SOURCE: Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard. “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc.” English Literary Renaissance 18, no. 1 (winter 1988): 40-65.

[In the following excerpt, Jackson concentrates on the symbolic power of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part 1 and maintains that this character would have elicited Elizabethan associations with Amazons, warrior-women, and witches.]

Glory is like a circle in the water,(1)
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
With Henry's death the English circle ends;
Dispersed are the glories it included.

1 Henry VI, 1.2.133-37²

This wonderfully evocative description of the everything that is nothing, an exact emblem of the rise and disintegration, in Shakespeare's first tetralogy, of one new center of power after another, is assigned to Joan of Arc, the character whom most critics agree in calling a coarse caricature, an exemplar of authorial chauvinism both national and sexual, or at best a foil to set off the chivalric English heroes of 1 Henry VI. Her portrait, says Geoffrey Bullough in his compilation of Shakespeare's sources, “goes far beyond anything found in Hall or Holinshed or in the Burgundian chronicler Monstrelet.”³ Bullough ruefully lauds Shakespeare's mastery in discrediting the entire French cause through Joan; many subsequent critics have shared Bullough's admiration, although not his compunction, over the skill with which Shakespeare delineated an “epitome of disorder and rebellion” to pit against the “epitome of order and loyalty,” the English hero Talbot: “She is absolutely corrupt from beginning to end,” rejoices the author of one book on Shakespeare's history plays.⁴ When the play was presented in 1591 or 1592, English troops were once again in France, once again supporting a claim to the French crown, a claim by another Henry—their religious ally Henry of Navarre. “A play recalling the gallant deeds of the English in France at an earlier period … would be topical,” Bullough rightly says.⁵

The portrait of Joan, by this calculus of relation between drama and social context, takes its place among “English attempts to blacken the reputation of Joan of Arc”⁶—an easy task in the Elizabethan period, when women “who refuse[d] the place of silent subjection” could, like Shakespeare's Joan in Act 5, be carted to execution as witches.⁷ By this reckoning, the character of Joan of Arc becomes a regrettable sign of the times.

Neither the content nor the form of Joan's words about glory easily supports such a reading. Joan's image of the circle in the water is not only the most poetically resonant statement in the play, it is also specifically borne out by the action. The eloquence of her recognition that all human achievement is writ in water, one of the play's thematic pressure points, sorts ill with a lampooned character “coarse and crude in language and sensibility.”⁸ Yet 1 Henry VI does contrast English chivalry, especially in the figure of heroic Talbot, with the pragmatism of the French, especially Joan, and Act 5 does dispel both Joan's power and her pretensions to divine aid in a series of progressively less dignified scenes.⁹

First she vainly offers diabolical spirits her blood and sexual favors in exchange for continued French success; subsequently captured, she rejects her old father to claim exalted birth; finally, faced with the prospect of death by burning, she claims to be pregnant, shifting her allegation of paternity from one French leader to another in response to her captors' insistence that each of these is a man whose child should not be allowed to live.

Perhaps it is a reflection as much on accepted critical standards of aesthetic unity as on the gullibility of individual critics that several have read this last scene as Joan's admission of sexual activity with the whole French camp. Ridiculous as such a reading is, it does at least integrate Act 5 with what precedes, undercutting Joan's claims to virginity just as her conjuring undercuts her claims to divinity. Such an interpretation of Act 5 makes it synchronic with previous acts in meaning; only the revelation of that meaning is postponed. Similarly, Joan's claims to divine mission, which she never mentions again after her introductory speeches in Act 1, become in such an interpretation synchronic with the action which follows them. In the long central section of the drama, according to such a unified interpretation, Joan's prior assertion of godliness struggles against Talbot's repeated assertions of diabolism until Act 5 vindicates Talbot. The unstated premise of this kind of reading is that temporally multiple suggestions of meaning collapse finally into an integrated pattern that transcends the temporal process of dramatic presentation. In this final pattern, all suggested assignments of value are reconciled and each plot line or character allotted its proper plus or minus sign sub specie unitatis. The individual incident or dramatic effect has no more final autonomy than a number in a column for addition has in the sum below the line. These assumptions are very clear in Riggs' influential 1971 summation of Joan's character: “Beneath these postures, Joan is generically an imposter. … Hence the scenes in which she is exposed and burnt as a witch, like the stripping of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, serve a formal expository purpose that supersedes any need for a controlled, sequacious plot.”¹⁰

