SOURCE: Nichols, Nina da Vinci. “The Paper Trail to the Throne.” In Henry VI: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas A. Pendleton, pp. 97-112. New York: Routledge, 2001.

[In the following essay, Nichols links the symbolic and theatrical functions of paper to themes of legality, revenge, and the legitimacy of kings in the Henry VI plays.]

Right, says the fledgling playwright as he carries the script of his national epic into the theater. Players know that speech is action, but the audience had better see speech referring to something substantive—a man, an army, a crown, something visible on stage. Of course, some of this speechifying is operative language: oaths, pledges, and ceremonies authorizing allegiance. Those passages ought to work well with an audience accustomed to ritualized occasions. But what to do about all these letters, bills, proclamations, edicts, writs, and verses from the beyond? Written words are false signifiers, attributable to no one and addressing only an educated elite; hence they are secret, “the devil's writ.” Worse still, they are fixed and so pretend to be absolute. Writing, ergo, provides only the “shadow of a substance,” or an army, or a crown. Words in that form are not worth the paper they're written on. Aha! About my brain! Paper!

So the new man-of-theater tackles the problem for his history plays not only of how language fares in a fallen world, but how the legacy of Babel may translate into stage business.¹ Precisely as it's utterly insignificant, destructible, and the physical medium for words, paper in all three plays performs as a theatrical device. Or perhaps metatheatrical device would be more apt since, in several instances discussed below, papers operate as props and visual images nearly independent from writing. In all cases, bills, books, and supplications passed back and forth as characters jockey for position literally show written language asserting itself as substantive instead of referential. Whereas every character must assert or be checked by the final authority of combat, papers pretend to derive from a world as signified. No one in the trilogy scrutinizes words like a Richard II, or divides them from substance like a Lear wanting to keep his title, though Shakespeare introduces that idea when both Charles of France in Part 1 and King Henry in Part 3 of Henry VI symbolically divide their crowns. Nor are the Henry VI plays anchored like the Second Tetralogy to a poetic structure independent of chronology.² Shakespeare instead pits signifier against signified more playfully—if I may—through papers that initiate action, serve a symbolic coherency, and reflect the individualized conception of the self which will wreck so many of his tragic heroes. Even though actual power shifts either with battles won or plots laid and discovered, as these are represented on and by paper, so paper ironically expresses a semblance of orderly procedure in the face of encroaching chaos.

Shakespeare, in other words, dramatizes the perfect analogy, indeed the near equivalence, of verbal, social, and moral orders, that becomes typical of his and other Renaissance theaters: the stage is the world. Still more specifically, the insignificance of written papers expresses the medieval world as fallen: a golden age of heroes exemplified by Talbot passing into an era of self-interest and Realpolitik. As sedition and betrayal become everyday evils, so writing comes to be mistrusted not only by an ignorant rabble. Papers then signify the stability of person, family, and state destroyed by ambition, factionalism, and superstition, separately and together. Henry's crown is hollow yet mysterious, desired yet mocked, claimed by him as a divine right and “shadowed” by York until paper and crown become inseparable at the latter's death. Indeed, most of the many papers passed back and forth in the three plays function either as premonitions or consequences of York's paper trail to the throne. To lay out all the references would amount to annotating the plays line by line. Let me instead summarize some relevant actions and examine in more detail four emblematic episodes in which, as I suggested above, paper acquires a theatrical function almost separable from the writing it bears: in Part 1, the response to Gloucester's bill; in Part 2, the “exorcisms” orchestrated by the priest, Hume, for Eleanor of Gloucester; also in Part 2, Queen Margaret with the severed head of her lover Suffolk; in Part 3, York's paper crown.

Part 1 suggests that papers, like “shadows” and “pictures,” are equally insubstantial signifiers—that is, figures and images—during the quarrels between followers of Lancaster and York after the death of Henry V. The testing of England, the plays' overall subject, begins obliquely with the arrival of “letters full of bad mischance” reporting that the Dauphin has been crowned king (1.1.88) Immediately the scene shifts to the French court and a bit of action that serves as an ironic leitmotif throughout the trilogy: only heaven authorizes a true king. Laying a trap for Joan la Pucelle and her claim of divine guidance, the Dauphin assigns a “shadow” king, Reignier, to receive her. She, however, sees through the counterfeit, proving that she may indeed commune with heaven, whence the mystery of kingship once found its source. To recognize Joan's triumph, the Dauphin will “divide his crown with her” (1.6.18), a scandalous idea to the English audience and proof that La Pucelle is a witch. The Devil rules the French. A divided crown cannot be substantive, although Charles implies that his crown is God-given.

