body, once “black and swart” but now “infused” (1.2.84-5) with a beauty which she offers as an outward guarantor of her honest “wit untrained in any kind of art” (1.1.73).

In this sequence, the two opening scenes of the play suggest a disruption of the ceremony of succession. As Henry V's hearse is carried on and off the stage to an extended elaboration of “The King is dead,” the heir to his place of privileged vision is shown to be, not Henry VI, but Joan of Arc. With her assertion, “Expect Saint Martin's summer, halcyon days, / Since I have enterèd into these wars” (1.2.131-32), Joan appropriates the most powerful image of Henry's spectacular kingship, the sun. In usurping the role of privileged gazer, Joan transgresses a gamut of regulative categories. In Le Ménagier de Paris (1393), to give just one illustrative example, woman is admonished to “[k]eep your head straight, your eyelids lowered and unflinching and your glance directed straight in front of you, eight yards ahead and toward the ground, without moving it about” (qtd. in O'Faolain 167). The passage demonstrates the regulation, not just of women as objects of the gaze, but of female gazes. Directed to look straight ahead and at the ground, the woman is the acknowledged object of the gaze, the regulation of her own gaze working to mitigate against the breakdown of the subject/object relationship by which patriarchal power is consolidated. A wandering, or worse, direct gaze from a woman entails a sudden reversal of terms: as the one-time object assumes the role of subject she potentially binds the masculine subject to the triumphal car. Charles's supplication, “Meantime, look gracious on thy prostrate thrall,” (1.2.117), for all its Petrarchan triteness, signals, for the hierarchy-conscious, English audience of Shakespeare's theatre, an outrageous overthrow, all the more dangerous because Charles is no simple lover, but a king. So, too, Joan is not simply a woman, but a Frenchwoman, a peasant, the enemy, and, to go further, a boy playing a crossdressing woman in a theatre often condemned for its mockery of royalty by base-born actors and its violation of gendered codes of dress and behaviour. By appropriating the imagery proper to Henry V, Joan becomes, in an English context at least, a usurper, a monster, a conceptual nightmare. Much of the innuendo directed at Joan, like the accusations of witchcraft and whoredom she receives from her English enemies, is intended to alienate her from the identification she claims with the Holy Mother's glory and the king's privileged vision.

Joan's story is not true, of course, or, more precisely, how true it is depends on who is telling the story, but the disruptions precipitated by her transgressive nature are manifest. Unlike the eulogy for Henry, which, by placing him beyond our sight seeks to enable a heroic narrative to stand for him in our minds, Joan's introduction to the stage, although it is couched in similar rhetoric, is challenged by the dramatization of her openness to the gaze. The scene is contained within a doubled frame of observation, that of the sexual innuendo and commentary of Alençon and Reignier and that of ourselves as audience. Offering the beauty of her body as sign of her honest wit, claiming to be “untrained in any kind of art,” Joan presents herself to the gaze as one who has no secret interior beyond the visible surface. The significance of Joan's apparent openness, especially to the gaze of the audience, and the nature of this surface of presentation I will address below. At this juncture, however, Joan's arrival and attempted appropriation of the discourse of sunlike, prophetic sight nevertheless serve to locate the terms of the conflict within an economy of visual mastery and to body forth the crisis of hierarchy and social identity inaugurated by a defining and radical absence.

