SOURCE: MacKenzie, Clayton G. “Myth and Anti-Myth in the First Tetralogy.” Orbis Litterarum 42 (1987): 1-26.

[In the following essay, MacKenzie examines how the classical and biblical mythic references in the Henry VI plays reflect and subvert the heroic ideals of English mythology.]

To the Elizabethan translator Philemon Holland, mythology is “a fabulous Narration: or the delivery of matters by way of fables and tales”¹ and mythologers are those who expound such “Morall Tales.”² Neither the First Tetralogy nor its author wholly correspond to either definition. The plays, as mythology, fall short of a “fabulous Narration,” and the rôle of Shakespeare, as mythologer, is not focused exclusively on ethical matters:

When first this order was ordain'd, my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars;
Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress,
But always resolute in most extremes.

(1 Henry VI IV.i.33-8)

O, I could hew up rocks and fight with flint,
I am so angry at these abject terms;
And now, like Ajax Telamonius,
On sheep or oxen could I spend my fury.

(2 Henry VI V.i.24-7)

Now my soul's palace is become a prison.
Ah, would she break from hence, that this my body
Might in the ground be closed up in rest!
For never henceforth shall I joy again;
Never, O never, shall I see more joy.

(3 Henry VI II.i.74-8)

None of these allusions can be precisely traced to the known sources of the Yorkist Tetralogy, though each represents themes common enough in Elizabethan literature. The first is native English, the second Classical, and the third religious and emblematic. Shakespeare's distinguishing achievement is that he goes some way towards weaving these three separate mythic strands into a single fabric of myth and counter myth, of English greatness and English depravity. This paper sets as its task the examination of what may be termed the “English mythology” and its “anti-mythology.”

An immediate objection may be raised against the critical usefulness of such an investigation. Of what interpretative value is a gamut of Biblical and Classical material, profuse and often superfluous, whose own inconsistencies deter a search for significance? The Tetralogy lays claim to more than a hundred references of this sort, many of them “local” in effect and lying within that vein of promiscuous allusion characteristic of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In fact, Malone cites the presence of numerous Classical figures that “do not naturally arise out of the subject, but seem to be inserted merely to show the writer's learning”³ as evidence in the case against Shakespeare's authorship of the Henry VI trilogy. This paper adopts the position of those who argue that the Henry VI plays, whether revised or plagiarised, are, in some considerable sense, the work of Shakespeare.⁴ There can be no denying, though, that the delineation of coherent and unified motifs is hampered by an obvious confusion of mythic identities in these early plays. In 1 Henry VI, for example, Joan la Pucelle is described variously, by friend and foe, as an Amazon (I.ii.104), Deborah (I.ii.105), a bright star of Venus (I.ii.144), Astraea's daughter (I.vi.4) and the new patron saint of France (I.vi.28); and as a devil (I.v.5), a witch (I.v.6), a railing Hecate (III.ii.64), and Circe's collaborator (V.iii.35). The balance of French praise and English condemnation is to be expected and the general tenor of the references suggests this. But such diversity of allusion means that the respective adulation and condemnation of la Pucelle are both framed in terms that clearly signal a broad intent but lack sustained cohesion. “Amazon,” “bright star of Venus,” and “Astraea's daughter” each imply some kind of superlative but their disparity can present no solid and unified development towards a common end. In view of this, a methodical and consecutive examination of Classical and of Biblical names mentioned in the plays seems less satisfactory than an analysis of coherent image patterns to which selective and, perhaps, more significant Hebraic and Graeco-Roman figures may contribute. Our purpose here will be to analyse the development of the English mythology and its antithesis in terms of the central motifs that serve to articulate both.

Barnaby Rich writes of the “decaie of Marciall discipline”⁵ in Allarme to Englande (1578)—an observation that appears to understand, of the English soldier, a traditional military excellence. The complaint is a sensitive one and its origins are many and varied. We shall focus, though, on the issue of reputation. Let us conjecture that Shakespeare was well schooled in the theme of the English as a warlike race. The idea is a familiar topic of discussion in the writings of Tudor commentators, who often measure the extent of English martial achievement with reference to French conquests. Raphael Hythlodaeus notes, in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (in which Hythlodaeus is a fictitious foreigner), that “not even the French soldiers, assiduously trained in arms from infancy, can boast that they have very often got the better of it face to face with your [English] draftees.”⁶ And Sir Walter Raleigh notices that “among all their warres, I find not any, wherein their valour hath appeared, comparable to the English. If my judgement seeme over-partiall; our warres in France may helpe to make it good.”⁷ A few English writers seek to explain the origins of such greatness in arms. Richard Verstegan, in his discourse on “The most noble and renowned English nation,” insists on the hereditary nature of the English warring spirit: “Our ancesters delighted in warre and hunting.”⁸ England falls under the patronage of the god of war, Mars, Richard Argol confirms in a work first published in 1562, and this accounts for the Englishman's natural “fire of honour mounting by martiall prowes.”⁹ Possibly, Argol has the legend of the Trojan Brutus in mind—a legend of Britain's Aenean and, ultimately, Martian ancestry still widely accepted, Aaron Thompson¹⁰ tells us, as late as the seventeenth century.

This sense of English martial prowess as an hereditary quality, as an ancient and ancestral right, is one to which Shakespeare refers on several occasions in the plays of the First Tetralogy:

Froissart, a countryman of ours, records
England all Olivers and Rowlands bred
During the time Edward the Third did reign.
More truly now may this be verified;
For none but Samsons and Goliases
It sendeth forth to skirmish. One to ten!
Lean raw-bon'd rascals! Who would e'er suppose
They had such courage and audacity?

(1 Henry VI I.ii.29-36)

Coming from the Frenchman Alençon, such praise is of particular interest. Andrew Cairncross defines Samson and Goliath as “typical O.T. strong men”¹¹ in the Arden edition of the play but does not comment on the allusion to Oliver and Roland on whom the significance of this passage pivots. Celebrated as military paradigms during the illustrious reign of Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were allegedly killed in the pass of Roncesvalles in the year 778 during a surprise military encounter with an overwhelming Gascon force.¹² Further, Roland was the nephew of Charlemagne himself. G. H. Gerould,¹³ in his paper “King Arthur and Politics,” argues that the whole story of the Trojan Brutus building a New Troy in England was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth as a direct native British counter to the mythology of heroism and conquest the Normans had constructed around Charlemagne. In the “Corona Dedicatoria” to Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas, the name of King James is linked with the idea of the English monarch as “un Charle-magne encore.”¹⁴ And Daniel Price, in 1613, addresses Prince Charles as “The Hope of Svcession, Englands Charlemaine.”¹⁵ Clearly, there is evidence to suggest that the English were, to some degree, concerned with compiling a myth equivalent to that of the French conqueror. Alençon's comparison of the progeny of Edward III's reign with that of Charlemagne's (to “Olivers and Rowlands”) is all the more significant in view of this. The idea was not Shakespeare's own, and the obligation to Froissart is acknowledged in the text. Even so, the dramatist's interest in this snippet of information from the Frenchman's chronicles, when he already had a veritable mountain of material in Hall to collate and condense, may in itself be indicative of his intentions.