The scene between Talbot and the Countess (2.3), when she compares the hero to her picture of him, makes a similar point in reverse: he calls on his army to show his substance. And then the Temple Garden scene (2.4) elaborates the theme again as it pivots on a show of allegiance either to Henry Lancaster or Richard Plantagenet in the “dumb significants” of red and white roses, respectively; these, too, refer to an abstract idea of power while effectively dividing the country's substance. Henry, later taking up a red rose (4.1.145-154), says it signifies only the accident of his birth as Lancaster, not his identity as king; a rose is “a trifle,” a “toy” referring to nothing but itself. Linguistically he is right; politically he is wrong. During the quarrel between factions in the Temple Garden scene, the unnamed lawyer, the one character in the play whose person substantiates legal writ, plucks a white rose, saying that his “study and his books” show the Red Rose faction to be in the wrong (2.4.56-58). The latter argue that Plantagenet should remain a “yeoman” because his blood is “attained” and “corrupted” by his father's execution for treason under Henry V (90-95). Plantagenet counters that his father was arrested and summarily executed without a legal bill of attainder; therefore he may not be deprived of his heritage as York. Deeper sources of division notwithstanding, expert interpretation of the law, in other words, rests as fully on the “dumb significants” of paper (“books”) as roses themselves in the political realm or inscrutable messages from elsewhere in the spiritual one. Earlier in the scene Suffolk, in his arrogance, had dismissed law as incomprehensible, saying he instead intended to “frame the law unto his will” (9). Plainly, both factions prepare to wage a shadow war which, Warwick prophesies, will either advance Plantagenet as heir to the house of Mortimer during the next Parliament or send “a thousand souls to death” in battle (116-127).

Shakespeare then makes theatrical capital out of paper in 3.1, during the Parliament nominally called to effect a truce between Gloucester, the Lord Protector, and Bishop Winchester, the dissident. According to stage directions at the beginning of the scene before any dialogue, “Gloucester offers to put up a bill, Winchester snatches it [and] tears it,” instantly demonstrating the fragility of the king's power. Presumably Gloucester's paper spells out the charge he delivers moments later, that the dissidents are plotting to bring him down (3.1.21-24), but an infuriated Winchester seizes the advantage by preventing Gloucester from reading his bill aloud:

Com'st thou with deep premeditated lines,
With written pamphlets studiously devised?
Humphrey of Gloucester, if thou canst accuse
Or aught intend'st to lay unto my charge,
Do it without invention, suddenly
As I with sudden and extemporal speech
Purpose to answer what thou canst object.

(3.1.1-7)

On the offensive, Winchester articulates the very antithesis between spoken and written words that will characterize the machinations of the White Rose faction hereafter. Gloucester's answer, by comparison, sounds defensive as he takes up the theme. Don't think I've “forged” this list of your crimes, he says, I can recite my bill “verbatim” while your treachery is “manifest” in the traps you have laid for my life (8-24). The argument between Church and State at the least makes “manifest” the split between words substantiated by a man and worthless papers, the point immediately underscored by civil strife made equally manifest on stage. A distressed mayor breaks in on the Parliament for help with maintaining order in the city; he is followed by both Gloucester's and Winchester's “servingmen” with “bloody pates” who have been pelting each other with stones—carrying weapons has been forbidden. As the “skirmish” spills over in the hall, one servingman vows he will fight rather than be “disgraced” by the likes of an “inkhorn mate” for a neighbor (101-103).

Instead of ending here, however, the scene then reaches a brilliant climax, for no sooner has the mob departed and Henry made peace between his warring uncles than Warwick “proffers a scroll” in the right of Richard Plantagenet “to his blood” as York (159-162). In theatrical effect, this indeed is the deeply “premediated” paper anticipated dramatically by Winchester's tearing up of the Protector's “bill.” Warwick the king-maker has been waiting in the wings for his cue to present the scroll, thereby balancing the scene structurally: Gloucester, next in blood to the throne, has been silenced. Alone then with the threat to him implicit in Warwick's scroll, Henry the conciliator unwittingly begins to divide his substance; he creates a “princely Duke of York” (173) who, from this moment on, wears a shadow crown. Exeter in soliloquy after the Parliament says as much.

This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forged love
And will at last break out into a flame.

(190-192)

Yet York, at this point in the saga, seems not to be angling for the throne but biding his time until his faction gains strength (Ornstein 40). Nevertheless, by the close of the play written papers and “dumb significants” have become equivalent symptoms of discord. More letters are carried to and from France in 4.1; from the Pope in 5.1; from Henry to France by Winchester in 5.4., the latter offering to turn King Charles into a “shadow of himself” by having him swear fealty to England (5.4.133). Although these papers advance plot, dramatically they simply punctuate the action.