Having established in this economical way both the ideal of spectacular power and the consequences of its loss, the play moves on to elaborate and unfold the political, historical and epistemological implications of a visible economy without a defining centre. To the panoptic gaze of the ideal monarch, the play juxtaposes a problem of perspective. The rapidly developing artistic science of Shakespeare's day offered a paradoxical mix of true, full and realistic mastery of representational space and an awareness of the limitations of this mastery, for, as Ernest Gilman observes, “the very fullness and definition of perspective space implies the radical incompleteness of our vision, and the point of view becomes a drastic limitation, a set of blinders, as well as an epistemological privilege” (31). Assuming a particular point of view, the perspective picture structurally encodes its own blindspot, that is, the observer who necessarily does not appear within the frame, but whose presence and gaze are the governing principles of the painting's structural composition. Even as the painting presents itself as an image, therefore, its encoding of the observer as governing principle, that is, the presence and location that make the illusion of realistic representation intelligible, necessarily makes the observer the object of the painting. It is this relationship that the Rainbow Portrait exploits when it encodes as object the observer whose interpretive gaze activates the iconographical representation of a sovereignty defined by the power to turn all into objects. The observer, locating herself in the position of visual mastery, however, sees herself only as viewing subject, and is blind to the blindspot she inhabits. In her discussion of this dynamic in her book, Staging the Gaze, Barbara Freedman has identified this epistemological conceit as “spectator consciousness,” a model based on an observer who “stands outside of what she sees in a definite position of mastery over it” (9). This model of the gaze acknowledges the doubled nature of the dynamic, as Jean Gebser argues: “Perspectival vision and thought confine us within spatial limitations … The positive result is the con[c]retion of man [sic] and space; the negative result is the restriction of man to a limited segment where he perceives only one sector of reality” (18). This implication proves to be important to I Henry VI, where audiences, both onstage and off, play a witness's role that is woven even into the metaphorical and philosophical fabric of the drama.

The world in which 1 Henry VI takes place is a world evacuated of its panoptic vantage, a world that has fallen, as it were, into perspective where unitary vision is fractured into overlapping, fragmentary, and contestatory loci of sight.³ As such the play is plagued by the blindnesses peculiar to spectator consciousness. Repeatedly, characters on both sides of the conflict take up positions of visual mastery only to find themselves subject to a fatal blindness: certain of their mastery, they do not put themselves into the picture, they do not recognize themselves as objects, and they do not account for the dangers of either the return of the gaze or the limited scope and contrived reality of perspectival vision.

Act one, scenes four and five, which form in many ways a reprise of the first two scenes of the play, immediately establish the precariousness of visual mastery upon which the English rely before the besieged city of Orleans. The French master gunner, acting on information provided by the “Prince's espials,” directs his aim at the English generals who “Wont through a grate of iron bars / In yonder tower to overpeer the city, / And thence discover how with most advantage / They may vex us with shot or with assault” (1.4.8-13). In an almost cinematic cut, the scene shifts to the English in the tower, where Talbot recounts his story of his time spent as captive of the French. In a narrative actualization of the metaphorical triumph in Act one, scene one, Talbot describes his humiliation: “With scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts / In open marketplace produced they me / To be a public spectacle to all” (1.4.38-41). Talbot's phrasing, that in the marketplace “produced they me,” reveals a similar evacuation of identity that characterizes the earlier scene, since “produced” carries a double connotation of “made to appear” and “fashioned.” For Talbot, as for the peers at Henry's funeral, spectacle humiliation and exposure to the French gaze have the capacity to remake him as an object. It is just this kind of humiliation that incites Cleopatra to kill herself rather than to see an actor “boy [her] greatness / I' th' posture of a whore” (Antony and Cleopatra 4.2.220-21). Exposed before the taunting crowd, Talbot and his heroic narrative are open to a reinterpretation that hollows out his greatness, turning him into a substanceless mock-hero and literal straw man: “‘Here,’ said they, ‘is the terror of the French, / The scarecrow that affrights our children so’” (1.4.42-43). “Produced” as in a play, Talbot is forced to “boy” his own greatness; to appear in the flesh in this context is to be coerced into a parody of himself that threatens to empty out his identity and make him, like an actor, a shadow of his fame. Forced to play a role in a spectacular ritual, Talbot, specifically as a physical presence, is textualized as a grammar through which the French articulate their own narrative of glory. Talbot responds to this sarcastic debasement with a counter-narrative of resistance—“And with my nails digged stones out of the ground / To hurl at the beholders of my shame” (1.4.45-6)—through which he struggles to regain control of the site of seeing. For all its marshal ferocity, the counter-narrative is undermined by the stage direction that follows it: “Enter the Boy with a linstock.” The framing narrative of the scene, that of French ordinance and espials, interrupts Talbot's resistant gesture, revealing that, in spite of his apparent delivery from the triumphal car, Talbot and the English generals are still very much captives of the French gaze.

