[In the following excerpt, MacKenzie discusses different icons of life-in-death in Shakespeare's English history plays that support the themes of renewal and heroic succession. He calls particular attention to the phoenix allusions and the idea of England as a new Troy in the Henry VI trilogy and to symbols of the nation as a new Eden in the second tetralogy.]

The sixteenth century made much of the idea of “life in death,” one of its most popular visual metaphors being the phoenix, an exotic self-procreating bird which, as Pliny claimed, lived in Arabian spice trees.¹ Paradin's emblem in Les Devises Heroiques (1551) reveals the bird emerging from the ashes of its own fiery death.² Nicholas Reusner's Emblemata Nicolai Revsneri (1581), offering a similar image some thirty years later, summarizes a standard interpretation:

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.(3)

Reusner's meaning is unambiguously religious, drawing on the purgative qualities of fire which had been well rehearsed in the diktats emerging from the Roman Catholic Church's Council of Trent (1545-1563) and which, anyway, had been a commonplace since early Medieval times. The bird is less common in English church iconography, perhaps disadvantaged by its associations with Catholic notions of purgatory, an idea eschewed by Protestant England after the death of Queen Mary I in 1558. One example does exist in a misericord carving in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey but it is conspicuous by its rarity.⁴ Secular usage is more common. Geffrey Whitney, in A Choice of Emblemes (1586), imitates Paradin's print but avoids the overtly religious significances that both Paradin and Reusner accord to the icon.⁵ For Whitney, the phoenix is a valuable image of secular resurrection, and his bird stands as a representation of the revivalist hopes of the town of Namptwiche in Cheshire which had been recently destroyed by a devastating fire. In sum, the phoenix suited well both religious and secular metaphors of regeneration, of life in death. Having spent its life, it disappeared in a fury of flames, only to rise again, alive and well, from its own ashes; an immortal bird, and yet also mortal.

A phoenix flutters irregularly through Shakespeare's early and middle canon.⁶ It is a precocious (and secular) bird, appearing variously as a tavern in The Comedy of Errors (I.ii.75 etc.), a ship in Twelfth Night (V.i.61), an instrument of revenge in 1 Henry VI (IV.vii.93), an expression of rarity in As You Like It (IV.iii.17), a variety of womanhood in All's Well That Ends Well (I.i.168), and the subject of narrative fable in The Phoenix and Turtle. The later work makes less of it, though there is one startling reference in Henry VIII, relating to the idea of monarchy regenerating itself from one reign to the next, and thereby defeating death through a perpetuating cycle of earthly glory. Baptizing the infant princess, Elizabeth, Archbishop Cranmer assures her father, Henry VIII, that

                                                                                                                                  as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall she leave her blessedness to one
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness
Who from the sacred ashes of her honor
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him.
Where ever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honor and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations.

(Henry VIII V.iv.39-52)

If there was a greater concurrence of views that Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII, or if the play was simply more popular, Cranmer's comments might have ranked alongside Gaunt's English panegyric in Richard II. I say might because several facets of the speech serve to diminish its worth. First, there is the unashamed sycophantism which tends to jar on democratized ears. The infant Elizabeth had already reigned and died by the time Shakespeare (and whoever) came to write this play and her “heir,” at whom all this prophesied glory is aimed, was James I—presently on the throne and patronizing theatre rather generously. Secondly, and more to our purposes here, the reference to the phoenix sits uncomfortably on the facts of the situation. True, it seems to express succinctly and admirably that paradox of regality, still uttered at the moment of succession to the English throne: “The king is dead. Long live the king!” The individual monarch may perish but the monarchy itself is immortal, perpetual, un-killable. But with regard to the actual circumstances to which Cranmer alludes (the succession of James I), the reverberations are somewhat implausible. No one could doubt the splendor of Elizabeth's reign but James had achieved little, save the accidental union of England and Scotland by dint of birth, and his penchant was not for chivalric and spiritual triumph but for reading and the occult.⁷

What Cranmer would really like to say, but can't, is that James is Elizabeth's son and familial inheritor, that her “Ashes new create[d] another heir,” just as the infant Elizabeth was the inheritor of her biological father, Henry VIII, and just as the phoenix recreated itself from its own physical being. This would be to stretch reality further than even dramatic prerogative allows. The two monarchs were only distantly related: Elizabeth was a Protestant Tudor, James a Catholic Stuart. The point about the phoenix was that it was able to procreate the next physical version of itself, a lineal corollary that was pertinent to Henry VIII and Elizabeth but hardly applied to Elizabeth and James. On the contrary, the most compelling political issue in the years before the maiden queen's death was exactly that she had not produced a son and heir, and that, as a result, the door was being left frighteningly ajar for a Scottish Catholic to assume the throne of England.⁸ The best the dramatist's hand could do was allow Cranmer deftly to fudge the issue, permitting him to infer likeness (not equation) through the “maiden phoenix” simile and confining him to the simple assertion that James would inherit Elizabeth's “blessedness” (line 43) and “honor” (line 45). But not her genes.