In understanding present English military daring in terms of a revivification of an ancestral heritage deriving from the time of Edward III, Alençon articulates a mythology of English martial supremacy strengthened by association with his own native French mythology. The choice of Edward III as the source and fountain-head of this reviving militarist tradition is not all that surprising. The name of Edward III is almost synonymous in Tudor literature with foreign conquest. His achievements are extolled at length in works as diverse as John Rastell's The Pastyme of the People (1530)¹⁶ and Caxton's Chronycles of Englande (1475?),¹⁷ and at least mentioned in standard works on martial skills and strategy—as in Matthew Sutcliffe's The Practice, Proceedings, And Lawes of armes (1593).¹⁸ William Wyrley,¹⁹ in The Trve Vse of Armorie (1592), writes that Edward III created the Order of the Garter, a statement confirmed by Rastell.²⁰ Talbot elucidates the heroic qualities demanded by the Order of the Garter.²¹ He declares:

When first this order was ordain'd, my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars;
Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress,
But always resolute in most extremes.
He then that is not furnish'd in this sort
Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight,
Profaning this most honourable order,
And should, if I were worthy to be judge,
Be quite degraded, like a hedge-born swain
That doth presume to boast of gentle blood.

(1 Henry VI IV.i.33-44)

Gerard Leigh records that “in the time of king Edward the thirde, at one voyage, his souldiers were so laden with pray of arme, as they esteemed nothing but golde, siluer and Estrichfethers.”²² To Leigh, materialistic superlatives represent an equivalent expression of military worth. Talbot's martial ideal is conceptual rather than tangible. We are presented not with gold or ostrich feathers, but with valour (line 35), virtue (line 35), haughty courage (line 35), credit (line 36), and resolution (line 38). It is intriguing that Talbot places “noble birth” (line 34) as the first requirement of a Knight of the Garter. Through his cowardice, Sir John Fastolfe has betrayed his birth and, fittingly, Talbot demands that he be degraded “like a hedge-born swain / That doth presume to boast of gentle blood” (lines 43-4). This vocabulary of condemnation styles Fastolfe as a “counterfeit,” as a man whose rank and station do not match his actions. As such, Sir John can be no true inheritor of the ancient and warlike spirit, and Talbot pointedly slanders his lineage, claiming he “Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight” (line 40). The sense of piety that Talbot would here attach to the English military ideal suits well the symbol of the George (a jewel, named after the saint, which forms part of the insignia of the Order of the Garter), and the battle cry of “Saint George!” which, as Wyrley²³ tells us, was also instituted by Edward III. In tearing off Sir John's Garter at IV.i.15, Talbot exposes him not only as a military sham but also as one who is guilty of “Profaning,” to use the hero's own words, “this most honourable order” (line 41). If we look forward to Richard III, we may decipher in the vilification of Fastolfe the promise of more sinister things to come. This is how Queen Elizabeth condemns Richard:

Thy George, profan'd, hath lost his lordly honour;
Thy garter, blemish'd, pawn'd his knightly virtue;
Thy crown, usurp'd, disgrac'd his kingly glory.

(IV.iv.369-71. Emphasis added.)

By the time the heroic ideal of the English mythology is deployed in Richard III, its terminology and accoutrements have undergone perversions and assumed ironies that Talbot himself unwittingly predicts, but surely could not have imagined, in his censure of Fastolfe. For the time being, at least, Talbot clings with steadfastness to the notion, first formulated in the play by Alençon's reference to the English “Samsons and Goliases,” that the English knight can and must remain faithful to a code of military conduct bequeathed to him by his illustrious and valiant ancestry.

But Alençon's idea of “rebirth” is not only an expression of a reviving military spirit. It is a familial process as well. The present Samsons and Goliaths are the physical progeny of those Olivers and Rolands who were themselves “bred” in Edward's reign. These two aspects of rebirth are skilfully harmonised in the relation of Talbot to his son John in the first play of the Tetralogy:

O young John Talbot! I did send for thee
To tutor thee in stratagems of war,
That Talbot's name might be in thee reviv'd
When sapless age and weak unable limbs
Should bring thy father to his drooping chair.

(Talbot to son. IV.v.1-5)

When Talbot wishes that his “name might be in thee reviv'd,” his concept of inheritance encompasses connotations that are both physical and spiritual (in the military sense). The great reputation of Talbot's “name” is documented by Geoffrey Whitney in his 1586 edition of A Choice of Emblemes:

Hvniades, the terrour of the Turke,
Though layed in graue, yet at his name they fled:
          And cryinge babes, they ceased with the same,
The like in France, sometime did Talbots name.(24)

And the most immediate source of 1 Henry VI, Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and Yorke (1548), records that Talbot “obteined so many glorious victories of his enemies, that his only name was, and yet is dredful to the French.”²⁵ In the next sentence, Hall also describes Talbot as a son of Mars, but Shakespeare does not take up that tantalising association (in fact, Mars is mentioned only once in the whole Tetralogy, at I.ii.1 in 1 Henry VI, and there insignificantly) opting, instead, for an emphasis on Talbot's very “name.” This emphasis goes well beyond the warrant of Hall's chronicle: at I.i.128 we are told that the English soldiers shouted “A Talbot! a Talbot!”; at I.iv.50 Talbot himself claims that the French so feared his name that they guarded him excessively; at II.i.79 an anonymous English soldier informs us that the cry of Talbot's name serves him as a sword; and John Talbot insists that he has a renowned name that must not be dishonoured (IV.v.41). The importance that the dramatist places on Talbot's name as the by-word of a military mythology is paralleled by an insistence that Talbot's son, John, is not only the physical progeny of his father but his military heir as well. The hope that “Talbot's name might be in thee [John] reviv'd” underscores Shakespeare's mythologisation of a process of physical and military regeneration of excellences. Another example of some significance in this direction is to be found in 3 Henry VI. The Earl of Oxford here addresses the Prince of Wales:

O brave young Prince! thy famous grandfather
Doth live again in thee. Long mayst thou live
To bear his image and renew his glories!

(V.iv.52-4. Emphasis added.)

Henry V (“thy famous grandfather”) is not only of the same family line as Edward III, but he can also claim a similar military descent. In fact, Sutcliffe's treatise on the art of warfare celebrates these two kings together for their glorious success in France.²⁶ Throughout the Yorkist Tetralogy, Henry V is presented to us as a moral and military paradigm against whose feats the present is repeatedly compared and measured, a fine illustration of the quality of military achievement that is demanded by the English mythology.