This continuity and the presence now on stage of the Boy, presumably on the mainstage below, contributes an added irony to Salisbury's invitation to Talbot and the others to look through the grate “And view the French how they fortify. / Let us look in; the sight will much delight thee” (1.4.61-2). The delight Salisbury takes is not so much in the view, but in his belief of his visual mastery of the scene, further emphasized by Gargrave and Glansdale's suggestions of targets on the panorama below, and by the anticipated revenge to be exacted on the French for their humiliation of Talbot. What the generals do not see is that their exposure to French artillery is precisely a consequence of their elevated position of mastery; they stand in their own blindspot and, because of this, believe that they can see without being seen. Salisbury's invitation, “Let us look in” (my emphasis), as implicit stage direction, indicates that the men look out over the stage and into the daylight O of the theatre in a metadramatic acknowledgement of their condition as objects of the gaze, an acknowledgement of which they, contained for the moment in the dramatic fiction of the tower, are unaware.⁴ Similarly, for all their discussion of the layout of the city and deployment of the Dauphin's troops in the distance, the generals and captains fail to observe the Boy in the foreground (they literally over-look him), the unseen watcher whose linstock will ignite the fatal shot.

Losing both his eye, the organ of sight, and part of his face, that surface that most represents an individual to the world, Salisbury wears on his body the signs of the dangerous circuit of the gaze and its violent return. Talbot's attempt to recover from the unexpected turn of events takes the form of an invocation of the familiar image of the sun: “One eye thou hast to look to heaven for grace. / The sun with one eye vieweth all the world” (1.4.83-4). But Talbot's appeal to this image of the all-seeing eye cannot recuperate lost mastery, for the king is dead, and in this world revolving around a vital absence, a French boy can topple the nobility from below; less than 20 lines later, peals of lightning and thunder herald the arrival of Joan la Pucelle, “A holy prophetess new risen up” (1.4.102), played by another boy, or perhaps even doubled by the Boy with the linstock. These two boys represent a radical challenge to the principles of hierarchy and the stability grounded on those principles. The sudden reversal at Orleans exemplifies this breakdown in the broader society: boys will kill men from a distance using guns, disdaining honourable hand-to-hand combat, a prentice will do his master's work, peasants will cozen noblemen, women will entrap them, petty jealousies will cause them to feed on one another. By the end of the next scene, Talbot's subjection to the gaze is complete. He laments: “Pucelle is ent'red into Orleans / In spite of us or aught that we could do. / O, would I were to die with Salisbury! / The shame hereof will make me hide my head” (1.5.36-39). The story of humiliation that began our relationship with Talbot in the previous scene culminates here in shame. Surveillance has become internalized as self-surveillance, and Talbot has become his own spectacle as he looks upon his dismal failure. As in the opening scene of the play, exposure is attendant upon debasement and a marshal impotence that is closely allied to the breakdown of established hierarchies.

The vanguard of a storm that ravages the social as much as the cosmic sphere, Joan's presence is coincident with roaring ordinance and rumbling thunder. Arriving at this moment of crisis, Joan is identified as its embodiment: she appropriates the language proper to the ideal of English monarchy, presumes to raise herself, though a peasant, the enemy, and a woman, to the height of visual mastery. Appearing before Rouen disguised as “la pouvre gens de France” (3.2.14), Joan confounds the desire for truth by appearing disguised as herself. Conflating truth and falsehood, strategy and verity in this way, Joan is the target of epistemological anxiety in the play, for she resists the anatomizing gaze by seemingly standing, like the “full” and “true” space of perspective painting, openly before it. Holy prophetess, maid, marshal hero, whore, witch and finally, mother, prisoner and condemned, Joan is the specular surface par excellence, a play of light that is always tantalizingly beyond the touch. The combat of the play, rhetorical as much as physical, is a struggle to control the signification of that reflecting surface. While Phyllis Rackin argues that Joan's “promiscuity” in this play, and Queen Margaret's adultery in the next, “are dramatically unnecessary,” serving only to “underscore the women's characterization as threats to masculine honour” (Stages 158), the play is not at all clear on the fact of Joan's promiscuity, a circumstance that points to an important dramatic necessity enfolded in Joan's multiple presentations of self. From the contesting images that pass for Joan's presence, there emerges, not a single self, a witch, who lies about her nature from the beginning of the play, but an overdetermined site of contestation where difference is installed as the prime mover of the dispute over territory. Without this moment of differentiation, played out in terms of sorcery and promiscuity, the English conquest of the French would be revealed to be a kind of self-mutilation: if France belongs to England, then this war is no less than a dismemberment of the politic body.