I want to move away from Henry VIII's vexatious phoenix and into the more pertinent domain inferred, but not articulated, in Cranmer's panegyric—namely, the sense of heroic genetic succession, the notion of direct familial inheritance, of the child inheriting from the parent. If Shakespeare and others wanted a better illustration of heroic familial inheritance, there were several examples available more persuasive than the Jacobite line. Richard I, Coeur de lion, and his bastard son, Faulconbridge, for one; and Edward III and his son, the Black Prince, for another. Shakespeare makes something of the Richard / Faulconbridge relationship in King John, offering in the form of Faulconbridge a super-hero who breaks the norms of devious bastardy and emerges as a potential kingly inheritor, albeit he never actually becomes king. And though Coeur-de-Lion was admired by Tudor historians, most of his exploits were against the distant Arab infidel. By Elizabethan times the world of Arabia had become an alluringly exotic, rather than odious, landscape—a place of sweet perfumes (Macbeth V.i.50-1) and phoenixes (The Tempest III.iii.23-4). There was little mileage in raking up an old and near-forgotten enemy when one had available, instead, the marvelous French-conquering chronicles of Edward III and the Black Prince. As military exemplars, the pair were unsurpassed in the Elizabethan imagination. Tudor historians lauded Edward III's exploits abroad with unfailing enthusiasm, ranging from John Rastell's populist The Pastyme of the People⁹ to Caxton's weightier Chronycles of Englande.¹⁰ A plethora of Elizabethan works on military prowess and skills made standard reference to Edward III as the primal illustration of the heroic militaristic traits they advocated—as in William Wyrley's The Trve Vse of Armorie¹¹ and Matthew Sutcliffe's The Practice, Proceedings, And Lawes of armes.¹²

The Black Prince was revered equally, with pen and brush stroke alike, in works as diverse as the Mirror for Magistrates (1555),¹³ Raleigh's Historie of the World (1613),¹⁴ and a late fifteenth century painting entitled “Adoration of the Magi” which portrays him as one of the three Magi.¹⁵ The other two members of the triptych are Edward III and Richard II. So, in effect, we have a generational sequence visually represented, running from father to son to grandson. The religious import of the painting is edifying. By attaching to this family portrait the iconography of Biblical excellence, the artist at once reiterated the long-held idea of England as a blessed and sacred place, the “Fortunate Isles,”¹⁶ but also suggested that the nature of the particular lineal inheritance was characterized by spiritual excellence. The Tudor chroniclers ignored the senility of Edward III, discreetly marginalized the unsavory reign of Richard, and clarioned the Black Prince as a peerless prince of chivalry—though, for those citizens of Limoges who suffered the barbarity of his Haute-Vienne reign of terror, peerless prince of chivalry may not have been the first phrase that jumped to mind. By the time the Edward / Black Prince chronicle reached the Elizabethan age, the formalin of time had solidified it into crystalline perfection, a pious artifact entirely impervious to sense or fact or reason.

Not surprisingly, in what was almost certainly the first history play he wrote, Shakespeare turns for early inspiration to the Edward III connection.

Froissard, 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?

(Alençon, 1 Henry VI I.ii.29-36)

Alençon's allusion is confused by the contradictory moral and social implications of a combination of French aristocratic heroes, English military legend, Biblical strongman, and gargantuan Philistine—none of which sits entirely comfortably with the image of scrawny, “raw-bon'd” Englishmen whose courage and audacity have inexplicably carried them to victory. No matter. The real issue for us here is that Alençon views English warriorship in genetic terms. The Englishmen who have that day defeated the French are the physical descendants of those magnificent combatants “bred” in the time of Edward III. Victory was in their DNA; it was something they inherited. In the same play, the image of the phoenix is deployed as a synonym for reviving English greatness. Lucy at first wishes “O, that I could but call these dead to life” (1 Henry VI IV.vii.81) and then threatens, of the English dead,

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

(IV.vii.92-3)

These new English terrors will be, we suppose, the next generation of “Olivers and Rolands” who were left in swaddling clothes when their fathers went off to fight and die in France.