In Part 2, to the contrary, papers serve a more intricate structure combining their functions as medium for writing and as separable theatrical devices. Again the play opens with papers pertaining to France, this time “articles of contracted peace” (1.1.40) relating to Henry's marriage to Margaret. Gloucester reads them aloud first, and stage directions say he “lets the paper fall” as he is overcome by tears (53-54). Then his enemy Winchester takes up the paper and reads aloud, much as if this brief fall and rise of paper foreshadowed in little the imminent decline of Henry and rise of York. The papers' import? Anjou and Maine “are given to the French, / Paris is lost,” the peers disaffected, Humphrey's fall forecast, and, by the close of the scene, York in soliloquy expresses his intention: “when I spy advantage, claim the crown” from Henry, “Whose bookish rule hath pulled fair England down” (240, 257). In sum, papers now line the path for York, who hereafter remains vigilant for “advantage.”

Papers establish York's presence even when he is offstage. For instance, though he takes no part in the Peter-Horner argument, it hinges on the dissidents' claim. A man called Peter comes to court with a “petition” against his master Horner for declaring York the rightful king (1.3). As several other petitioners also appear in the scene, it is not clear which papers Queen Margaret destroys in the stage direction instructing her to “tear the supplication” (SD, 39). The very mode of appeal through papers provokes her raging to Suffolk about “the fashion in the court of England” where commoners can overthrow a king “by petition,” while Henry's “weapons” for retaliating are “holy saws of sacred writ” (42-58). By the end of the scene, in the presence of the king and York, Gloucester delivers the law: Peter and Horner shall meet in single combat because the master has witnessed “his servant's malice” (209-210). Do the implications apply to Henry's servant York? The episode feels prophetic partly because while the nobility wait for Horner to answer the charge in person, a quarrel breaks out among them about York's appointment as regent of France; that is, about his suitability as official shadow of the throne.

Then in 1.4, two priests, Margery Jordan, and Bolingbroke conjure up the spirit world for the vain, superstitious Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester. Either the priest Southwell or Bolingbroke reads out black magic spells from papers and presides over “ceremonies” eliciting thunder, lightning, and a Spirit that “riseth” (23). In other words, the mysterious papers and incantations bring about a coup de théâtre. Earlier, Eleanor, wanting her ambitions endorsed by the beyond, had instructed Hume to seek out the “cunning witch” Margery Jordan as an interpreter of dreams (1.2.74-75), a variation on pictures as dumb significants. In this scene, the haughty duchess watches “from aloft”—ironically perched as high as she will reach—as the priest Southwell writes out the message delivered by Jordan's familiar (SD 32). It all seems more marvelous than dangerous until York and Buckingham break into the “exorcism,” seize the papers, and York reads out “the devil's writ.” These “oracles,” York declares, “are hardly attained and hardly understood” (71), that is, irrational gabble. Yet as they seem to demand the death of the king along with others of his party, York arrests Eleanor as a traitor in a show of respect for law. Who framed the “oracles” and how probably matters less than the fact that York unifies them dramatically (Cutts 117). Eleanor provides him with “A pretty plot, well chosen to build upon!” (57), as he does.

After her judgment (2.3), a barefoot Eleanor, carrying a taper, parades in a white sheet with written “verses” (papers of accusation?) pinned to her back (2.4, SD 17). Punishment fits the crime in a public show of England's suffering under the curse of witchcraft, a popular interpretation of the country's plight at the hands of the French and a source of resentment that York counts on. Eleanor's white sheet, the costume of a penitent, serves in turn as a visual reminder of her former luxurious dress and of earlier complaints about her expensive tastes. Still, none of Shakespeare's sources, either for her adventures in necromancy or her sentence, mentions writings to and from a spirit world, whether located above or below. Hall instead says that Eleanor asked the witch Jordan to fashion a wax effigy of the king, which through sorcery would consume and bring him to death (Bullough 102). Shakespeare, however, ignores this potential dumb significant. Much ado throughout the next act about the exorcism and paper rather seems to unify the latter's implications thus far. For one, Eleanor is as mad in her way as Joan la Pucelle in hers: both women believe in primitive signatories, each is motivated by an extreme self-conception referring to an elsewhere at the expense of their responsibility to communal order. For another, Eleanor's language describing the scene of her shame anticipates York's shame with the paper crown:

Methinks I should not thus be led along,
Mailed up in shame, with papers on my back,
And followed with a rabble that rejoice
To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans.

(2.4.30-34, emphasis mine)

As she departs for exile to the Isle of Man, Gloucester charges the herald escorting her to see that her penance does not “exceed the King's commission” (75-76). The phrase may foreshadow the style of York's death, which ironically does exceed a king's commission. More immediately, the entire episode motivates the murder of Gloucester, who blocks York's ascent to the throne.

In Part 2, this strong anti-intellectual strain reaches a crescendo with the Cade rebellion, fomented by York in Act 3 and darkening his shadow with malevolence:

I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman,
John Cade of Ashford,
To make commotion, as full well he can,
Under the title of John Mortimer …
This devil here shall be my substitute; …
Say that he thrive, as 'tis great like he will;
Why, then from Ireland come I with my strength
And reap the harvest which that rascal sowed.