Because of the instability of Joan's specular surface, the structures of difference and authority staked upon her identity show an equal tendency toward an anxious indeterminacy, as the distinctions between the (righteous) English self and the (degraded) French Other are repeatedly shown to be illusory and strategic rather than natural. For instance, Talbot overturns his defeat at Orleans under cover of darkness, proving the English to be as “subtile-witted” as their enemy. Rouen, too, is seized by the French and retaken by the English in the space of a scene. The easy loss and recovery of positions of mastery in these scenes of attack and counter-attack testify to the instability of the visible economy in which these battles are waged. The holy prophetess “new risen” on the upward turn of Fortune's wheel will herself occupy an elevated position of visual mastery and will suffer the fall that inevitably comes with such a rise. But this dynamic is not one of simple reversal of terms, as the metaphor of Fortune's Wheel might suggest, for the rapid oscillation of subjects to objects of the gaze and back again is symptomatic of a more fundamental disturbance. The loss of the spectacular ideal of Henry V precipitates a collapse of categories of difference upon which national identity and epistemology are grounded. Phyllis Rackin astutely observes the challenge posed to English idealizing historiography and discourses of fame presented by French nominalism and association with sexuality and the body:

[A]t the rhetorical level, [the French] attack both the English version of history and the values it expresses with an earthy iconoclasm that subverts the inherited notions of chivalric glory invoked by the English heroes. Talbot, the English champion, and Joan, his French antagonist, speak alternative languages. His language reifies glory, while hers is the language of physical objects.

(Stages 150-51)

I would argue, however, that this binary model, like the oppositional rhetoric Rackin identifies, participates in the epistemological desire for dichotomous relations, a desire that is consistently thwarted in the play. In an epistemological model where the masculine, martial, English self is defined and consolidated by its opposition to a feminine, French Other, the crisis is to be found not merely in a conflict between opposed sets of terms (English words and French things), but rather in this opposition's collapse, in the possibility that the differences mobilized to justify territorial, national, religious, sexual, or historical dispute prove to be unstable and incapable of consolidating the identities staked upon them. It is for this reason that the appropriation of visual mastery by a French peasant woman must be figured as a usurpation of English right; to suggest that such mastery does not naturally adhere to only one side of mutually exclusive binarisms is to suggest a radical alternative to existing models of knowledge and identity. This deconstructive energy provokes in the play finally a strident (although incomplete) reassertion of English difference in what Gabriele Bernhard Jackson describes as Joan la Pucelle's violent and provocatively anxious recuperation by the dominant order (60).

The companion sorcery and trial scenes (5.3, 5.4) neatly illustrate the implications of this threatened collapse of difference and its violent and anxious reassertion through the identification and “exorcism” of Joan as witch. Joan's traffic with demons and her offered sacrifice of flesh seemingly solidify the dichotomous relations between English and French by demonstrating right before our very eyes her alignment with the forces of darkness, just as Talbot has insisted all along. Joan's promise that she will “lop a member off” (5.3.15) to give to the fiends in exchange for their prognostications, and her assertion that her “body shall / Pay recompense” if they will grant her suit (5.3.15, 18-19), are at first glance blatant instances of Joan's sexual openness and willingness to sell her flesh for her own purposes. Joan's offer to dismember her own body apparently provides proof of Talbot's indictments of both whoredom and witchery that ground the definition of French degradation against which English virtue is defined.