James Calderwood has explored the interrelation of ideas of sexuality and death, arguing that to early modern European sensibilities “the human sexual act is never quite untinged with the shame of its animalistic associations.”¹⁷ This, he suggests, helps us to understand why it is that Shakespeare links immortality (derived from the cycle of procreation) with sexuality and death. Since sexual intercourse equates mankind with brute beasts, the erotic impulse derives not from God but from the apes.¹⁸ Its source is therefore located in earthly physical transience rather than ethereal spiritual permanence. The challenge to Shakespeare's theatre, then, may be to build out of the baseness of the sexual act a cosmic scheme that brings a grandeur and dignity to the cycle of procreation and bestows upon it some form of “spiritualized” legitimacy. As we have seen already, the obligation of magnificent familial inheritance was an idea of some interest to Shakespeare in his treatment of the Henry VI era. He dwells on it elsewhere in the trilogy.

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 his son, 1 Henry VI IV.v.1-5.)

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

(Oxford to Edward, Prince of Wales, 3 Henry VI V.iv.52-4)

Talbot's name; in thee reviv'd; famous grandfather; live again in thee; bear his image; renew his glories. It was by no means unusual in Elizabethan theatre for those embarking on a military enterprise to invoke the names of their ancestors. Beaumont and Fletcher, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, weave considerable burlesque out of Rafe's insistence on swearing “by the soule of Amadis de Gaul, / My famous Ancestor” (II.ii.55-6)¹⁹ before setting out on his program of chivalric revenge. But the supplication to ancestry in Shakespeare's history plays takes the custom beyond the norm of casual allusion that characterizes it in Beaumont and Fletcher, and in the work of other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, with the possible exception of Tourneur.

The great reputation of Talbot's “name” is documented by Edward Hall's The Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548) which records that Talbot “obteined so many glorious victories of his enemies, that his only name was, and yet is dredful to the French.”²⁰ Shakespeare's emphasis far exceeds 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.48-50 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 dishonored (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 mythologization of a process of physical and military regeneration of excellences. As far as it goes, the idea works effectively enough and we have a sense of an honorable entity passed down familialy from generation to generation. It is, though, a construct of only limited dimensions for its potential is stifled by historical fact. Talbot and his son are both dead by the end of 1 Henry VI and, as far as they are concerned, the experiment with regenerating military excellences comes to an abrupt halt.

Oxford's expectations that Prince Edward will emulate the feats of his famous grandfather, Henry V, are similarly misplaced. The hope of heroic renewal is preempted by his protégé's early death, a possibility hinted at by the doomed youth himself: “And 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). His murder in the Tower of London, an act away, highlights Shakespeare's problem in attempting to reconstruct a line of familialy repeating greatness. There simply is no sustained scheme of splendidly regenerating mortality in the First Tetralogy—there is very little splendid mortality, per se. In an era scoured by civil war, the repetition of brutalities seems more indicative of the age than the revival of military excellences. Oxford's faith in the rebirth of famous conquering achievements in France, in the revival of glorious ancestral qualities, stands in the constant shadow of familial perversions. The instance, in II.v of 3 Henry VI, where Father kills Son and laments, with an appropriate reproductive nuance, the cruelties “This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!” (II.v.88-91, emphasis added) is perhaps the most memorable of these.

The sense of moral distortion, of unwholesome regeneration, becomes associated, as well, with the figure of the phoenix. Having begun the tetralogy as Lucy's heroic image of English dead reviving to conquer the French (1 Henry VI IV.vii.92-3), the bird transposes itself into a specter of regenerating evil:

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 what e'er you can afflict me with.

(York to his English foes, 3 Henry VI I.iv.35-8)

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

(Richard III IV.iv.422-5)