(3.1.356-369, 371, 379-381)

The “commotion” pivots on rejection by the illiterate of everything written, from letters to laws and everyone who writes: “scholars, lawyers,” and their ilk. An “honest, plain dealing man,” says Cade, only “has his mark” (4.2.98). So the man named “Emmanuel” (meaning lord, but also a heading for documents meaning “God with us”) in effect signs his own death warrant with Cade's mob when he thanks God that he has been “so well brought up he can write his name” (101). He then is taken off to be hanged, an ironic exemplar “with his pen and inkhorn about his neck” (106). Cade in full glory even justifies his own absurd bid for the crown with a garbled genealogy that mimics the recitals of noble claimants (130-140). Not that Cade commands the slightest political credibility (Pearlman 36). The insurrection, rather, expresses a deep hostility between classes that York at once deplores and exploits like a true Machiavel.

Paper then becomes a brilliant emblem in 4.4 when a mad Queen Margaret addresses the severed head of Suffolk, cradled in her arms, while the king reads “a supplication” from Cade's rebel forces. Mad she must be, else the scene loses half of its theatrical point as a macabre spectacle of deranged queen on one side of the stage and pious king on the other, each engaged in acts symbolizing their difference. Her emotional disorder is analogous to the social disorder reported by the very paper Henry studies, another shadow of York. She speaks first “to herself,” communing with, fondling, kissing the grisly remains of her lover: “Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind / … Think therefore on revenge” (1-3). Then glimmerings of reason seem to return, and a sense of occasion prompts her to hide the head inside her gown: “Here may his head lie on my throbbing breast” (5). Both line and gesture echo Suffolk's romantic farewell to her, in which he anticipated death. In her presence, he said, death would be “as mild and gentle as the cradle-babe's / Dying with mother's dug between its lips,” whereas “out of her sight” he would “cry out” to have her “lips to stop [his] mouth” (3.2.388-396). Once dead he is indeed out of her sight, and both her lips and her dug do stop his mouth. The physical immediacy of Margaret's action, her elemental attachment to the severed head as more alive to her than her husband, expresses not only the lovers' former physical union but her scorn for the merely legal bond of marriage and her affinity to the realm of the dead. She is French. Suffolk married her in France for Henry in absentia, and her stance between her actual lover and ineffectual husband expresses their three-way relationship thereafter. Henry is a negligible tool of her ambition, a stepping-stone for the woman who cost him France and caused dissension among his noblemen.

While Margaret attends to the hideous trophy, the king remains so absorbed in reading the supplication from Cade that Buckingham must rouse and urge him to answer the rebels immediately. Their exchange is heavily ironic. Henry says he will “send some holy bishop to entreat” with the rebels lest many “perish by the sword” (10-12), in theatrical effect commenting on Suffolk's having just perished by the sword. Further, to avoid “bloody war,” he himself will “parley” with Cade—for all the good talk will do with the man who burns books. Henry then turns to Lord Saye with: “Jack Cade hath sworn to have thy head” (19), again reminding the audience of Suffolk's severed head at Margaret's breast. Eventually, twenty lines into the scene, Henry turns to the mad Queen with the bloody head and refers to her vacancy; that is to say, first he was abstracted while she muttered to her lover's head, then they switch postures so that she is abstracted while he converses with his court. “How now, madam? / Still lamenting and mourning for Suffolk's death” (21-22). That “still” is provocative. It suggests that Henry only at that moment recognizes in her a continuing demeanor of lament, for even this weak and remote young man would have reacted more strongly to the sight of her clinging to the bloody remnant.

Be that as it may, the brief scene presents an astonishing tableau of paper or shadow versus substance. The scholarly Henry here becomes a shadow of himself, a believer in a lost unitary world of words and things: to him the supplication, like all papers, at once represents, symbolizes, and signifies. Put still differently, the supplication persuades Henry, an educated gentleman, to a meeting with his opposite, an outlaw incapable of entering a symbolic reality. Cade lives in his body and in fact fears the symbolic, as becomes still more apparent in the following scenes. In this sense, Margaret, the hated Frenchwoman gone mad, is as anarchic emotionally as Cade is politically. Or again, in Act I of Part 3, when Margaret berates Henry for disenfranchising her son by appointing York as successor, warning him that Lancastrians will be alienated, Henry amazingly enough says he will “write unto them and entreat them fair” (1.1.271). She, like Cade, pins her faith to material substance. The scene functions as a commentary not only on Henry's trust in dumb significants like paper but on woman's irrational resort either to the supernatural, like Eleanor and La Pucelle, or to the preternatural, like Margaret. And York's shadow hovers throughout.