Oxford thinks of Prince Edward as one in whom Henry V could “live again.” This proposed renewal retains the two-fold significances of which we have spoken already. As Henry V's potential inheritor, the Prince of Wales must both “bear his image” and “renew his glories”—his inheritance is physically familial and spiritually heroic. Regrettably, Oxford's hope of renewal through young Prince Edward is a forlorn hope that is wisely qualified by the boy himself: “An[d] if I live until I be a man, / I'll win our ancient right in France again / Or die a soldier as I liv'd a king” (Richard III III.i.91-3, emphasis added). The curse of civil war is the very stuff of the anti-mythology, and civil dissent is condemned on many occasions in the First Tetralogy, notably at III.i.72 and at IV.i.147 in 1 Henry VI and at II.v.77 in 3 Henry VI. The young Prince of Wales falls prey to terrors that characterise the dramatist's vision of civil intrigues. Oxford's faith in the rebirth of famous conquering achievements in France, in the revival of glorious ancestral qualities, must stand always in the shadow of that grim and most unfamilial incident in II.v of 3 Henry VI where Father kills Son and laments, with an appropriate reproductive nuance, the perversions spawned of civil war:

O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous, and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!

(II.v.88-91. Emphasis added.)

As early as I.i in the first play of the Yorkist quartet, the sheer desolation of the heroic ideal is encapsulated in Exeter's terse annunciation: “Henry [V] is dead and never shall revive” (line 18), and in Gloucester's bleak cry: “Is Paris lost? Is Rouen yielded up? / If Henry were recall'd to life again, / These news would cause him once more yield the ghost” (lines 65-7). There will be no renewal of great conquering deeds on foreign soil—only the swift ruin of the foreign empire and the inexorable descent into civil war. Shakespeare's anti-myth perceives this failure and disintegration of the noble English mythology not through an entirely independent imagistic scheme but through the inversion and perversion of existing motifs. The use of “Saint George” as a battle cry is a point in question. Initially an archetypal cry of the Englishman Talbot (at IV.ii.55 and IV.vi.1) as he prepares to do battle with the French in 1 Henry VI, it is quickly commissioned into the service of civil war to perform the unnatural duty of inspiring English soldiers in battle against each other. The final perversion is executed by Richard III when, before encountering Richmond, he cries:

Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!
Upon them! Victory sits on our helms.

(Richard III V.iii.349-51)

The spleen was supposedly the seat of anger, but Richard's strange appeal to both the dragon and the dragon slayer in these lines marks, more importantly, a confusion of moral and military intention. The chaos of England has reached its nadir. The plays of the First Tetralogy deploy the battle cry of “Saint George” (used on nine occasions) more frequently than any other play, or group of plays, in Shakespeare's canon.²⁷ It is surprising that the dramatist does not choose to align and develop this theme more closely with the other elements of Edwardian military myth. Its ambivalent usage, though, does correspond to the polarities of the English mythology and the anti-mythology. Further examples of the transition from myth to anti-myth may be found in the images of the “soul” and the “womb”, and both merit close examination.

The Tetralogy's religious imagery is, for the most part, profuse and unremarkable. Several critics²⁸ have made the point, implicitly or otherwise, that Shakespeare writes under the immediate influence of the Morality play tradition. Perhaps this stifles any innovative aspiration. “Devil” is an expression of damnation, “angel” of goodness—and, if statistics can be any measure of a fallen world, there are three times as many “devils” as there are “angels.” The image of the “soul” offers a notable exception, contributing to the English mythology and its reverse. Here, in 1 Henry VI, the young Plantagenet addresses the body of Mortimer who has just died in the Tower of London:

And peace, no war, befall thy parting soul!
In prison hast thou spent a pilgrimage,
And like a hermit overpass'd thy days.
Well, I will lock his counsel in my breast;
And what I do imagine, let that rest.
Keepers, convey him hence; and I myself
Will see his burial better than his life.
[Exeunt Gaolers, bearing out the body of Mortimer.

(II.v.115-21)

Many commentators²⁹ have indicated that the idea of life as a pilgrimage is of Biblical origin. None has suggested that Plantagenet's “thou” in line 116 refers not to the physical body of Mortimer but to his “soul”, mentioned a line earlier. Once we recognise this possibility, a possibility enhanced by the change to the third person in line 118 (“his”), the notions of soul, pilgrimage and prison merge together in what we may call a verbal emblem, and the Gaolers' action of carrying the body of Mortimer out of his prison confines becomes a visual metaphor for the escape of the soul from the prison of physical life. The antithetical nature of the flesh and the spirit is a Biblical commonplace. In the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians (v.17) we read that “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary one to another”³⁰—the enmity is made quite explicit. And the image of the soul imprisoned occurs quite frequently in Elizabethan drama. H. C. Hart, writing in a different context, brings attention to Lyly's Campaspe: “the bodie is the prison of the soule.”³¹ Hart also quotes examples from Peele's Edward I, The Battle of Alcazar, and the second part of Marlowe's Tamburlaine.³² However, there does not appear to be an extant emblem book source available to Shakespeare harbouring a print of comparable visual detail to the dramatist's stage metaphor for the escape of Mortimer's soul. Only Francis Quarles,³³ writing forty years after the composition of 1 Henry VI, produces an emblem of any similarity—a bird (the soul) languishes in a cage (the flesh) while an angelic figure stands near, awaiting the release of the prisoner.

Shakespeare's intentions in styling Mortimer's captivity in the way he does may well be related to the nature and history of the old warrior himself:

Since Henry Monmouth first began to reign,
Before whose glory I was great in arms,
This loathsome sequestration have I had;
And even since then hath Richard been obscur'd,
Depriv'd of honour and inheritance.
But now the arbitrator of despairs,
Just Death, kind umpire of men's miseries,
With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence.

(1 Henry VI II.v.23-30)

Aside from his personal regret that his own military greatness should have been eclipsed by his confinement, Mortimer's deeper concern is that Richard Plantagenet, who now comes to visit him, has been deprived of his rightful honour and inheritance—accession to the English throne. The betrayal of the natural reviving processes of the English mythology—the denial through imprisonment of Mortimer's right to exercise his prowess in arms, and the refusal, through obscurity, of Richard Plantagenet's ancestral claim to the throne (Henry VI himself confesses that his title is weak in 3 Henry VI at I.i.134)—is, to no small degree, symptomed by Mortimer's desire for death. In thinking on the “sweet enlargement” (line 30) that Death will grant him, he angles at a double sense of escape. His body will be carried forth from the prison confine by the gaolers, and his soul will, at last, break free from the prison of the flesh. This is, indeed, a “sweet” enlargement. In a tetralogy where many characters express similar inclinations, there is some justification in assuming that Shakespeare connects the idea of death as an escape from the pangs of life with the fall of the English mythology. Interestingly, Ronald S. Berman,³⁴ in his paper “Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI Plays,” has brought attention to Mortimer's Biblical characterisation of Richard II as “the first-begotten and the lawful heir” (II.v.65). And Berman is not alone in feeling the need to articulate the evils of Henry VI's era in terms of an “original sin,” which he defines as the deposition and murder of Richard II.³⁵ Unfortunately, the Tetralogy does not provide sufficient evidence to merit some kind of association of the anti-mythology with the Biblical understanding of man's Fall, though the link is of very great import in the second tetralogy. For our further purposes here it will be useful to look at two other allusions to the “soul” which consolidate the link between death and the English mythology reversed.