The first of these is excerpted from the tormenting of York in I.iv of 3 Henry VI, and presents Englishman pitted against Englishmen. In the previous scene young Rutland, Henry's son, had been slain by Clifford, despite his protestations that he had never done his murderer any harm. “Thy father slew my father; therefore die,” says Clifford as he stabs the boy at I.iii.47. The recycling of evils becomes inextricably intertwined with the notion of physical regeneration from parent to offspring. The idea of evil procreated from generation to generation was one developed in the later Jacobean theatre, notably in The Changeling and The White Devil.²¹ There, though, it served to express the pervasive malignity of a shadowy Mediterranean world that, like no other, at once fascinated and repelled Jacobean sensibilities. For Henry VI's first audiences the crudities of English civil war were frighteningly proximate. The Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), the last great battle of the Wars of the Roses, bringing to an end a calamitous century of civil strife, would have been within living memory for a scattering of the early Elizabethans. It was that close. In such a savage period of English history, Rutland's murder was not exceptional in its brutality. Nor even, perhaps, was that of his father, York, killed in the very next scene of 3 Henry VI. After being taunted with a handkerchief dipped in the blood of his beloved Rutland, and having been compelled to wear a paper crown, York is ritually slain. The phoenix that he wishes upon his foes turns out to be his son Richard, later King Richard III—he, in fact, who invokes the next phoenix image of the tetralogy. His is a bizarre and obscene restatement of the regenerative life-in-death theme. Having murdered one set of children, his metaphor promises to breed new children from the dead, to conjure them to life in Margaret's nest of spicery. It is ostensibly a gesture of atonement but actually yet another endeavor to find gratification in physical or manipulative cruelty. Even so, its infernal logic somehow persuades Elizabeth and she rushes off immediately to sway her daughter to the enterprise.

It is hard for me to imagine how Elizabeth could be taken in so by this charlatan. That may be because, as people claim, he was magnetically charismatic; or it could be because the phoenix doesn't loom large in my life, but for Elizabeth it signaled a compelling association. Its regenerating peculiarities were linked in sixteenth century mythography with the sacking and burning of Troy and, by implication, with the rise, from its ashes, of the great states of Europe. As most English people born before 1700 knew, England, too, was founded by a Trojan—the worthy Brutus, from whose name the term “Britain” derived. We live in “another Troy” says Gloucester in 3 Henry VI III.ii.190 and, as if in evidence, the First Tetralogy positively groans with Classical allusion. Every significant figure of the Trojan siege, mortal or immortal, Greek or Trojan, is there: Helen, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Paris, Hector, Anchises, Aeneas, Hercules, Nestor, Ulysses, Venus, Mars, Priam, Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes. The pageant seems unending and Shakespeare fails to harness and manage it effectively. There is certainly a semblance of Virgilian or Homeric myth in the Henry VI plays, of an attempt to harmonize with the ancient epic resonances, but the inconsistencies of detail and development allow us to speak with assurance of only the feel of the Troy saga. The sense of momentous catastrophe seems unconvincing in Shakespeare's chronicle. With the fall of the civilization of Troy came to an end a golden age of arts and science, of soldiership and chivalry, of beauty and love. The very core of what we might call humanism. A legend was destroyed; but it was resurrected, phoenix-like, by the exceptional individuals who emerged from its flames and lived to shape the mortal world again. To compare Henry's England to Priam's Troy is to compare the sinking of a river barge to that of the Titanic—equally tragic for the victims, without doubt, but lacking the romantic pathos that history is apt to bestow upon exceptional loss.

What seems absent from the First Tetralogy is the presence of anyone, or any process, that can regenerate some kind of English heroic myth. Without this, the phoenix metaphors and the Dardanian parallels echo dissonantly and even grotesquely. Here, for example, young Clifford, is bearing the body of his father in 2 Henry VI and talking like a Trojan:

In cruelty will I seek out my fame.
                                                  [He takes him up on his back.]
Come, thou new ruin of old Clifford's house:
As did Aeneas old Anchises bear,
So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders. …

(V.ii.60-3)

A popular woodcut of Shakespeare's age shows Aeneas carrying his living father on his shoulders, while Troy burns in the background.²² The episode was held as a consummate illustration of filial duty by European emblematists. Alciati's woodcut archetype of the incident was copied by Lefèvre, Marquale, Daza, and Hunger,²³ and reproduced by Geffrey Whitney in A Choice of Emblemes. …²⁴ At a superficial level, the theatrical emblem Young Clifford presents is reminiscent of the classical archetype, and no one can doubt his filial loyalty. But the referential harmonies are all awry. Alciati's verse adage, and Whitney's gloss of it, both emphasize that Aeneas' greatest glory was in saving his father. In 2 Henry VI, there is no rescue, merely a retrieval. In fact, Clifford does not carry his father “As did Aeneas old Anchises bear,” for the father he carries on his shoulders is dead; and his vow to seek out fame “In cruelty” is most un-Trojan in demeanor.