Immediately a messenger comes from the rebels and tells the king to flee: “All scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen, / They call false caterpillars and intend their death” (2 Henry VI, 4.4.36-37) The king replies as a Christ: “O graceless men! They know not what they do.” Only when a second messenger and Buckingham urge Henry again does he say: “Come Margaret. God, our hope, will succor us.” Margaret knows better than to trust in metaphysical aid: “My hope is gone, now Suffolk is deceased” (56). The threat of total anarchy then follows with Cade's edict to “pull down the Savoy … the Inns of Court … all records of the realm” (4.7.1-17). Law will originate only from Cade's mouth, “extempore.” He condemns books, schools, and paper mills (!), and orders the death of Lord Saye, who has men around him talking of “a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear” (37-38). “Kill all the lawyers,” those middlemen interpreting abstract codes and other written arcana.

These and more implications of paper culminate in the scene of York's death in Part 3, perhaps the most overtly theatrical of the four episodes outlined here and one dense with allusions to events in the Christian tradition. To sketch out the relevant prior actions, York claims his right to the crown (2 Henry VI, 5.1.1-2), and then resists arrest by Somerset for “capital treason against the King” (106-108). Openly defiant, York several times during the scene says, “We are thy sovereign,” and “I am thy king” (127, 143), while Clifford calls him mad to think so, tries to enforce the order of arrest, and threatens York with beheading (134-135). Several phrasings, too, seem particularly to anticipate his end. When York protests that his sons' “words” will be his “surety” or bail (120-121), Margaret complains to the king that York “will not obey” the law (136). In the critical scene later, Margaret and Young Clifford not only enforce obedience but luxuriate in their lawless revenge on York for disinheriting Margaret's son and killing Clifford's father.

The opening scene in Part 3, however, foreshadows York's ignominious end more specifically. York and Warwick at court urge York's claim with the threat of arms: “Will you we show our title to the crown?” (1.1.102, emphasis added). Henry, reminded of Bolingbroke's usurpation, admits in an aside that his title is weak and decides to “adopt” an heir (136); so again, as in Part 1 when he created York, Henry advances his enemy, now as official successor. The two embrace to show themselves reconciled, and their pact, we learn later “is enrolled in the parliament” (2.1.173), that is, written into law. York's sons scorn the “vain and frivolous” pact as not sworn before a lawful magistrate (1.2.22-34), and so combat resumes. Retaliating for York's slaying of Old Clifford (2 Henry VI, 5.2), his son Young Clifford slays York's boy Rutland. He brings the body to Margaret, who dips a cloth in the blood on Clifford's sword to substantiate report of the boy's murder with visible evidence. Plainly this line of action in Parts 2 and 3 modulates the themes of law, vengeance, and the sins of the fathers visited on their sons down generations since the reign of Richard II. The densely interwoven themes come to the forefront especially as the atmosphere of York's death recalls that of the Divine Son Christ; for Margaret and Clifford murder the man who would be king in a mock coronation resembling the Passion.³

The extraordinary play-within-a-play in 1.4 hints not only at analogues to the Corpus Christi plays but at both the anti-intellectualism earlier in the trilogy and the dynamic between sign and substance at the heart of Shakespeare's history. While no such borrowing can be proven by historical or textual study—indeed there is no absolute proof that Shakespeare ever saw the mystery cycles performed, much less which ones and where—Shakespeare at the least seems to be authenticating his own fifteenth-century chronicle by evoking the moods and actions typical of several climactic episodes.⁴ Scholarly opinion about similarities among cycles and guesswork about their provenance goes so far as to suggest that the plays of the Wakefield Master provided a source for those seen at York and Coventry, or alternatively, that all playwrights involved at these and other locales drew on a common vernacular source now lost.⁵ Nothing said here means to resolve these issues by simplifying them. I instead refer mainly to the Wakefield and York texts as their depictions of the trials, judgment, and death of Christ at the hands of officials and commoners alike recur with varying fullness in other cycles as well as in liturgical recitations, biblical passages, and prayers.

When Northumberland asks what should be done with the captive York, Margaret at exuberant length outlines the “game” or “sport” they will play to degrade the false king (1.4.66-86). To this end she proves a consummate stage manager. I take the sense of her instruction to “stand” him “on a molehill,” followed immediately by her echoing of York's grandiose lines at the end of Part 2 about his right to the crown, to be cues to the scene's staging as a crucifixion. He that “raught at mountains with outstretched arms” [i.e., reached for Henry's throne] / Yet parted but the shadow with his hand” (68-69); that is, parted King Henry, a shadow, from his substance, her army. If York's arms are not outstretched, her line is purely metaphoric and its precise placement here more arbitrary than seems plausible. Either way, she alludes to York's regal claim in the earlier scene: “this hand was meant to handle naught but gold. / I cannot give due action to my words / Except a sword or scepter balance it” (2 Henry VI, 5.1.7-9). He repeats the same magisterial image a few lines later in that scene, comparing Henry's hand, “made to grasp a palmer's staff,” to his own, “to hold a scepter up” (97-103). Repeating images from play to play seems to exemplify Shakespeare's technique in building to this climax, for Margaret intends York to recognize himself in her taunting summary: “Was it you that would be England's king?” (70). At the same time, the wider context echoes Christ's indictment:

Sir Pilate, prince peerless, hear what is said,
That he escape not harmless but ye doom him dead:
He calls himself king in every place, thus has he misled
Our people for a space, and might our laws down tread.