Now of course the typical Shakespearean play does have a very powerful sense of ending, partly brought about by a “formal expository” resolution of difficult issues. I want to emphasize, however, that it is equally typical of Shakespeare to present unexplained and suggestive discontinuities. One might remember the complete reversal of Theseus' attitude to the lovers in Midsummer Night's Dream: having backed up Hermia's coercive father in Act 1 by citing the unalterable law of Athens, Theseus reappears in Act 4 (after a two-act absence) to overrule the same father and the same law with no explanation whatever. A more subtle version of this kind of turnabout occurs when Othello, calmly superior in Act 1 to the accusation that he has used sorcery in his relationship with Desdemona, informs her in Act 3 that the handkerchief which was his first gift to her is a magical talisman. In these instances, the critic's expectation of unity forces interpretive strategy back on unspoken motivations and implicit character development, raising such questions as whether Othello deliberately lied to the senate in Act 1, or when exactly he gave Desdemona the handkerchief. I want to propose that these are unsuitable strategies and questions for a phenomenon that has little to do with unity of character and much to do with the way in which a character is perceived by the audience at a particular moment of dramatic time. I would argue that in Act 1 Othello had not given Desdemona a magic handkerchief as his first gift, but in Act 3 he had. It is a matter of the character's consonance with the key into which the movement of the play has modulated.

This is not the place to make a detailed case for such an interpretive approach or to try to identify for these examples the reasons—external to a concept of character as coherent selfhood—that direct a change in Shakespeare's presentation. Applying such an approach to the problem of Joan's significance, however, permits us to recognize and give individual value to the phases of her portrayal, which, not untypically for Shakespeare, is partially continuous and partially disjunct. 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.¹¹ As Bullough long ago suggested, the play's ideology is topical, but in what way and to what end cannot be answered as simply as he or some of the play's subsequent critics have believed.¹² To characterize its main military hero, Talbot, the play alludes specifically to the contemporaneous French expedition led by Essex, as John Munro first suggested, but it incorporates far more ideologically ambiguous detail than has been recognized. Similarly, for its presentation of Talbot's national and sexual opposites, the three Frenchwomen who are the play's only female characters, it draws heavily on the current controversy about the nature of women and on the interrelated types of the Amazon, the warrior woman, the cross-dressing woman, and the witch, all figures that—for a variety of reasons—were at the end of the sixteenth century objects of fascination both in England and on the continent.

It is now generally accepted that the play dates from 1591/92, when English troops under Essex had been sent to France for the particular purpose of besieging Rouen; the play unhistorically dramatizes that city's recapture from the French. Actually, Rouen had never been retaken, nor was it after this hopeful piece of stagecraft. But the parallel does not remain general and wishful. The play explicitly links Talbot to the current effort through a neatly turned compliment to Queen Elizabeth which has, oddly, been deflected by critics to Essex alone. Bearing away the fallen Talbot and his son, the English messenger declares: “from their ashes shall be rear'd / A phoenix that shall make all France afeard” (4.7.92-93). The phoenix was one of Elizabeth's emblems; Shakespeare uses it again in Henry VIII. She had not up to this time fulfilled the messenger's prediction: early military success against French forces in Scotland had been completely cancelled by a disastrous occupation of Le Havre in 1563. The vaunting compliment can only refer to the most recent French expedition. Its leader—the dashing young popular favorite, Essex—would be an eminently suitable candidate for the role of Talbot redivivus.¹³ In 1591 the becalmed campaign was serving as backdrop for his exploits, one of them mimicked by another of the play's departures from its sources. Encamped before Rouen, “Essex sent a challenge to the Governor of the town daring him to fight either a duel or a tournament,” which was, not surprisingly, declined.¹⁴ In 1 Henry VI, Talbot similarly challenges Joan and her supporters as they stand victorious on the walls of Rouen (2.2.56ff.).¹⁵ He is contemptuously rebuffed by Joan in one of those moments when English chivalry confronts French pragmatism: “Belike your lordship takes us then for fools, / To try if that our own be ours or no” (3.2.62-63). A critic guided by the play's obvious national sympathies could plausibly feel that Joan's reply, however momentarily amusing, lacks magnanimity.