Young Clifford's action summarizes the paradox that “Sex is life but also death,”²⁵ to use Calderwood's words. The human ability to procreate derives explicitly from the transgression in the garden of Eden, a transgression that brought about the certainty of death. Humans, like other “ordinary” creatures, must endure the same cycle of life and death. The distinguishing factor, in Shakespeare's vision of splendid England, is the chivalric spirit of earthly magnificence which lends to the animalistic procreative process a sense of worth and grandeur. Young Clifford's willingness to deplete the myth, by promising cruelty instead of chivalric excellence, attests to a reversion to animalism—and to a state where human beings are indistinguishable from brute beasts. His invocation of the familiar Trojan icon, of son carrying father, mirrors the visual import of Alciati's print but carries a very different meaning.

The suggestion of a reviving Trojan paradise in the Yorkist cycle is both weak and distorted. All was not lost, though. The brief flurry of English history from the deposition of Richard II (1399) to Henry V's miraculous triumph at Agincourt (1415) provided Shakespeare with material more amenable to his heroic English designs than the grim, grinding reign of Henry VI had done. Here, the enfeebled and seedy kingship of Richard would be brought to an end by the dashing Bullingbrook (a name refashioned as “Bolingbroke”²⁶ in the eighteenth century). And, in turn, his son, King Henry V, would carry English aspirations to unimaginable heights in France. Enlightened and perhaps chastened by the experiences of the First Tetralogy, Shakespeare set about the construction of a new English paradisial myth, one founded upon a principle of life-in-death, of heroic genetic inheritance. I have used the word “paradisial” deliberately here. Gaunt's reference to “This other Eden, demi-paradise” (II.i.42) in Richard II is well known, but Shakespeare was far from original in framing England in such terms.²⁷ More, Sylvester, Lightfoot, and Greene had all recounted the idea of an English Eden before Shakespeare wrote Richard II.²⁸ The term “paradise,” generally, was one the Elizabethans and Jacobeans bandied about liberally, and not only with reference to England. Thomas Stocker (1583) refers to the Low Countries as “the Paragone, or rather, yearthly Paradise, of all the Countries in Europe.”²⁹ To Captain Bingham (1583), Newfoundland is “The paradise, of all the world.”³⁰ And Silvester Jourdan (1613) calls Bermuda “one of the sweetest Paradises that be vpon the earth.”³¹ There was, though, a special affection for the idea of England as the ancient location of paradise and Elizabethan cartographers bent their compasses backwards trying to prove the matter scientifically.

If Gaunt's England is a paradise, an “other Eden,” in what sense is it or was it or could it be paradisial? In the original Garden of Eden there was physical immortality. Adam and Eve would never die, just as long as they didn't succumb to the temptations of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Succumb they did. God's punishment was expulsion from Eden and the revocation of their immortality (Genesis 3:17-18). Henceforth, they would grow old and physically die. In the Biblical paradigm, life-in-death meant spiritual life following physical death, a meaning commonly understood in both secular and religious literature. Baldock, in Marlowe's Edward II, for example, urges the younger Spenser to “Make for a new life, man; throw up thy eyes / And heart and hand to heaven's immortal throne” (IV.vi.107-8).³² On this literal level of immortality, Gaunt's Eden in Richard II is quite different to the Biblical Eden and to Baldock's vision of unearthly paradise—but then, Gaunt is very careful to make the distinction. England is not Eden but a “second” Eden, a “demi” (= second) paradise. It is paradisial in a uniquely English way. Consider the expanded context of Gaunt's claim:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son

(Richard II II.i.40-56)

There is a reasonably cogent explanation here of what an English paradise is. Those, like Willy Maley, who have argued so passionately for a declamation of this speech as serving “imperialist rhetoric”³³ are really stating no more than the obvious. The Elizabethans saw absolutely nothing wrong with being imperialists, as the writings of any number of super-opinionated propagandists of the age affirm. Gaunt's definition of the anglicized Eden, deriving from widely and strongly held views on the notion of “paradise,” is partially “static” and partially “active.” The stasis of paradise consists of that which is given, fixed and immovable. The fact that England is the “seat of Mars” is irrevocable. A tradition of Mars as the patron-god of England had been extant since the Middle Ages. It is also a holy land, a “blessed” plot favored by God and renowned for its Christian service. These, too, in the Elizabethan psyche, were immutable truisms, historical facts that could not be obliterated or lost.