(Wakefield Scourging, 380, emphasis mine)

Margaret berates York for his imposture, insults his “mess of sons” (70-79), then gives him the “napkin” stained with Rutland's blood. Through it all York makes no reply. Typically, the Christ refuses to reply either to Herod and Pilate during his trials or to his tormentors during the Buffeting, Scourging, and Crucifixion sequences of the plays. One or another figure in these episodes decides Jesus is “mad” not to defend himself against coming “doom,” and initiates his mockery. So Margaret ridicules York: “I prithee, grieve, to make me merry, York. …”

Why art thou patient, man? Thou should'st be mad;
And I, to make thee mad, do mock thee thus.
Stamp, rave, and fret, that I may sing and dance.
Thou woulds't be fee'd, I see, to make me sport.
York cannot speak, unless he wear a crown.—
A crown for York! And, lords, bow low to him.
Hold you his hands, whilst I do set it on.

(1.4.86, 89-95)

In the York play by the “Shermen,” soldiers decide Jesus must be “a foyl” to remain silent (l.28). In Wakefield's Buffeting, the torturers make good “cheer” of their task and “teche him … a new play of Yoyll” (yule?) at which they “dawnse” (l.497). One Torturer in the Wakefield Scourging promises the others great cheer by proposing to “lead [Christ] a dance unto Sir Pilate's hall” (l.376). The salient point is that game, violence, dance, and jest, sometimes by “soldiers” or “knights,” or “a consultus,” are elaborated only in these episodes of the mystery pageants and might be cited here at length to parallel Margaret's wish that York give her “sport” (Kolve 196-198). The vengeful queen extends her abuse of York almost as if reminding the audience that torturers in the plays traditionally “behave like raving madmen,” in Kolve's phrase, to incite the Christ to react. Most tellingly, to further humiliate the man, Margaret addresses him as one of the actors hired especially to perform various “japes” around the cross, an action extended largely for its own sake (Kolve 181): “Thou woulds't be fee'd, I see, to make me sport,” that is, to entertain me as would a player king.

Cutts believes the crown Margaret then bestows on York might have been fashioned on the spot out of the legal “pact” she somehow has been carrying (122). If so, York's paper trail may have been still more visible on Shakespeare's stage than I imagine. Margaret congratulates herself on her creation and pretends to recognize him suddenly as Henry's usurper:

… Now looks he like a king! …
But how is it that great Plantagenet
Is crowned so soon, and broke his solemn oath
As I bethink me, you should not be king
Till our King Henry had shook hands with death. …
O, 'tis a fault too, too unpardonable!
Off with the crown, and, with the crown, his head!

(96-107)

She conferred kingship with a bit of paper and may depose him as easily. Hall's Chronicle dispatches York in a phrase or two. Clifford discovers York's dead body, cuts off the head, crowns it with paper, then presents it to Margaret on a pole “in great despite.” It is greeted with “much derision … much joy … and rejoysing” (Bullough 178). Holinshed additionally provides the version paralleling the crucifixion: “Some write that the duke was taken alive, …” mocked, crowned with a garland of “sedges or bulrushes,” and was treated “as the Jewes did unto Christ” (Bullough 210). Neither source, however, suggests why Shakespeare extends the action here so that it deepens the theme of trial by law and intensifies the implications of sign and substance. As Young Clifford starts to remove York's crown, Margaret stops him, saying, “Nay, stay. Let's hear the orisons he makes,” rather like Caiaphas urging a slower pace on the torturers so as to increase the fun (Wakefield Buffeting, 467-470).

While Christ's words before he dies vary from play to play, the pattern of his breaking his long silence at this juncture remains constant. And in general, as liturgical drama becomes Shakespearean parody, so Christ's prayer—“Eli, eli, eli.”—becomes York's lengthy curse, beginning “She-wolf of France” (111-149). Yet remarkably enough, part of his speech momentarily restores the play's fallen language to something like its ideal power to signify, for York calls on the “napkin” with Rutland's blood as a testament:

See, ruthless Queen, a hapless father's tears?
This cloth thou dippedst in blood of my sweet boy,
And I with tears do wash the blood away.
Keep thou the napkin, and go boast of this;
And if thou tell'st the heavy story right
Upon my soul, the hearers will shed tears.
Yea even my foes will shed fast falling tears
And say, “Alas, it was a piteous deed.”