A closer look at the topical link between Talbot and Essex, however, suggests a more complicated ideological situation. Both the expedition and its leadership were controversial. Henry IV had broken his promise of reinforcements for a first set of troops, sent in 1589, and Elizabeth sent the second army with misgivings, putting the hot-headed Essex in command with a reluctance well justified by the results. “Where he is or what he doth or what he is to do,” she wrote angrily to her other officers, “we are ignorant.”¹⁶ Halfway through the expedition she ordered her uncontrollable deputy home, although he talked her into sending him back. A likely rescripting of this sequence of events appears in Act 3, where Talbot interrupts his conquests to go and visit his sovereign “with submissive loyalty of heart” (3.4.10) and receives acclaim, reward, and a commission to return to battle (3.4.16-27, 4.1.68-73). In the second of these scenes, Talbot strips a coward of his underserved Order of the Garter and makes a long speech about the value of “the sacred name of knight” (4.1.33ff.)—another touchy subject after Essex's temporary recall, for he had just knighted twenty-four of his do-nothing soldiers. Lord Treasurer Burghley kept this news from Her Majesty as long as he could; Elizabeth was notoriously stingy with new titles—holding, in fact, rather the attitude expressed by Shakespeare's Talbot. She had wanted to deny Essex the privilege of dubbing knights, and remarked caustically on hearing of the twenty-four newcomers to fame unsupplemented by fortune, “his lordship had done well to have built his almshouses before he had made his knights.”¹⁷

Are these portions of Talbot's behavior and speech, then, aligned with the latest news from France in order to celebrate Essex?¹⁸ Or do they obliquely defend him by rewriting his indiscretions in more acceptable terms, sympathetically dramatizing the “real” meaning of his grand gestures? Or do Talbot's loyal actions, on the contrary, undercut the play's apparent endorsement of Essex by showing how a truly great champion acts? The answers are not at all clear.¹⁹ What is evident is that the play situates itself in an area of controversy easily identifiable by its audience, an area of growing ideological conflict in which a “war party” contested, if it did not openly confront, the Queen's favored policy of negotiation, delay, and minimal expenditure. Far from playing down the controversial aspects of Essex's command, the drama singles them out for reenactment, but presents them in such a manner that either side could claim the play for its own. In light of the play's tendency to go both ways, Joan's sardonic reply to Talbot's challenge acquires an integrity of its own, sounding surprisingly like the voice of Her caustic Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Is the play, then, lauding chivalry or correcting it? Is it pro-war or not? This irritable reaching after fact and reason that Keats found so uncharacteristic of Shakespeare is not soothed by the parallels between Talbot and Essex or by the tone of Joan's voice. The coexistence of ideologically opposed elements is typical of the play's dramatic nature and foreshadows the mature Shakespeare.

Critical examination of the play's three women has not proceeded on this assumption. The perceived dominance of patrilineal and patriarchal ideology in Shakespeare's era and in the play's action has been the basis of most interpretations, whether feminist or masculinist.²⁰ The three women have been seen as a trio of temptresses,²¹ of threats to male and particularly English hegemony and to the chivalric ideal,²² as incarnations of what Marilyn French calls the “outlaw feminine principle.”²³ This kind of negative reading, like the purely positive reading of the play's military expedition, has support in the action. All three women are in different ways unconventionally strong and all three threaten the English with losses. Coppélia Kahn's claim that Shakespeare is here exposing, but not sharing in, male anxieties about women is surely counsel of desperation.²⁴ Fortunately, it is not the only alternative to pathological or paternalistic Shakespeare. Like the positive militaristic reading, with which it is closely connected, the negative misogynist one neglects both the play's topicality and the historical moment's ideological complexity.

The nature of women had long been under discussion in western Europe in a semi-playful controversy that became especially active in sixteenth-century England. Contributors to this controversy buttressed or undercut female claims to virtue by citing exempla, worthy or unworthy women chosen from history, the Bible, and legend. As Linda Woodbridge's recent account of this literary sub-genre in England points out, “The formal controversy did not always appear full-blown, in carefully developed treatises; it was sometimes sketched in cameo, with the names of a few exemplary women stamped on it like a generic signature.”²⁵ The 1560s had seen a spate of plays about individual exempla in the controversy. By the time 1 Henry VI appeared, the controversy had already been naturalized into narrative fiction by George Pettie's A petite pallace of … pleasure (1576) and Lyly's best-selling Euphues (1578). In these fictional contexts, the old techniques “could be used to characterize, to comment on the action, even to advance the plot.”²⁶1 Henry VI incorporates just such a cameo controversy. The play's three women are surrounded by allusions to legendary females which problematize their evaluation. The Countess of Auvergne compares herself to Tomyris, a bloody warrior queen, and is connected by verbal echo with the Queen of Sheba—two entirely opposite figures.²⁷ Margaret of Anjou is cast in her lover's description of his situation as Helen of Troy (5.5.103ff.), a woman claimed by both attackers and defenders in the controversy. Joan appears amidst a tangle of contradictory allusions: she is among other identifications a Sibyl, an Amazon, Deborah, Helen the mother of Constantine, and Astraea's daughter to the French, but Hecate and Circe to the English. Of the women alluded to in 1 Henry VI, eleven appear as exempla in the formal controversy. The genre itself was tolerant of, not to say dependent upon, divergent evaluations of the same phenomenon: a number of its exempla, like Helen of Troy, appeared regularly on both sides, and some writers handily produced treatises both pro and con. It would come as no surprise to readers of the controversy that one man's Sibyl is another man's Hecate.