Even here, however, at what should be the moment of the most clarity in the play regarding Joan's slippery evasions of the defining gaze, we find in the language of self-mutilation a most graphic instance of the collapsing difference between the two factions. Talbot's presence is not felt in the scene merely because his early intuitions are here proved, but also because we hear in Joan's language of demonic sacrifice a troubling rhetorical echo. In his first encounter with Joan, Talbot declares: “My breast I'll burst with straining of my courage / And from my shoulders crack my arms asunder / But I will chastise this high-minded strumpet” (1.5.10-12). The similarity between the Talbot's patriotic martial declaration and Joan's demonic rhetoric is striking. Although Joan does not defeat Talbot at their initial encounter, he rhetorically dismembers himself in a way that foreshadows his own literal death later in the play. More importantly, both the hero and the witch in their rhetorical fervour sacrifice and mutilate their bodies in the theatre of war; Talbot offers up his limbs to king and country, as does Joan, who fears that France's glory, without the aid of her familiars, “droopeth to the dust” (5.3.29). It will be argued that Joan's sacrifices are manifestly to demons, while Talbot's are, presumably, to God, and it is not my purpose here to argue that Joan is not in this scene in league with devils. What I am arguing for, however, is a structural conjunction between the two scenes which, taken together, reveal that the appeal to dismembered bodies in these instances complicates the pat gratification of English desire for a resolution of the conflict into binary oppositions. The difference between Talbot's discourse of self-mutilation and Joan's is one of moral rectitude, but the contamination of English discourse by the very corporeal terms of the flesh they identify as French reveals the uncanny return of the Other within the boundaries of the self.⁵

If the borders between the self and the Other are dangerously permeable, the larger epistemological project of the play is the finding, knowing and policing of those borders. This project, fraught with the contradictions of visibility, is played out across the physical bodies of the characters: epistemological uncertainty is forcibly stabilized through violence. The sorcery scene, then, proves to be a particularly important juncture where we as audience—within whose experience this dramatic echo of self-mutilating language resonates—become implicated in the rhetorical, political and epistemological struggle to reestablish and police these threatened boundaries. As Derek Cohen observes, in this case, of the deposition scene of Richard II: “[I]n the political scheme of this world of power, murder becomes the logical means of reconciling the irreconcilable; it is a procrustean attempt to resolve through violence what cannot be resolved through logic” (23). Cohen continues: “Bolingbroke, in a sense, wants to be Richard, but can only succeed by seeming to be his opposite. The violence of the language of the play, straining as it does to break the bounds of rigid verse structures, derives from the attempt of each antagonist to propose himself as the opposite of the other” (26). In a visible economy in which opposition is justified as difference, violence, Cohen argues, becomes the site at which difference itself is fashioned and becomes meaningful as a term in the ideological conflict of the play. The violence of the play, instead of guaranteeing epistemological mastery, becomes instead what can be seen as an ineffectual reaction to the terrifying apparition of the Other who always threatens to return as the same. Thus, the trial scene which follows the sorcery scene presents to us a double image: on the one hand we see what appears to be a pat demonstration of a ceremony of exorcism, a clear demarcation between the pure and the corrupt; on the other hand this scene, like the funeral scene that opens the play, serves rather to reveal the failure of ceremonial protocol, that the violence to which Joan is subjected cannot ratify the dichotomy upon which English judicial superiority rests.

The end of the sorcery scene along with the trial scene together mark the point at which Joan's character is ostensibly finally stabilized as a witch, and Talbot's insistence to that effect proves to be correct. The scene is a prime example of exorcism based on the revelation of the transgressor to the judicial gaze: the moment that Joan's demonic affiliations are made apparent to us onstage is also the moment of her loss of privileged vision and power. After Joan is rejected by the fiends and captured by the English, Richard says of her, “See how the ugly witch doth bend her brows / As if, with Circe, she would change my shape” (5.3.34-5), referring both to the potential power of Joan's sorcerer's gaze and its loss. In this, the sorcery scene enacts the pattern of demonic exorcism in which, as Stephen Greenblatt observes, the spirit is “compelled by a spectacular spiritual counterforce to speak out and depart” (Negotiations 98-9). Like Greenblatt, Deborah Willis argues that the presence of spectators is essential to overcoming the witch in spectacular presentation: “The trial [of a witch] functions as a kind of countermagic, with judges and jury taking over some aspects of the role of the cunning folk, as the witch's exposure and forced confession also dissolve her magical powers” (107). Joan as witch is made visible precisely to be erased; she is subjected to “visible exclusion,”⁶ a gesture which seems to stabilize the difference between French corporeal debasement and English moral rectitude that is mobilized as justification for their opposition.