(156-163)

In rhetorical effect, he recalls the instant repeated in the York, Wakefield, and other cycles when Jesus calls to those present to “behold” if “ever ye sagh body / Bufet and bett thus blody (York Crucifixion, 233-285).⁶ With that gesture, his sacred body substantiates the epiphanic word “behold” and encapsulates the essence of liturgical drama's unity of signifier and signified. The context for so sacramental an event, however, has long since become theater of the world and its imitation in Shakespeare's play. So York, a parodic Christ, can only evoke the idea of “behold” as he envisions some future audience who will see the bloody napkin that authenticates Margaret's cruelty (156-169). In such a recital, joining word to material thing, language will regain its authority as sign, and the highest justice will exonerate York. In fact speech does retrieve some efficacy right then, for Northumberland is moved to tears (150-151; 169-171), while York plays out the significance of Christ's “gyltles thus am I put to pyne” (York Crucifixion, 176). He may indeed be a player king as he likens himself to the Divine Father who suffered his innocent son to be martyred. York himself then hands over the paper crown, deposing himself in a gesture Shakespeare was to repeat with historical consequence in Richard II. Structurally, York's surrendering the paper crown not only reverses Henry's inept pact elevating York; it anticipates Henry's later ceding the protectorship to Warwick and Clarence, another division of his crown. York's mood on returning the paper crown, however, is bitterly triumphant rather than abject; he has effected an ironic reversal of victim and victor while reinvesting language with an aura of its original, mythic power. Clifford and Margaret then stab York, who commends himself to heaven in a final echo of the Christ.

Shakespeare thus layers his evocation of the Corpus Christi Passion both dramatically and rhetorically. The report of York's death later to his sons, for instance, might be echoing the torturers' reports to Pilate in most of the cycle plays, or in the liturgical poem quoted below.⁷ Shakespeare's messenger says

Who crowned the gracious Duke in high despite
Laughed in his face; and when with grief he wept,
The ruthless Queen gave him to dry his cheeks
A napkin steeped in the harmless blood
Of sweet young Rutland, by rough Clifford slain.
And after many scorns, many foul taunts,
They took his head. …

(2.1.59-65)

The narrative poem “Evangelie,” reporting to Pilate, reads

While ihesu crist thus hanged on the rode
the wikke men that about stode /
Scorning him did & shame—
& of him made al her game /
And shoke her hedes & lough & pleied.

(quoted by Kolve 198)

The sheer abundance in the 1590s of both popular and religious references to the Passion tell that Shakespeare needed only to hint at this most theatrical event in the entire Christian tradition if he intended, say, to elaborate “Margaret's Revenge” for the wrongs done her, or to balance the scene's dramatic weight between the two adversaries (Keyishian 130). The scene's substrata in the mystery pageants, however, also implicate the trilogy's interweavings of emblematic paper, writing, law, and lawlessness, as I suggested earlier, while casting an eerie light on Margaret's characterization. The illiterate mob in the pageants always threatens legality, and Pilate, chief judge, always insists on a written tablet at the head of the cross. Torturers or soldiers, traditionally puzzled by the message, know the “scrawl” is Pilate's, for “there is no man alive / But for Pilate … that dare write in our view” (Wakefield Crucifixion, 409-423). When one of them finally translates: “Yonder is written Jesus of Nazareth / He is King of Jews,” the others claim it is “written wrong”; as the Jew is not a king, the writing can be “nought but fable” originating with “the devil.” Still, Pilate the “man of law must have his will.” In the Chester cycle, Pilate insists on the written tablet as the “King of the Jews … must have recognition”; and in the York Passion II, lengthy stage directions for Pilate's writing are followed by protest at his results.⁸ Pilate in most texts dismisses complaints imperiously: “That I have written, written it is, / And so it shall be for me, iwis!” Judgment, in other words, is at once unilateral and according to the letter of the law.

As for the mad queen, crowning York with paper, whether or not made of the parliamentary pact, again proves her scorn for written petitions, supplications, and their roles in lawful procedure. Her chaotic scene with Suffolk's severed head dramatizes this same primitive aspect of her personality, opposed to the symbolic and perhaps anticipating her brutal sport with York. In her drum head court she, like Pilate, is on the right side of the law; yet Margaret's true court is rule by the body. York in fact expends his greatest rhetorical energy on excoriating her inhumanity: “O tiger's heart …”(111-142). The fierce warrior who, York says, bears no resemblance to woman (“Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible,” 141), exults in her power over material life. In the theatrical terms proposed here, she creates a spectacle that juxtaposes the physical reality of the here-and-now to spirit in the hereafter, thereby exploding an otherwise conventional division of male and female orientations. York, in contrast, genuinely believes by Part 3 in both the temporal and divine justice of his claims. He even envisions heaven's response to the depredations wrought on his person (168). In short, beyond the idea of player-king in the paper-crown scene is Margaret's ironically doubled role: her fortuitous prosecution of the letter of the law and her unruly subversion of trial by law, the lynchpin of all the passion plays. She literally enacts Suffolk's arrogant promise to “frame the law unto his will” (1 Henry VI, 2.4.9).