1 Henry VI should be classed with what Woodbridge calls the “second flurry of plays centering on prominent exempla of the formal controversy,” which “appeared in the late 1580s and 1590s.”²⁸ Its deployment of these stock figures is as germane to its ideology as its structural alignment of the female characters, but whereas the play's structure points in the direction of synthesis, of the synchronic or temporally transcendent reading, the exempla point towards differentiation, the temporally disjunctive reading.

Joan is evaluated by the French choice of exempla at the beginning and by the English choice at the end. At all times before Act 5, however, because of the armor she is described as wearing and the military leadership she exercises, she is an example of what the Elizabethans called a virago, a woman strong beyond the conventional expectations for her sex and thus said to be of a masculine spirit.²⁹ The increasing fascination of such women is evident in the proliferation of Amazons, female warriors, and cross-dressing ladies in the English fiction and drama of the late sixteenth century.

The Amazon and the warrior woman were already established as two of the most valued positive exempla of the controversy over women. Joan is identified with both immediately on her entry into the play's action: “thou art an Amazon,” exclaims the Dauphin, “And fightest with the sword of Deborah” (1.2.104-05). The power of this combination reaches beyond the arena of the formal debate. Spenser had just used it in The Faerie Queene, published 1590, in praise of “the brave atchievements” of women (3.4.1.3): those “warlike feates … Of bold Penthesilee,” the Amazon who aided the Trojans, or the blow with which “stout Debora strake / Proud Sisera” (3.4.2.4-5, 7-8).³⁰ For him these two fighters define Britomart, his female knight in armor, who in turn defines Queen Elizabeth, “whose lignage from this lady I derive along” (3.4.3.9). Both Amazons and women warriors already had some degree of British resonance because the Trojans who received Penthesilea's help were the supposed ancestors of the British, while a proud chapter in legendary English history recounted Queen Boadicea's defense of her country against Roman invasion. The evocation of heroines related to England is continued by Joan's association with Saint Helen, the mother of Constantine; though not a warrior, this finder of the remains of the true cross was by popular tradition British.³¹ The Dauphin's welcome to Joan is thus calculated to arouse the most unsuitably positive and even possessive associations in an Elizabethan audience.

Elizabethan literature of course contained many other Amazons besides Penthesilea; the race had a long and honorable history, derived from such respected authorities as Plutarch, Ovid, and Apollonius of Rhodes.³² In the sixteenth century Amazons became a topic of current relevance when exploration of the Americas and Africa began bringing reports of Amazonian tribes sighted or credibly heard of.³³ Within a brief period after 1 Henry VI, both Ralegh (1596) and Hakluyt (1599) would specify the Amazons' exact location. Perhaps because of their increased timeliness, Amazons were also about to become a vogue on stage; they would appear in at least fourteen dramatic productions from 1592 to 1640.³⁴

Elizabethan stage Amazons are all either neutral or positive, an evaluative convention generally in line with their ever more frequent mention in Elizabethan non-dramatic literature. On the other hand, The Faerie Queene contains an evil Amazon alongside its positive allusions. For the Amazon figure was inherently double: although “models of female magnanimity and courage” who appeared regularly in lists of the nine female worthies and were venerated both individually and as a race, Amazons were also acknowledged to be at times cruel tormentors of men.³⁵ From the very beginning, then, Joan's ideological function is complicated to the point of self-contradiction: she seems both French and English, both a type of Penthesilea who helps her countrymen in battle and an unspecified Amazon who may embody threats to men—in fact, a representative of the full complexity of late Elizabethan perception of the strong woman.