In 3 Henry VI, as the Queen's party enact a ritualistic execution of York, the dying man, after hearing of Rutland's brutal murder, longs for death at the hands of his captors:

Open Thy gate of mercy, gracious God!
My soul flies through these wounds to seek out Thee
[Dies

(I.iv.177-8)

Clifford, the boy's killer, had vowed at V.ii.60 in 2 Henry VI to seek out fame, not in the heroic militarism of the English mythology, but in pure cruelty: “In cruelty will I seek out my fame.” Despairing at this single act of inhumanity, even one as hardened to the ways of the world as York can no longer endure the savagery of life. The stab wounds inflicted upon York's body mix the literal and the metaphorical in granting the body leave from physical life and freeing the soul from the prison of the flesh. And in the next scene, when Edward hears of his father's murder, he exclaims:

Now my soul's palace is become a prison.
Ah, would she break from hence, that this my body
Might in the ground be closed up in rest!

(3 Henry VI II.i.74-6)

Full accreditation of Edward's sentiments must be tempered by the knowledge that, as son of York, he is of the new generation, a generation spawned of the anti-mythology. This perhaps will explain why his words savour more of rhetoric than of spontaneity and it is revealing that, for all his world weariness, he has, by the end of the play, enthroned himself as King of England. There is even a hint, brought finally to full fruition by King Richard III, that the generation of the anti-mythology actually enjoys the barbarity of its world. Young Clifford, as a prime example, inherits a military quality from his renowned father that he perverts to the most inhumane ends. “In cruelty will I seek out my fame,” he says, with his father's body slung symbolically over his shoulder. English youth is no longer inspired to conquests abroad but to savageries at home. For those who would aspire to the glories of the English mythology, death is, to use Talbot's words, “the end of human misery” (1 Henry VI III.ii.137) in this fallen English world.

As a symbol of regeneration, the image of the “womb” is of natural interest in plays so concerned with issues of rebirth. What is surprising, though, is Shakespeare's use of it more as a figure of malignancy than of hope or well-being. If the dramatist's aim is to portray a native English myth reversed, then the image of the womb, deployed in inversion, may well work toward a planned end. This is not to deny the presence of more optimistic usage. At the outset, the word is a symbol of such healthy and regenerating honour that John Talbot frames his military duty in terms of it:

TALBOT.
Shall all thy mother's hopes lie in one tomb?
JOHN.
Ay, rather than I'll shame my mother's womb.

(1 Henry VI IV.v.34-5)

This is the heroic spirit of the English mythology. Yet, even here, we experience the disquiet of a tomb-womb rime, an association no more than aural at this point but one that is developed textually in the later stages of the quartet. By IV.i of Richard III, Shakespeare is ready to enact the most startling imagistic inversion. The Duchess of Gloucester speaks with thoughts of her evil son Richard in mind:

O my accursed womb, the bed of death!
A cockatrice hast thou hatch'd to the world,
Whose unavoided eye is murderous.

(IV.i.54-6)

The juxtaposition of what ought to be the archetypal life-force image of the “womb” and the bed of death, the tomb, represents a compelling departure from the notion of an ideal English mythology that is sustained by the rebirth of great acts and famous monarchs. From the pedigree of the noble Duchess has sprung a beast of chilling malignancy. It is indicative of Shakespeare's developing dramatic art that Richard III, unlike its predecessors in the First Tetralogy, should sacrifice the dubious mechanism of indiscriminate Classical and Biblical reference to a more tutored, less effusive, approach to his task of articulating the anti-mythology. The image of the womb, as a metaphor for Richard's depravity in familial and national obligations, is both sustained and coherent:

The slave of nature and the son of hell,
Thou slander of thy heavy mother's womb

(Marg. to Rich. I.iii.230-1)

O my accursed womb, the bed of death!

(Duchess IV.i.54)

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death.

(Marg. to Duch. IV.iv.47-8)

That dog [Richard] …
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.

(Marg. to Duch. IV.iv.49 & 54)

RICH.
Who intercepts me in my expedition?
DUCH.
O, she that might have intercepted thee,
By strangling thee in her accursed womb,
From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done!

(IV.iv.136-9)

It is possible, even likely, that Shakespeare derives the idea of the womb as a tomb from The Mirror for Magistrates where, in the section devoted to King Henry VI, the king himself wishes: “Would God the grave had gript me in her gredy woumbe, / Whan crowne in cradle made me king, with oyle of holy thoumbe.”³⁶ The image has much in common with both the Duchess' bed of death and her regret that Richard did not die in her womb, but Shakespeare must be credited with developing the theme. Be this as it may, usage for which there seems to be no obvious precedent in the sources may be located in the final two womb images of Richard III, both uttered by the king. In the first, Richard vows to Elizabeth

If I have kill'd the issue of your womb,
To quicken your increase I will beget
Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter.

(IV.iv.296-8)

And in the second:

ELIZ.
Yet thou didst kill my children.
RICH.
But in your daughter's womb I bury them;
Where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

(IV.iv.422-5. Emphasis added.)

Once heroic processes of revival are here strangely perverted. The womb becomes the expression of both life and death. But while Richard promises in each case that life will follow death, the progressions are decidedly unnatural. In the first instance, there is not the sense of a healthy and familial inheritance, of one generation bestowing its life upon the next. There is, rather, the feel of an all-seeing and an all-powerful Richard, presiding omnipotently over reproductive processes—wilfully destroying one generation, promising life to another. It is more a mechanism of substitution than of regeneration, and it becomes a thinly veiled idiom of the English mythology reversed, of the anti-mythology. In the second quotation, we are taken a step further. Burying the children of Elizabeth in her daughter's womb, Richard proposes a phoenix-like resurrection: “in that nest of spicery [the womb], they will breed / Selves of themselves.” The king does not entirely dispense with the normal means of reproduction. When he says “in your daughter's womb I bury them,” he makes it clear that he will be doing the “burying.” This intriguing form of ejaculation again corrupts the concept of rebirth, and styles Richard as one who sows the seeds of death rather than of life. The English mythology's theme of heroic and splendid regeneration is now subsumed into the grotesque service of the anti-mythology. For the idea of the womb as a kind of hermaphroditic breeding ground (“they will breed / Selves of themselves”), the figure of the phoenix is not an unusual choice, though its usage here may be considered untypical of the Tetralogy as a whole but no less indicative of the manner in which the typical processes of rebirth in the English myth are drawn into the degenerative cycle of the anti-mythology. Referred to by name rather than inference, and very powerfully linked with Shakespeare's Classical endeavours in the opening trilogy, the “phoenix” of the Henry VI plays is a quite different species to that of Richard III but no less instructive for an analysis of the continuing conflict between the mythological opposites.