A wide circle of reference to liturgical and popular Christian traditions touches on more hints about what constitutes legality than are feasible to pursue here. Is York a sacrifice to an ultimate order in the future, in the sense that parody by definition retrieves the idea it mocks? The least that may be said about the paper-crown scene is that Shakespeare intensifies the contrast he will dramatize so often in later plays between a medieval world where shadow and substance are unified by a divinely anointed king (the model to which York and Henry subscribe), and the new world of political rapacity and willfulness that Margaret personifies. As only belief distinguishes between religion and superstition, so there can be no one true, uncontested monarch in these deeply skeptical plays. Henry too will sit on a molehill in a battlefield (3 Henry VI, 3.2.5) and contemplate the wreckage of his rule before he surrenders. By then he is a “quondam king” (3.1.23), in effect a shadow of York, as the Second Keeper implies with his question: “If thou be a king, where is thy crown?” (60)

My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones
Nor to be seen. My crown is called content;
A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy

(62-65)

All subsequent references to the crown—the one Richard of Gloucester sees “far off” (3.2.140); that Warwick turns his back on (4.1.200) and then removes from Edward's head, making him “the shadow” (4.3.50); the metaphoric “laurel crown” (4.6.34) of the Lord Protector that Warwick accepts with Clarence as “double shadows” (49); the continuing barrage of letters and proclamations about rule—these never regain their substance until Richmond ascends the throne at the end of Richard III.

Notes

1. I am endebted to Jonathan Hart's premise in Theater & World that the Christian idea of the world as “fallen” is germane to the problem of linguistic meaning in the history plays. He limits his examination to the Second Tetralogy.

2. I suspect that the “paper trail” I am proposing indicates that Shakespeare revised Part 1 to anticipate the theatrical capital he made of papers in Part 2 and Part 3. My remarks, however, make no pretense of addressing the vexed issues of the trilogy's authorship and order of composition. I simply adopt Ornstein's position that the three plays are Shakespeare's and were written in chronological order (35). All quotations refer to David Bevington's fourth edition of the plays.

3. John Cutts says, “there is something of the atmosphere of Christ being scourged, ridiculously crowned and mocked, and this is sustained by York's commending his soul to heaven” (122). Holinshed additionally provides a version of York's death paralleling the crucifixion (Bullough 210), discussed in the text.

4. I am relying on both the text and copious notes for the Wakefield Master's (Towneley) cycle of Corpus Christi plays, edited by A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens. Cawley also produced a facsimile of the sole copy of the cycle housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. For comparison's sake, I refer also to the York cycle, edited by Canon J. S. Purvis (London, 1957) and to the Chester cycle, edited by R. T. Davies (London, 1972).

5. The evidence for this argument is thoroughly reviewed by Cawley and Stevens, xii-xxii. Also see Cairncross's notes on the scene, 2 Henry IV liii; and Cutts 119-122.

6. The Corpus Christi cycles celebrate a showing forth, Craig, 34. In the York Crucifixio Christi, Jesus says “All men that walkis by waye or strete … Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete. And fully feele nowe … yf any mourning may be meete / Or myscheve mesured unto myne” (252-259). In the N-Town Crucifixion, the call to “behold” is spoken to Mary: “Woman, woman, beheld there thy sone” (145-147). Or again in the York play XXXVI by the “Bocheres,” Jesus addresses the thieves hung with him: “Man, see what bitter sorrow I suffer for thee; on me for to look” (183-189).

7. In the Wakefield Talents, for instance, the Torturers report to Pilate that their good time on Calvary was very like their fun at a new play in town, which the Second Torturer taught to the King of the Jews. We taught him, they say, “… a new play … the play we lately had in town, / … That game me thought was good / When we had played with him our fill / Then led we him unto a hill, / And there we wrought with him our will” (54-59, emphasis mine).

8. “Here shall Pilate ask pen and ink, and a table shall be take him, written before, ‘Hic est Jesus Nazarenus rex judeorum.’ And he shall make him to write, and then go upon a ladder and set the table above Christ's head. And then Caiphas shall make him to read. ‘Sir Pilate, we marveleth of this, / That you write him to be King of Jewes. / Therefore we would that you should write thus, That he named himself King of Jewes’” (quoted in Davies 311).

Works Cited

Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Volume 3: The Early English History Plays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.

Cawley, A. C., and Martin Stevens, eds. Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle. 1958; Rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, EETS, 1994.

Craig, Hardin, ed. Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays. 2nd. ed. EETS e.s. 87 London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Cutts, John. The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare's Early Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968.

Davies, R. T. The Corpus Christi Plays of the English Middle Ages. London: Faber & Faber, 1972.

Keyishian, Harry. The Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.

Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Ornstein, Robert. A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Pearlman, Elihu. William Shakespeare: The History Plays. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Purvis, J. S., ed. The York Cycle of Mystery Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1957.