These contradictions continue for as long as Joan appears in the role of woman warrior. Although she triumphs over the English and so must be negative, she carries with her a long positive tradition reaching back to Plato's assertions that women could and should be trained for martial exercise and to the figure of the armed goddess Minerva. These classical references as well as invocations of the Old Testament Deborah and Judith figured repeatedly in the formal defenses of women. Female military heroism under special circumstances carried the prestigious sanction of Elyot, More, and Hoby, and Joan's actions conform to the pattern they approved as well as to the current literary conventions defining a praiseworthy female warrior. She fights in defense of her country, “particularly under siege,” and converts the Duke of Burgundy to her cause with a simile that likens France to a dying child (3.3.47-49)—defense of her children being a recognized motivation of the virtuous woman fighter.³⁶ Like Spenser's Britomart and countless others, she deflates male boasts and engages in a validating duel with a would-be lover.

As Spenser's connection of Britomart with Queen Elizabeth suggests, the tradition of the woman warrior acquired particular contemporaneous relevance from her existence. The maiden warrior-goddess Minerva provided an irresistible parallel with the virginal defender of Protestantism, who even before the year of the Armada was called “for power in armes, / And vertues of the minde Minervaes mate” by Peele in The Arraignment of Paris (1584).³⁷ Deborah, a magistrate as well as her country's savior in war, was also adopted immediately into the growing iconology of Elizabeth: the coronation pageant contained a Deborah, and the name was frequently used thereafter for the queen.³⁸ Not unexpectedly, Spenser identifies the Trojan-oriented Penthesilea as an analogue of his Belphoebe, the avowed representation of Queen Elizabeth.³⁹

In light of these accumulated associations, a Minerva-like French leader who is a Deborah and Amazon, and is also called “Astraea's daughter” (1.6.4) at a time when Astraea, goddess of justice, was another alter ego of Elizabeth, must be reckoned one of the more peculiar phenomena of the Elizabethan stage.⁴⁰

Notes

1. This essay was first presented at the 1986 World Shakespeare Conference in Berlin and, in another form, at the Northeast Modern Language Association on 3 April 1987. It shares a common concern about Joan's ideological ambiguity with an independent study by Leah Marcus in her forthcoming book Shakespeare and the Unease of Topicality, but we arrive at different conclusions. Professor Marcus emphasizes Queen Elizabeth's complex projected image and its reception by her subjects, while the present essay examines late Elizabethan literary embodiments of the strong woman; Professor Marcus' discussion of topical references in 1 Henry VI is much more extensive than mine and will surely be the definitive treatment of that matter.

2. Citations are from The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962).

3. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York, 1960), III, 41.

4. Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus, Oh., 1971), pp. 46-47. In the same spirit, Don M. Ricks identifies the tone she sets as “treachery, depravity, and insolence” in Shakespeare's Emergent Form: A Study of the Structures of the Henry VI Plays (Logan, Utah, 1968), p. 45. So common is the critical view of Joan as a moral write-off that she is sometimes assigned reprehensible behavior that does not even occur in the text, as when Catherine Belsey remarks that she “puts heart into the enemy by her rhetoric,” in The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York, 1985), p. 183. At the very least she is presumed to be the butt of continuous irony (e.g., by David Bevington in “The Domineering Female in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 2 [1966], 51-58 and John Wilders in The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays [Totowa, N.J., 1978], p. 36). A signal exception is H. M. Richmond in Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York, 1967), who allows her “heroic power” and even some “magnetism”; he also goes quite against the current of critical commentary by alluding to “her subtlety and finesse” (p. 23), but he agrees on “the harshness of the portrait” (p. 22).

5. Bullough, pp. 24-25.

6. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex, 1983), p. 124.

7. Belsey, p. 184.

8. Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York, 1981), p. 47.

9. See David Riggs, who admirably elucidates the play's structure in Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 100ff. On the play's ideology we disagree.

10. Riggs, p. 107. Riggs' view has been more recently affirmed by Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, 1981), pp. 88-89 and n. 39. Ricks and David Sundelson also make explicit, in slightly different ways, a criterion of integration to explain the last act: “her final degeneration in Act V is but a spectacular demonstration of the unsaintliness which has been implicit in her words and behavior all along. There is nothing contradictory, therefore, about the two views of Joan as Pucelle and as ‘Puzzel’ [whore]” (Ricks, p. 46); “Shakespeare himself seems unable to tolerate any uncertainty about the source of Joan's potency. He resolves the matter with a scene in which she conjures …, thus confirming Talbot's explanation” (David Sundelson, Shakespeare's Restorations of the Father [New Brunswick, N.J., 1983], p. 20).