The definitive sorcery scene slips, however, into evasions that complicate its status in the judicial discourse of the trial scene that follows. That this is so can be demonstrated by the fact that we see Joan's traffic with demons, but the English do not. Since Joan is onstage alone as she reveals herself to be a conjurer, it is we in the audience who are enlisted as the judges, jury and “cunning folk” to bear witness to the act and to fulfil the ceremonial protocols of exorcism. We are in this way implicated in the condemnation that Joan receives, insofar as witchcraft is the cause, for none of the English “judges” has witnessed what we have seen. The tendency, however—and the dramatic structure of events specifically elicits this effect—is to attribute our knowledge to the English: we know that Joan is guilty of sorcery, ergo her condemnation as a whore can be justified as a slightly displaced comeuppance. Our own desire for epistemological mastery, implied by our positioning in the exorcism of the earlier scene, finds its fulfilment in what the play encourages us to read as the final stabilization of Joan's representation. It no longer matters whether we have seen Joan deny the Dauphin's advances or that we have heard even her French allies, Alençon and Reignier, drop acerbic asides about her possible sexual dalliance with the king. We have occupied a position of privileged vision, have observed Joan in a private moment and have seen, therefore, the “truth” of her enigmatic and contradictory character. This knowledge and position of privileged vision should, if we have been paying attention, make us very nervous. This nervousness arises when we realize that Joan's condemnation in the trial scene is constructed by the order of the presentation of the drama to appear to be a culmination of a condemnation begun in the sorcery episode. But as such a culmination, the later judgement is made based on evidence that only we have seen; in fact, the English ignorance of this scene has no effect on the final outcome of her trial, which is based, not on “proof” of Joan's sorcery, but on the English need to expose, humiliate and destroy the enemy. Joan is not a witch, in other words, because she has been shown to be one, but because the consolidation of English identity in opposition to the French who form their constitutive outside demands that she be so. The demonstration of Joan's transgression, therefore, has no role in the unravelling of the events of the play, but has everything to do with the dramatic manipulation of the audience in the context of a radical destabilization of certainties based on visibility. The sorcery scene does not, then, culminate in the trial scene, nor does it influence the represented action of that scene, but actually permits from the point of view of the audience the displacement from witchcraft to whoredom that enables the English to burn Joan at the stake.

The verity of our vision in the first scene, then, implicates us in the wilful distortion of the trial scene and the ruthlessness of the English judges, epitomized by their refusal to grant Joan “benefit of belly” when she discloses her pregnancy in a final attempt to escape execution. Joan's claim, first that the Dauphin, then Alençon, then Reignier, is the father of the child is rejected because the men are respectively the enemy, a “notorious Machiavel” (5.4.74) and “A married man” (5.4.79), and the child subsequently becomes a “sign that [Joan] hath been liberal and free” (5.4.82). As a whoreson, the child has no social being, and on this ground the judges deny Joan's claim to benefit of belly. In rejecting Joan's claim to judicial protocol, the English once again compromise their claims to moral superiority. As Jackson observes, “Joan is the butt of the brutal joke here, but it is unlikely that York and Warwick come off unscathed by the negative association of their total violation of English custom” (62). Simply by placing an Englishman on the stage during the sorcery scene—as in the next play for the entrapment of Duchess Eleanor—Shakespeare could have avoided this complication and recuperated the trial scene in a discourse of justice. That he does not do so suggests that this manipulation of the protocols of “evidence” is implicated in deeper questions about identity and epistemological desire.

The trial scene represents a distortion of the protocols of evidence in two ways: first, because the judges' condemnation of Joan on the grounds of promiscuity is given dramatic support by the sorcery scene of which we, and not they, were witness, and; second, because the pregnancy which should elicit a standard reprieve is reread as justification for the circumvention of the law. Our privileged viewpoint on the one hand and the judges' wilful blindness on the other are subject to a rebounding of the juridical gaze upon those who claim its rights, as Jackson concludes: “[I]n a final twist of meaning, as we have seen, the terms of Joan's reintegration into conservative ideology recognizably damage her captors' own ideological sanction” (64). In this final instance of the deployment of a stabilizing gaze, Joan proves to be a reflecting surface yet again.