In baptising Elizabeth in Henry VIII, Cranmer compares her to the maiden phoenix (V.v.39-47) who, though doomed to perish, yet promises the hope of monarchs to come. The use of the phoenix in the First Tetralogy is directed more towards the ends of heroic militarism than royal succession, but the connotations of “rebirth” are just as pertinent. This is how Lucy, addressing the French, speaks of the dead Talbot and his men:

                                                  from their ashes shall be rear'd
A phoenix that shall make all France afeard.

(1 Henry VI IV.vii.92-3)

And York, facing death at the hands of his foes, utters a curse of unnerving certainty:

My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth
A bird that will revenge upon you all;
And in that hope I throw mine eyes to heaven,
Scorning whate'er you can afflict me with.

(3 Henry VI I.iv.35-8)

The respective ideas of “fear” and “revenge” in these two quotations may seem to lie in roughly the same emotive direction but the dramatist's intentions in each are very different. Lucy's allusion savours of the English mythology. The hope that an English military paradigm will rise to renew the feats of Talbot against the French and on foreign soil is well in keeping with the precept of English heroic greatness renewing itself from generation to generation. What is disconcerting, though, is the apparent absence of any person capable of fulfilling that rôle. Lucy's idealism returns, in spirit, to the archetypal conquests of Edward III and Henry V in France but the spectre of civil war and mythological degeneration is so threatening, even in this the first play of the Tetralogy, that such idealism can find its only viable domain in the imagination. York's phoenix, by contrast, is a creature of terrifying reality. When we recall that his son, Richard III, will be his inheritor, the promise of revenge through his own succeeding generation assumes dimensions of cruelty and evil that outreach even his predictions. The metaphorical bird that will rise from the Duke's ashes will be the bird of bloody and unnatural civil dissent, passed on from one generation to the next—a bizarre distortion of the English mythology's natural reviving cycle. The notion of phoenix-type rebirth is thus doubly significant. On the other hand, it is Lucy's expression of the glorious English mythology and, on the other, it is a figure of the anti-mythology, a metaphor for the fast gathering evil of civil war.

Shakespeare may have gleaned a knowledge of the phoenix and its attributes from almost anywhere. Even so, on the evidence of the most obvious sources, his usage is unusual. Pliny³⁷ affirms that the bird exists, and links it with Arabia and spice trees. Despite the plays' obvious interest in horticultural imagery, it would be a fruitless endeavour to suggest any derivative significance in that direction! Nicolas Reusner has an emblem of a burning phoenix in his 1581 edition of Emblemata, and his print is accompanied by lines that relate the miraculous reviving bird to the religious theme of saintly martyrdom:

If men report true, death over again forms the Phoenix,
To this bird both life and death the same funeral pile may prove.
Onward, executioners! of the saints burn ye the sainted bodies;
For whom ye desire perdition, to them brings the flame new birth.(38)

Had York been endowed with altruistic qualities, and had Talbot suffered the same fate as Joan la Pucelle, Reusner's print and verse might well have merited consideration as the possible source of Shakespeare's usage. Finally, Geoffrey Whitney's verse addendum to his plate of the phoenix (copied from Les Devises Heroiques³⁹) purports to nothing more than a topical comparison of the phoenix to the town of Nampwiche which had burnt down and been rebuilt.⁴⁰ Whitney writes “bothe of the oulde, and newe” (p. 177). His theme can hardly be related to the details of the two phoenix citations in Shakespeare's Henry VI plays but it may provide us with a clue to a further interest the dramatist may have in the mythical bird. Certainly, it is useful as a metaphor for the ideas of heroic revival and unnatural resurrection already discussed. Perhaps less readily recognisable is the strange figurative affinity the phoenix has to the saga of Brutus and the New Troy. As the phoenix rises from the ashes of its predecessor, so, as legend had it, the New Troy of England rose from the ashes of the Old Troy of antiquity. The story, repeated by almost every Tudor chronicler, is a familiar theme in Elizabethan literature.⁴¹ Shakespeare never alludes to the Trojan Brutus in his plays, but in the Henry VI series (in 2 Henry VI at I.iii.43 and at III.ii.113; and in 3 Henry VI at III.iii.7 and 49) he uses the word “Albion” as a synonym for England. The name has a special link with the story of New Troy, and is used only twice elsewhere in the dramatist's works.⁴²

While the possibility of an association in Shakespeare's mind of the phoenix and New Troy can be no more than conjecture, the pre-eminence of the Classical story of Troy in the Henry VI plays is beyond question. The story of Troy appears to be the only sustained attempt at a Graeco-Roman parallel in the quartet. But, while almost every leading Greek or Trojan personage is mentioned somewhere in the Henry VI plays, not one is to be found in Richard III. Evidently, the reign of King Henry VI conjured up a particular vision of Trojan disaster in the mind of the dramatist. It is not difficult to see why this should be so, for many superficial details of Henry's disastrous rule echo elements of the Troy saga. For example, Suffolk's mission to woo Margaret and bring her back to England to be Henry's queen is something similar to the rape of Helen, particularly when the love affair between Suffolk and his one-time captive blossoms later in the trilogy:

Thus Suffolk hath prevail'd; and thus he goes,
As did the youthful Paris once to Greece,
With hope to find the like vent in love
But prosper better than the Troyan did.