11. See, e.g., Rabkin, pp. 86-87.

12. Detailed proposals of the play's topicality have been made by T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Plays 1592-1594 (Urbana, Ill., 1959), pp. 324-40. Less extended suggestions of parallels have come from J. Dover Wilson in the introduction to his edition of The First Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1952), pp. xviii-xix; Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977), pp. 119-26; John Munro in TLS [Times Literary Supplement] October 11, 1947; Hereward T. Price, Construction in Shakespeare, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology No. 17 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1951), pp. 25-26; and Ernest William Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays: An Essay in Historical Criticism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963). Leah Marcus offers a most thorough treatment of many of the play's topical allusions that takes full account of their complexity in “Elizabeth,” a section of her forthcoming Shakespeare and the Unease of Topicality. See note 1 above.

13. John Munro first interpreted the lines about the phoenix as a reference to Essex. J. Dover Wilson follows suit in his introduction to the play, where he also suggests that “Talbot was intended to stand as in some sort the forerunner of Essex” (p. xix). T. W. Baldwin, in his study of the play's “literary genetics,” is dubious about Munro's identification but agrees that the allusion is to “the English armies in France 1589 and following” (p. 334). E. W. Talbert similarly cites Munro and also accepts the play's connection with the Essex expedition (pp. 163-64 and p. 163 n. 6).

14. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. 337.

15. Dover Wilson sees the parallel between Talbot's and Essex's challenges, but interprets it simply as a reminiscence of Essex's gallantry (p. xix). He considers the play “an outlet for the growing sense of exasperation, anger, and even despair which was felt in London at the impending failure of an invasion of France” (p. xvi).

16. Neale, p. 335.

17. Neale, p. 336. Elizabeth called the campaign “rather a jest than a victory” and ordered Essex home for good in January 1592 (Neale, p. 337).

18. That a steady stream of ephemera carried bulletins from France to English readers is evident from the entries in the Stationers' Register. The diversity of possible attitudes to the expedition is perhaps suggested by the contrasting titles of two such pieces: an obviously enthusiastic “ballad of the noble departinge of the right honorable the Erle of ESSEX lieutenant generall of her maiesties forces in Ffraunce and all his gallant companie” (23 July 1591) and a possibly more ominous-sounding “letter sent from a gentleman of accoumpte concerninge the true estate of the Englishe forces now in Ffraunce under the conduct of the right honorable the Erle of ESSEX” (6 September 1591).

19. The well-known compliment to Essex in Henry V, 5, Cho. 30-34, is also ambiguous in light of the sentence that follows it (ll. 34-35). That this passage refers to Essex has been generally accepted, but the identification has been challenged by W. D. Smith. See G. Blakemore Evans, “Chronology and Sources,” The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), p. 53.

20. E.g. Marilyn French (n. 8 above), following L. C. Knights and Northrop Frye, calls the play a search for legitimacy (p. 43). She believes that legitimacy is presented as a strictly masculine principle—“Shakespeare's women can never attain legitimacy”—although, somewhat confusingly, she also claims that it can contain “the inlaw feminine principle” (p. 49).

21. Bevington (n. 4 above), pp. 51-58.

22. Riggs (n. 9 above).

23. French (n. 8 above), p. 51.

24. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, Cal., 1981), p. 55 and p. 55 n. 11.

25. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (Urbana, Ill., 1984), p. 61. Shakespeare's interest in this controversy is evident not only in his frequent allusions to its exempla (Woodbridge cites references, pp. 126-28, and there are many more) but in his use of at least ten of them as characters in his works, four as protagonists. His is an impressive roster even in a period when plays about the controversy's exempla were a growth industry (Woodbridge, pp. 126ff.). The four protagonists are Venus, Lucrece, Cressida, and Cleopatra; the other characters, Volumnia in Coriolanus, Portia in Julius Caesar and Portia in The Merchant of Venice (carefully identified, as Woodbridge notes on p. 127, with “Cato's daughter, Brutus' Portia”), Octavia, Helen of Troy, and Hippolyta (Thisbe should also be mentioned). The maligned and repudiated Mariana in Measure for Measure, too, may be a relative of Mariamne, Herod's defamed second wife, another favorite of the controversialists.