Even while noting this tendency for the captors to be contaminated by the rebounding infamy of the condemned, Jackson makes a common critical assumption. She writes: “Although Joan is only pretending, her captors are at best playing cat and mouse with her as they condemn her supposed child to death anew each time she assigns it a different father” (62, my emphasis). This assumption that Joan is “only pretending” about her pregnancy, a position general among critics, reveals a critical belief that Joan really is a maid as she earlier claims, and as the historical record tends to support. However, if, on the one hand, Joan is a promiscuous sorceress, if the French innuendo is taken to supplement and validate English invective, then it is possible that Shakespeare's Joan (as opposed to the historical Joan) could be pregnant at this point. If this is the case, then the English are murderers of an innocent and become villains at the moment when the condemnation of the criminal should ideally crystallize their identities in opposition to feminine, French, peasant, enemy illegitimacy. If, on the other hand, we assert that Joan is “only pretending” when there is no more evidence to that effect than there is of its opposite, then we must acknowledge an unarticulated critical desire that has already solidified a significant aspect of her identity, sorcery scene, conflicting reports and innuendo notwithstanding. The critical desire for Joan not to be pregnant is as much an imposition as the judges' desire for her pregnancy to “prove” her villainy. As critics, we participate in, or more precisely, we perform the slippage and evasions that characterize the English as judges.

Recognizing ourselves in this judicial tableau, we also confront our own confidence in historical knowledge. Do we see Joan, even in the privacy of the sorcery scene, as a unified subject, or does this dramatis persona,⁷ poised between history and fiction, reflect back to us our own desire for unity? The scene of privacy, like the sorcery scene or a standard soliloquy of the Hamlet type, is conventionally assumed to present truth to the audience—the character alone on stage is not considered to be performing for an outside world in a potential state of duplicity, but is felt, rather, to be “being herself.” No-one “acts” unless she feels she is being observed. The image of the “witch” onstage alone establishes conventional expectations of unmediated, “true,” representation; however, our knowledge of the historical record, as Jackson's assertion suggests, does in fact mediate, does trouble the visible fact of Joan's onstage “promiscuity,” placing us in a liminal space between drama and history, visible evidence and desire. In manipulating the boundary between historical knowledge and dramatic construct, the two scenes of sorcery and condemnation manoeuvre us into a position where our sense of mastery is challenged by the dramatization of the notion that even the most likely images of truth give us access only to further duplicities in a treacherous labyrinth of contradiction. Shakespeare's mobilization of history (in this case our extratextual belief that Joan is a maiden as historical record tells us), serves not as a guarantor of validity, legitimacy or truth, but rather as a challenge to both history's status as knowledge and our confidence that privileged vision is equivalent to truth. In the interaction of these two scenes, we become aware of our spectator consciousness and the limitations that conceit of mastery implies. Pregnant or not, sorceress or not, historical figure or Shakespearean construct, Joan's uncertain and shifting position between history and fiction, between what we see and what we are told, challenges our belief that seeing is believing. Shakespeare gets us coming and going.

Throughout the trial scene Joan displays all of her masks and the transgressions of boundaries attendant upon them: disclaiming her peasant father, she claims noble birth, then heavenly descent; professing purity, she then “discovers” her pregnancy. Each persona—upstart peasant, holy maid, mother, whore—is rehearsed and stripped away in the course of the action, leaving behind, not an inner core revealed to the gaze hungry to know her and thus to contain her, but a strange emptiness. She is pregnant and not pregnant, a maid and a whore, a pretender and a savior, an enemy and a victim of ruthless injustice. As such, she takes upon her the anxieties attendant upon the collapsing discourses of hierarchy that make this world intelligible to those who act within it. The destruction enacted by Boys and women in the play, the abandonment of heros by their armies, the language of demonization and degradation, with its reiteration of “Dogs! Cowards! Dastards!” (1.2.35) and “strumpet,” “pussel,” and “whore,” all signal the collapse of hierarchy and the identities staked upon it. In the wake of the definitive scenes of the play, therefore, Joan exits as much an enigma as she ever was. Rising in an image of sun-like mastery, Joan's specular surface in fact reflects a strange emptiness where the real sun, the idealized figure of Henry V, should have been.