(1 Henry VI V.v.103-6)

It is worth noting, as Gwyn Williams⁴³ has done in his paper “Suffolk and Margaret: A Study of Some Sections of Shakespeare's Henry VI,” that the illicit relation between the two lovers is unhistorical. The whole account is apparently Shakespeare's invention, and, similarly, the use of Classical material here must also be original. Margaret, herself, evokes the notion of a queen brought from her native land and “imprisoned,” as it were, within a city wall when, in describing the journey across the Channel to England, she remembers that she cast a jewel into the sea which received it, “And so I wish'd thy body [Henry's] might my heart” (2 Henry VI III.ii.109). In 3 Henry VI, Hastings makes explicit the protective rôle of the sea in the defence of the island from foreign invasion: “Let us be back'd with God, and with the seas / Which He hath giv'n for fence impregnable” (IV.i.43-4). The sense of the sea as a Trojan wall defending England is an idea that will be developed coherently and cohesively in the course of Richard II. This does not happen in the first tetralogy. We must view the Trojan nuance as simply an element strengthening the Margaret-Helen association. Further such elements can be detected in the division of opinion amongst the nobles as to the desirability or otherwise of Margaret's presence in England (2 Henry VI i.i) which may be understood as something approaching the embittered wrangles amongst the Dardanian nobles over the presence of Helen in Troy, and in the manner in which the burning of Troy, the direct result of Helen's presence there, is three times mentioned in 2 Henry VI, the play in which Margaret appears first and in which the most vociferous objections to her presence are raised. Bolingbroke recalls “The time of night when Troy was set on fire” (I.iv.17); Margaret talks of “burning Troy” (III.ii.118); and while Young Clifford's simile that he bears his father's body “As did Aeneas old Anchises bear” (V.ii.62) does not specifically refer to the burning of Troy, portrayals of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises in the emblem books or in books of illustrations are almost invariably backdropped by the burning ruins of the ancient city—as in Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias' Emblemas Morales (1591)⁴⁴ and in Antonio Tempesta's illustrations of Ovid's Metamorphoses.⁴⁵

In all fairness, though, Margaret's relation to Helen of Troy cannot be pressed to any great extreme. Though Michael Quinn⁴⁶ sees her advent as the “original sin” of the Tetralogy, her presence is surely less to blame for England's demise than is religious Henry's inability to command a disintegrating kingdom. Edward bluntly disavows the Helen link, but for very different reasons:

Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou,
Although thy husband may be Menelaus;
And ne'er was Agamemnon's brother wrong'd
By that false woman as this king by thee.

(3 Henry VI II.ii.146-9)

Menelaus indeed! George Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesie (1589), holds, as axiomatic, the “prudence of Menelaus.”⁴⁷ Edward's comparison is no less cryptic than Margaret's odd inference, in 2 Henry VI, that Henry dissembles like Aeneas (III.ii.115). Nonetheless, Edward's “de-mythologisation” of the Margaret-Helen association exemplifies a technique of some significance deployed by several other characters in the First Tetralogy as a strategy of degradation. In 1 Henry VI, the Countess of Auvergne denies her mortal foe, Talbot, his right to equation with Hercules and Hector (II.iii.19-20), describing him, instead, as “a weak and writhled shrimp” (II.iii.23); Joan la Pucelle is taunted by her English captors with the accusation that, far from being divinely conceived, she is the daughter of a humble peasant (1 Henry VI V.iv); in the second of the Henry VI plays, to Suffolk's claim that Jove sometimes disguised himself as he does now, the Lieutenant threatens that “Jove was never slain, as thou shalt be” (IV.i.49); Clifford, in 2 Henry VI, assails the myth-like stature that the bogus mythist Jack Cade would claim for himself by asking, derisively, “Is Cade the son of Henry the Fifth, / That thus you do exclaim you'll go with him” (Iv.viii.33-4); York's insistence, again in 2 Henry VI, that the golden crown “must round engirt these brows of mine” (V.i.99) is very well remembered by Queen Margaret in the next play when she forces her captive to wear a paper crown (I.iv); and, in Richard III, Richard urges Buckingham to sully the honour of Edward's heirs by inferring their bastardy (III.v.75). The devaluation of mythic worth is a motif to which the dramatist attaches very considerable importance in these plays.

Hector is the Trojan hero most frequently alluded to in the Henry VI plays. In the first, as we have seen, the Countess of Auvergne notices, of Talbot,

I thought I should have seen some Hercules,
A second Hector for his grim aspect

(II.iii.19-20)

A messenger in 3 Henry VI here describes the death of York:

Environed he was with many foes,
And stood against them as the hope of Troy
Against the Greeks that would have ent'red Troy.
But Hercules himself must yield to odds

(II.i.50-3)

And, in the same play, King Henry bids farewell to Clifford with the words:

Farewell, my Hector and my Troy's true hope.

(Iv.viii.25)

The Elizabethan acquaintance with the story of Troy, as the critic Kenneth Muir⁴⁸ has indicated in a Stratford-upon-Avon lecture given in 1980, was more likely to have been indebted to Virgil than to Homer. This, we might suppose, explains why Shakespeare refers to Hector in the second quotation as “the hope of Troy” (the phrase derives from The Aeneid: “O lux Dardaniae! spes O fidissima Teucrum!”⁴⁹) without feeling the need to mention the hero by name. The character of Hector in Troilus and Cressida is in keeping with the Virgilian vision of a consummate warrior, as are the two secondary Tudor sources with which Shakespeare may well have been familiar. William Caxton's translation of Raoul LeFevre's The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye claims that “This hector was moche coragyous. stronge. and victoryous in batayll / and a right wyse conduytour of men in Armes,”⁵⁰ and John Lydgate's Troy Book⁵¹ also styles Hector as a warrior archetype. As regards the emblem genre, at least one writer sees the Trojan paradigm in a similar light:

Le preux Hector, le beau Paris de Troie
Iouent tous deux de harpe armonieuse
Hector semond à guerre furieuse,
Et Paris quiert esbat, soulas, et ioye.(52)

And it is certainly the way in which the Countess, the Messenger and the King conceive of Hector.

However, it does not seem implausible to suggest that the dramatist could also have been familiar with the Hector of The Iliad, having available to him the English translation of A. Hall published in ten books by R. Newberrie in 1581 (London).⁵³ And The Iliad portrays Hector as not only a fabulous knight capable of feats of exceptional military prowess but also as an archetypal father figure—a man, as Paul Harvey puts it, “of human affections, devoted to wife and child”⁵⁴ and not just a soldier. R. K. Root may be oversimplifying in arguing that, in the Henry VI plays, Hector is “a mere name, a type of martial prowess.”⁵⁵ It is intriguing that each of the three “Hectors” Shakespeare presents us with can boast a degree of familial affection that must be considered unusual given the peculiar family dislocations of the Tetralogy as a whole. Fathers kill their sons, and sons kill their fathers (3 Henry VI II.v.); the weak King Henry surrenders his son's right to the throne in an action that even he admits is unnatural (3 Henry VI, I.i.192-3); in Richard III, Edward has his own brother executed, and Richard coldly conspires to the same end (II.i) and goes on to order the execution of his own nephews at IV.ii.18-19. By contrast, the bonds between Talbot, York, and Clifford and their respective progeny, each tested and steeled by grim Death itself, stamp themselves powerfully on the fabric of the drama. Talbot would willingly give his own life that his son might live (1 Henry VI IV.v). In 3 Henry VI, York's grief at the death of Rutland (I.iv.147) is as profound as is his pride in the way his sons demeaned themselves in battle (I.iv.8). And when Young Clifford carries away his father's body “As did Aeneas old Anchises bear” (2 Henry VI V.ii.62), he draws on a Classical anecdote popular in the emblem books as a good representation of family loyalty and devotion.