26. Woodbridge, pp. 61-62, 66.

27. Cairncross, 2.3.7-10n., and Bevington.

28. Woodbridge, p. 126. Woodbridge's account of the controversy is invaluable. I cannot agree with her, however, that the plays written in and after the later 1580s were probably not influenced by it; her own evidence (and there is more she does not cite) seems to point overwhelmingly the other way. She observes that “the drama had many other potential sources,” which is true but does not account for the upsurge in plays devoted specifically to exempla from the controversy, and she points out that dramatists often treated these exempla differently from controversialists—but this objection assumes that to influence is to produce a copy.

29. The term was almost entirely positive and denoted either physical or spiritual prowess. For the virago's “manly soul,” see Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Sussex, 1981), pp. 34-35. Various contemporary allusions to the Queen invoked the pun virgo/virago, and her “masculine” spirit was frequently remarked upon with admiration. See Winfried Schleiner, “Divina virago: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 75, 2 (1978), 163-80. I am grateful to Louis Montrose for calling this extremely useful article to my attention.

30. All citations from The Faerie Queene will be identified by book, canto, stanza, and line numbers in my text; these refer to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. R. E. Neil Dodge (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).

31. I am indebted to F. J. Levy for calling my attention to this fact.

32. Ironically—or as a calculated symbolic counterstatement to the Maid?—Henry VI's Paris coronation pageant included “la sage Hippolyte” and her sister Menalippe, as well as Penthesilea and Lampeto, as female worthies. See Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, Vol. I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp. 138-39 n. 4. Celeste Turner Wright calls attention to Henry's coronation pageant in “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” Studies in Philology 37 (July 1940), 437 n. 41 (n.b.: because of a numbering error in this volume, Wright's article begins on the second occurrence of p. 437).

33. See Abby Wettan Kleinbaum, “The Confrontation,” in The War Against the Amazons (New York, 1983). I appreciate being directed to this book by Daniel Traister, Curator of Rare Books at the University of Pennsylvania.

34. Schleiner (see n. 29 above) also identifies as “Amazons” the female characters in a mock tournament of 1579, presented for the Queen and the Duke of Alençon's representative (p. 179), although her quotation from her source refers only to “ladies” (pp. 163-64 n. 3). Tamburlaine mentions Amazon armies, but they do not appear. Greene's Alphonsus, an obvious offspring of Tamburlaine, may have preceded 1 Henry VI in presenting visible Amazons as well as a warrior maiden, but this play has never been satisfactorily dated. Rabkin believes it was “probably written 1587,” but does not given his reasons (introduction to Robert Greene, “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Drama of the English Renaissance. I: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin [New York, 1976] p. 357). The play's general derivative quality suggests, however, that Iphigina is more likely to be a daughter of Joan than the reverse. The other productions I know of containing Amazons are “A Masque of the Amazons … played March 3, 1592” (Henslowe's diary, quoted in William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs, 3 vols. [London, 1890], I, 1xxxi); “field pastimes with martiall and heroicall exploits” staged for Prince Henry's christening in 1594 (John Nichols, Progresses, Public Processions, &c. of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. [London, 1823], III, 355); Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595; Marston's Antonio and Mellida, 1602; Timon of Athens,?1605-1609; Jonson's Masque of Queens, 1609; Beaumont and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen,?1613, The Sea Voyage, 1622, and Double Marriage, 1647; the anonymous Swetnam, the Woman-Hater, 1620; Heywood's Iron Age, 1632; Shirley's dramatization of the Arcadia, 1640; and Davenant's Salmacida Spolia, 1640. There is a discussion of Fletcher's Sea Voyage and some Amazon dramas 1635-1685 in chapter 11 of Jean Elisabeth Gagen, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama, 1600-1730 (New York, 1954).

    For many of these titles and the beginnings of all my information about Amazons, I have relied on the encyclopedic Wright (n. 32 above). Her non-chronological organization assumes, however, that the degree of interest in Amazons and writers' attitudes towards them remained stable throughout the period from which she takes her examples (some undated). Her evidence suggests otherwise.

35. Wright, pp. 442-43, 449-54. Wright's data are difficult to get around in chronologically, but it looks as though doubts about the Amazons—including skepticism about their existence—may have increased in England after 1600, although the Amazonian vogue lasted right up to the Civil War.

    Although there are Elizabethan accounts of the Amazons' ruthless origins and habits, I do not agree with Shepherd (n. 29 above) that the period's overriding feeling was “Elizabethan distress about Amazons” (p. 14), in support of which view he instances Radigund and the egregious misogynist Knox. Shepherd wants to extrapolate Spenser's opposition between Radigund and Britomart into a pervasive Elizabethan distinction between Amazons and warrior women: “Against the warrior ideal there is the Amazon” (p. 13). This schema will not hold up in the face of a mass of evidence for Elizabethan Amazon-enthusiasm. Shepherd's own evidence for the Elizbethan period is slender and largely extrapolated from Stuart texts. Although he does say that the negative meaning of Amazon “coexists with the virtuous usage” (p. 14), this concession, in itself inadequate, is forgotten in his subsequent loosely supported account.