Notes

1. I have noted elsewhere this dynamic of the penetrative spectacle of power in which royal self-presentation is coded as a demonstration that, in its assertion of self-sufficiency, elides the reading power of its intended audience. See my article, “‘Industrious Scenes and Acts of Death’: Visible Economies and the (Dis)Appearing ‘I’” English Studies in Canada 24.1 (1998). 1-24., for a more detailed account of this unstable structure. Stephen Greenblatt notes a similar construction in which the monarch's spectacular presence functions like a theatre which depends upon the participation of the observing subject, but insists upon an unbreachable barrier between audience and spectacle (Negotiations, 64-5).

2. Shakespeare will exploit Reignier's status as the pauper-King of Naples and Jerusalem later in this play and in the next, when Suffolk will trade on behalf of Henry VI a significant portion of France for Reignier's daughter, Margaret. Dismissed and figuratively demoted by a mere peasant woman in this scene, Reignier will later inherit a kingdom in an overturning of hierarchy that is the preoccupation of this play and the two that follow.

3. Phyllis Rackin observes a similar structure in terms of historiography in Shakespeare's second tetralogy, which she identifies as a “fall into time” in a “postlapsarian world”: “The linear, causal structure of Richard II is replaced in the Henry IV plays by a proliferation of subplots that cannot be subsumed under the temporal principle of teleology; instead, they are tenuously connected by the spatial principles of analogy, parody, contrast, and juxtaposition” (Stages 136-37).

4. Christopher Pye further extends this “calculus of theatrical relations” of the gaze to include the theatre audience, “[f]or the moment Talbot ‘overpeers the city,’ overlooking the canon [sic] below and gazing out beyond the stage, is also the moment that the audience finds its own masterful and subjecting gaze returning upon it.” At this instant of transgression, “the moment spectacle returns the gaze … the boundary between viewer and spectacle is rent” (“Market” 509). This returning gaze rebounds yet again in the form of a shot that strikes off Salisbury's cheek and eye.

5. Note too, that at the funeral of Henry V Bedford performs his own rhetorical conjuration, saying: “Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate: / Prosper this realm, and keep it from civil broils!” (1.1.52-3). Granted that Henry is not here a fiend, the first invocation of otherworldly spirits in the play is nevertheless an English one. Furthermore, at the siege of Orleans, the sexual division upon which national distinctions are made are also challenged. As they plan their strategy, Talbot and Burgundy's speech is contaminated with the sexual images attendant upon their proposed penetration of the feminized city. Hoping, in making their “entrance several ways,” that if one party fails “The other yet may rise against their force” (2.1.30-2), Talbot chooses his literal and metaphorical place of attack: “And here will Talbot mount, or make his grave” (2.1.34). The language of marshal strategy, with its “mounting” and “rising,” betrays the grounding terms of the conflict in the scene as the exclusive options of phallic conquest and nothingness: a penetration of the feminized French city or “his grave.” In their recourse to the corporeal language of sexual penetration, the English undermine their own claims to purity, for they are involved in the very penetration of Joan that is the defining characteristic of the enemy.

6. See “‘Industrious Scenes and Acts of Death’: King John's Visible Economy and the (Dis)Appearing ‘I’” (2-3).

7. Jackson challenges those readings that see Joan as a unified subject with a reading that sees her as genuinely multiplicitous, as a dramatis persona whose multiple identities proliferate through time as the character fulfils a variety of context-bound dramatic functions. In this sense, Joan is not a witch masquerading as a maid, but is rather a maid and a witch, depending upon when we encounter her in the play: “The changing presentation allows Joan to perform in one play inconsistent ideological functions that go much beyond discrediting the French cause or setting off by contrast the glories of English chivalry in its dying moments” (44). Joan's identity, she concludes, has less to do with unity and more to do “with the way in which a character is perceived by the audience at a particular moment of dramatic time” (42). Contradictory, but not duplicitous therefore, Joan is not available to the regulative gestures of exorcism. Exorcism as a mode of definition operates in a vertical paradigm in which the occult is brought to light, the deeper meaning is brought to the surface and the doubleness of artifice is collapsed into the “real,” which is, in this model, coextensive with the visible. Proliferating horizontally through dramatic time, Joan's “character,” as dramatis persona, has no inner substance to bring to the regulative light of the patriarchal, English, nationalist, judicial gaze.

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