In his use of the figure of Hector as an illustration of military superlative and, as has been argued, of kinship, the dramatist may be moving with more subtlety in these plays than some critics believe.⁵⁶ It is intriguing, and a little worrying, that in two of the Hector allusions (those pertaining to Talbot and York) Shakespeare chooses to refer to Hercules as well. This is not as incongruous as it may seem at first. LeFevre's French edition of The Recuyell⁵⁷ has a woodcut of Deianira giving a kneeling Lichas the shirt poisoned with the blood of Nessus. And Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne,⁵⁸ in Emblemata, list an emblem in which Hercules is related to Trojan heroes. Certainly, some attempt is made to work out an Herculean identity for Talbot (he is linked a second time with Hercules when Lucy calls him “the great Alcides of the field” at IV.vii.60) and we might argue that Shakespeare intends some kind of parallel Hectorian and Herculean identification—a man, on the one hand, as bonded to his son as Hector was to his family, and, on the other, as betrayed and conquered by the treachery of his allies and the guile of a woman as was Hercules by the unfortunate Lichas and the shirt he bore from Deianira. Similarly, when the Messenger describes York's death at the hands of Margaret (significantly, though Clifford, Northumberland and the Prince of Wales were present at the execution, it is Margaret's rôle he emphasises), he compares York to the hope of Troy and then concedes tellingly

But Hercules himself must yield to odds;
And many strokes, though with a little axe,
Hews down and fells the hardest-timber'd oak

(3 Henry VI II.i.53-5)

This allusion to Hercules relates to a proverb “Ne Hercules quidem contra duos,” explained by Erasmus in Proverbs or Adages (1569 translation): “Not Hercules against two, that is to saye: Though a man neuer so muche excelleth other in strengthe, yet it wil be hard for him to matche two and mo at ones. And one man may lawfully giue place to a multitude.”⁵⁹ The vision of York forced to stand upon a mole hill (I.iv.67), made to wear a paper crown (line 95) and derided by Margaret, might almost seem an oblique reference to Hercules' subjugation at the mannish hands of Omphale, herself a queen. There is some evidence to suggest that Shakespeare's intentions stretch beyond a merely proverbial level towards this Omphalean connotation. Margaret's femininity is questioned on many occasions in 3 Henry VI: Richard calls her a “woman's general” at I.ii.68, York says she is “ill-beseeming” of her sex at I.iv.113, George refers to her as “Captain Margaret” at II.vi.75, Margaret herself declares that “I am ready to put armour on” (III.iii.230), and, at V.v.23-4, Richard sneers at her in wishing “That you might still have worn the petticoat / And ne'er have stol'n the breech from Lancaster.” The Hercules-Omphale entanglement appears to be a promising equation, applicable not only to York but also to King Henry who is never referred to as Hercules. Such ideas, though, may claim only inferential value since, so often, Shakespeare undermines his own Classical credibility by allowing himself to be lured into tempting “local” parallels whose variety does nothing to enhance the cohesion and the sustained significance of his mythology. Talbot's flirtation with Hector and Hercules seems defensible, even attractive, but how do we accommodate his further association with Daedalus in IV.vi and vii, or with Nero at I.iv.95? So, too, York looks like a promising hybrid of Hector and Hercules, but, if so, why does Shakespeare go on to confuse him with Ajax (2 Henry VI V.i.26) and with Achilles (2 Henry VI V.i.100)?

When we talk of the use of Trojan myth in the Henry VI plays, the inconsistencies of detail enable us to speak, with assurance, of only a feel of the saga of Troy. That, of itself, is useful. It gives the Tetralogy, as a whole, an overriding sense of predestined tragedy. There is humour in Henry's cry to Clifford, “Farewell, my Hector and my Troy's true hope,” but a humour that moves always against the dark backdrop of imminent disaster. Henry is no Priam, and his regime no splendid Troy. But he shares with his illustrious predecessor a common human pathos, and his order faces a destruction as certain, if not as memorable or as absolute, as that faced by the ancient city itself. And when Gloucester (later King Richard III) seeks a suitable metaphor for his own secretive ambitions, he imagines himself as some scheming Grecian plotting the demise of Troy:

I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

(3 Henry VI III.ii.188-90)

All this to gain the crown of England and build a new and a sinister world from the ashes of the old. The specific identity is not fixed, absolute, or even important. A Nestor, a Ulysses, a Sinon—Richard will be whoever or whatever he has to be in order to achieve his objective. Often outrageous and frequently inconsistent, the Tetralogy's Troy references endeavour to point us in general directions. It would be wrong to suggest that their implications are entirely unwholesome. While the sense of imminent doom is relevant to the immediate circumstances of Henry VI's predicament and Richard's impending rise to power, the Elizabethans would also have seen the fall of Troy as the unfortunate, but necessary, event that brought about the birth of their own great New Troy. In this way, the elements of the Dardanian myth contribute to the now familiar “two-way” mechanism of the English mythology and the anti-mythology. In one sense, they signal death, decay and destruction, and, in another, they offer the hope of a second Troy, of an English paradise on earth, in which the glories of former times will be born again.

Notes

1. Plutarch, The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, trans. Philemon Holland (A. Hatfield, 1603), explanation of words.

2. William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description Of The Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (1610, first publ.; F. Kingston, R. Young and J. Legatt for A. Heb, 1637), I, 207 (marginal note).

3. Quoted by Andrew S. Cairncross, ed., The First Part of King Henry VI, 3rd ed. (1962; rpt. Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1977), p. xxix.

4. For a discussion of the authorship question see Cairncross, ed., The First Part of King Henry VI, pp. xxviii-xxxvii.

5. Rich makes this retrospective remark in Riche his Farewell to Militarie profession (J. Kingston for R. Walley, 1581), sig. B1^v.

6. Edward Surtz, ed., Utopia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 23. The first edition of Utopia (a Latin version) was printed on the continent in 1516. An English translation appeared in 1551.

7. Sir Walter Raleigh: Selections from his Writings, edited with an introduction and notes, by G. E. Hadow (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 90. The extract is from The Historie of the World (1614, first publ.).

8. A Restitvtion of Decayed Intelligence In antiquities. Concerning the most noble and renowned English nation (Antwerp: Robert Bruney, 1605), p. 56 (gloss).

9. Argol is here writing in a prefatory address to the reader in Gerard Leigh's (sometimes Legh) The Accedence of Armorie (1562, first publ.; R. Tottel, 1591), sig. A5^v.

10. The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2nd ed. rev. and cor. by J. A. Giles (James Bohn, 1842), p. xix. Thompson makes the remark in his original 1718 translation.

11. Cairncross, ed., The First Part of King Henry VI, note to I.ii.33.

12. For a concise history of Orlando/Roland, see Ivor H. Evans' revised edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, centenary ed. (1970; rpt. Cassell, 1977), p. 927.