    Nor can I agree with Louis Adrian Montrose's implication in his otherwise insightful and imaginative “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1, 2 (Spring 1983), 61-94, that English Renaissance texts about Amazons generally express “a mixture of fascination and horror” (p. 66). The passages he quotes detail the Amazons' origins and/or customs; others of this type are often flat in tone and delivered without comment, like Mandeville's (1499, rpt. 1568), while some mention no horrors at all. Even the Amazon-shy Spenser compliments the supposed South American tribe: “Joy on those warlike women, which so long / Can from all men so rich a kingdome hold!” (F.Q. 4.11.22.1-2). Although Montrose calls attention to the association sometimes made between Amazons and the destruction of male children, and in some travel books between Amazons and cannibalism, in an equal number of accounts they produce male children for neighboring tribes and are thought of as desirable breeding stock. By far the greatest number of Amazon allusions, moreover, refer to specific Amazons and appear in a positive context. Penthesilea, the hands-down favorite, is always treated with admiration and respect, as is Hippolyta.

    My observations are based on the following Tudor texts: Agrippa, tr. Clapham, The Nobilitie of Woman Kynde, 1542 (STC 203), p. 360v; Anghiera (Peter Martyr), tr. Eden, Decades of the Newe World, 1555, ed. Arber, The First Three English Books on America, 1885, pp. 69, 177, 189; Richard Barckley, The Felicite of Man, 1598 (STC 1381), III, 266-68; Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus, 1534-47, ed. Wright, EETS (London, 1943), pp. 39-42, 66-67, 103-05 and Tragedies, tr. Lydgate, 1554 (STC 3178), I, 12; Quintus Curtius, tr. Brende, History of … Alexander, 1553 (STC 6142), pp. Pii-Piii; Anthony Gibson, tr., A Womans Woorth, 1599 (STC 11831), pp. 5, 37v; Richard Madox, An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox …, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, Hakluyt Society second series No. 47 (London, 1977), p. 183; Sir John Mandeville, The Voyage and Travel …, 1568 (STC 17250), pp. Gviii verso; Ortuñez de Calahorra, tr. T[yler], The Mirrour of … Knighthood, 1578 (STC 18859), 26.91v, 55.219; Hieronimus Osorius, tr. Blandie, The Five Books of Civill and Christian Nobilitie, 1576 (STC 18886), II, 25v; Ovid, tr. Turberville, Heroycall Epistles, 1567 (STC 18940.5), p. 23; William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, 1575, ed. Joseph Jacobs, 3 vols. (London, 1890), II, 159-61; Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of … Guiana, 1596 (STC 20636), pp. 23-24 and History of the World, 1614 (STC 20637), I.4.195-96; William Shakespeare, King John, 1594-96, ed. Herschel Baker, in Evans; Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, 1590, ed. Robertson (Oxford, 1973), pp. 21, 36; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I-III, 1590, IV-VI, 1596 (see n. 30); Andre Thevet, The New Found World, tr. 1568 (STC 23950), pp. 101-74 (recte 103); William Warner, Albion's England, 1586 (STC 15759), pp. 25-26; and two accounts of Spanish voyages known in England, those of Francesco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro, Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, tr. and ed. Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society (New York, n.d.), pp. 13, 26, 34, 36. I have also found useful Kleinbaum's chapters “The Net of Fantasy” and “The Confrontation.”

36. Woodbridge, p. 21.

37. Cited by both Wright and Shepherd.

38. Wright, p. 455.

39. He makes this identification in 1590, just a year and a half after the Armada crisis (see discussion below, in text). Penthesilea was frequently used as a comparison for Elizabeth, especially around this time (see Schleiner [n. 29 above], pp. 170-73). The Amazon analogy was still current in 1633, when Phineas Fletcher likened his “warlike Maid, / Parthenia,” a recognizable variant of Elizabeth, to Hippolyta in The Purple Island 10.27-40 (STC 11082), pp. 141-44.

40. In “Elizabeth,” Leah Marcus also connects Joan with the queen and comments on the contradiction between Joan's “idealized symbolic identities” and her status as an enemy (p. 51).