13. “King Arthur and Politics,” Speculum, 2 (1927), 33-51.

14. Susan Snyder, ed., The Divine Weekes And Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur Du Bartas (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), II, 886, cites the poem (1605 ed., sig. A2^v) in which it occurs.

15. Lamentations for the death of the late Illustrious Prince Henry: and the dissolution of his religious Familie (Tho. Snodham for R. Jackson, 1613), dedication leaf.

16. The Pastyme of the People. The Chronycles of dyuers realmys and most specyally of the realme of England (J. Rastell, 1530), signs. C5^r-D3^r.

17. Chronycles of Englande (St. Albans: 1483), pp. 186^r-227^v. The pagination has been pencilled in, perhaps after a more recent rebinding of the volume.

18. The Practice, Proceedings, And Lawes of armes, described out of the doings of most valiant and expert Captaines, and confirmed both by ancient, and moderne examples, and praecedents (deputies of Christopher Barker, 1593), sig. B3^r.

19. The Trve Vse of Armorie, Shewed by Historie, and plainly proued by example (J. Jackson for Gabriell Cawood, 1592), p. 29.

20. Rastell, The Pastyme of the People, sig. C6^v.

21. Oddly enough, while Sutcliffe's military treatise praises Edward's reign, there is no mention of the Order of the Garter.

22. Leigh, The Accedence of Armorie, fol. 132^v.

23. Wyrley, The Trve Vse of Armorie, p. 33.

24. A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Francis Raphelengius, 1586), p. 195.

25. In a passage from Hall's work cited by Cairncross, ed., The First Part of King Henry VI, p. 138.

26. Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings, And Lawes of armes, sig. B3^r.

27. In 1 Henry VI, the allusions appear at IV.ii.55 (“God and Saint George, Talbot and England's right”) and IV.vi.1 (“Saint George and victory!”). 3 Henry VI has references at II.i.204 (“God and Saint George for us!”), at II.ii.80 (“Unsheathe your sword, good father; cry ‘Saint George!’”), at IV.ii.29 (“For Warwick and his friends, God and Saint George!”), and at V.i.113 (“Lords, to the field; Saint George and victory!”). And we may cite three such examples from Richard III: at V.iii.270 (“God and Saint George! Richmond and victory!”), at V.iii.301 (“This, and Saint George to boot!”), and at V.iii.349 (“Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George”).

28. See Hardin Craig, “Morality Plays and Elizabethan Drama,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 1 (1950), 64-72; and Michael Quinn, “Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 45-52.

29. As does Cairncross, ed., The First Part of King Henry VI, note to II.v.116.

30. The Bible: That Is, The Holy Scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament (Robert Barker, 1603). This is the Geneva version.

31. H. C. Hart, ed., The Third Part of Henry VI, 1st ed. (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1909), note to II.i.74.

32. H. C. Hart, ed., The Third Part of Henry VI, note to II.i.74.

33. Emblemes (printed for J. Williams, and sold by William Grantham, 1634), pp. 284-6.

34. “Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), p. 489.

35. Michael Quinn also uses the words “original sin” in his paper “Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays”, p. 48.

36. The modern edition used is that of Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1960), p. 213. The earliest edition of the Mirror (written by William Baldwin, et al.) is believed to have appeared in 1555.

37. The Secrets and Wonders of the Worlde. A Booke Ryght rare and straunge, contayning many excellent properties, giuen to Man, Beastes, Foules, Fishes, and Serpents, Trees and Plants, translated out of P. de Changy's French abridgement by I. A. (1566, trans. first publ.; T. Hacket, 1587), sig. E4^v.

38. Quoted and translated by Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (Trübner & Co., 1870), p. 385.

39. Les Devises Heroiques, De M. Claude Paradin, Chanoine de Beaujeu, Du Signeur Gabriel Symeon (Anvers: C. Plantin, 1561).

40. Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, p. 177.

41. It was a common practice amongst dramatists of the day to refer to London as New Troy or Troynovant—in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene gives Bacon these lines:

    I find by deep prescience of mine art,
    Which once I tempered in my secret cell,
    That here where Brute did build his Troynovant,
    From forth the royal garden of a king
    Shall flourish out so rich and fair a bud,
    Whose brigthness shall deface proud Phoebus' flower,
    And over-shadow Albion with her leaves.

    The text used is that in John Gassner's Bantam collection Elizabethan Drama (New York: Bantam World Drama edition, 1967), scene xvi (p. 229). Similarly, The Mirror for Magistrates (ed. Lily B. Campbell) mentions Brute twice (p. 122 and p. 123) without feeling compelled to explain his significance to the reader. Though originally published before Elizabeth's reign began, the Mirror was both influential and popular in Shakespeare's era.

42. For the use of “Albion” in relation to the Trojan Brutus story, see Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum, ed. J. A. Giles (D. Nutt, 1844). G. H. Gerould, in his article “King Arthur and Politics” (p. 34), believes that Geoffrey issued his history between 1136 and 1138.

43. “Suffolk and Margaret: A Study of Some Sections of Shakespeare's Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 310-22.

44. Emblemas Morales (1589, first publ.; En Segouia: Impresso por Juan de la Cuesta, 1591), p. 232^r.

45. Metamorphoseon Sive Transformationvm Ovidianarvm Libri Qvindecim (1606, facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), plate 126.

46. “Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays,” pp. 47-8.

47. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, eds., The Arte of English Poesie (1598, first publ.; Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), p. 4.

48. The point was made during a lecture at The Hill, in Stratford-upon-Avon, July 1980.

49. T. H. D. May, ed. and trans., The Aeneid of Virgil (George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1930), p. 65.

50. H. O. Sommer, ed., The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (D. Nutt, 1894), II. 578.

51. Mark Sacharoff, in his paper “The Traditions of the Troy-Story Heroes and the Problem of Satire in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), remarks that “Hector is without doubt the peerless heroic figure in the Troy Book” (p. 127).

52. Cited by Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, eds., Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst Des XVI, und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), col. 1682.

53. Ten books of Homers Iliades, translated out of the French by A. Hall (R. Newberie, 1581). Hall's translation is in verse.

54. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937; rpt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 196.

55. Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1965), p. 69.

56. This is not to deny that Shakespeare's usage of mythic figures is at times inconsistent and confusing. M. C. Bradbrook's cautious generalization in The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Chatto and Windus, 1963) seems right: “His early plays, Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, and Richard III, The Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona, are heavily rhetorical, and make some parade of both fashion and learning” (p. 60).

57. The Warburg Institute, University of London, catalogues this print under “Hercules” and indicates the print is on fol. 203^r in a 1495 ed. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

58. Henkel and Schöne, eds., Emblemata, column 1644.

59. Proverbs or Adages, ed DeWitt T. Starnes (1569; facsimile rpt. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), pp. 16^v-17^r.