Though Gaunt's second Eden offers that which is fixed and immovable, it remains merely a latent paradise unless those who live in the present can enliven it, refurbish it, build upon it. This, too, is clear from Gaunt's prescription. England may be a fortress built against “infection and the hand of war” and its surrounding sea may act as a “moat defensive” but fortresses can be assailed and moats breached. The active duty of those who inhabit paradise is to preserve its paradisial characteristics from inward strife and outward invasion. Equally, the English Eden may have nurtured many a great king, who performed many a mighty act, but unless that kind of regenerating splendor can be actively maintained, the demi-paradise stands simply as a memory, a thing of recollection rather than contemporary experience. The myth of an English paradise, then, consists of that which is immovable and of that which must be given “new life.” For Gaunt, England under the rule of Richard is now no more than a shadow of its former greatness. It has become a landscape of death and despair and stagnation.

Things change quickly. Within a few hundred lines of Gaunt's English panegyric and his ensuing lament, a cadre of disaffected noblemen is lamenting the fate of an England ruled by Richard and deprived of Bullingbrook. One suggests that their future suffering is now unavoidable. Another disagrees:

Not so, even through the hollow eyes of death
I spy life peering, but I dare not say
How near the tidings of our comfort is.

(II.i.270-2)

Northumberland is understandably shifty here. The “life peering,” to which he alludes, is none other than Harry Hereford who has decided to un-banish himself and make his way back to England with eight ships and three thousand fully armed militiamen. Northumberland's cryptic clue heralds his return. It was also Northumberland who brought news of Gaunt's death, just over a hundred lines earlier (II.i.147-51). So here is a man well positioned to compass the life and death of Lancastrian inheritance. There is no phoenix allusion here, but the idea of “life-in-death” appeared in many forms. For example, the seventeenth print in Hans Holbein's Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti shows Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden. … ³⁴ Adam is clearing a root from a bare stretch of earth. He is assisted, almost shadowed, by a skeletal Death figure. In the background, Eve nurses her first-born son. Once expelled from paradise, Adam and Eve become subject to the familiar mortal cycle of life and death. That is what the skeleton signifies. Yet, this is no disdainful, scorning skeleton. Here is a skeleton with a solid work ethic, for in levering the root with Adam he does his best to assist in the cultivation of this bleak landscape. So, the world of fallen Adam is not entirely without consolation. Even as he labors in the certainty of eventual death, his child lies in the arms of mother Eve. There is the actuality of physical generation, of new hope, of a life not without purpose, symbolically portrayed by Holbein through the suggestion and promise of sown seed and the smile on Eve's lips. Yes, Adam and Eve will die; but they will live too. Death is an important mechanism in the cycle of regenerating life. Just as Adam and his skeletal friend extricate old roots from stony ground, so, eventually, new roots will flourish until they, too, are swept away in the inexorable march of time. In this unending round of life, perpetuation relies on the principle of inheritance, on a generation fulfilling its rôle to that which will succeed it, rejoicing in what is to come and exulting in what has been.

Holbein's Icones was one of the most successful of all sixteenth century emblem books, an English version appearing within two years of its first publication. The artist himself was particularly popular in England, and a favorite at the court of Henry VIII. Even if Shakespeare had not known the detail of this print, there are any number of other life-in-death sources in the emblem books which would have made the point, and less obliquely too. In the Antwerp issue of Emblemata (1564), Joannes Sambucus offers, as his final device, a plant flourishing out of the top of a skull.³⁵ Claude Paradin, in Les Devises Heroiques (1551), translated into English as The Heroicall Devises in 1591, depicts sprigs of wheat growing from bones and adds the motto “Spes altera vitae” which may be rendered as either “Another hope of life” or “The hope of another life”. …³⁶ Joachim Camerarius, in 1595, repeats Paradin's emblem and uses the same ambiguous Latin adage.³⁷ Some forty years later, George Wither published A Collection of Emblemes (largely an assemblage of prints from earlier periods) and chose as his twenty-first emblem a skull with sprigs of wheat growing out of the eyes and mouth. … :

When we are Borne, to Death-ward straight we runne;
And by our Death, our Life is new-begunne.(38)

This couplet provides a fitting conclusion to Wither's commentary on what is, in essence, an image of wholesome life peering through the hollow eyes of death.

One central idea emerges from the life-in-death iconography of Wither, Holbein and the other emblematists I have mentioned. The intentions of each icon are specifically religious, promoting the meaning that physical death leads to spiritual life in heaven—an idea that John Donne expanded in his celebrated “Death's Duel” sermon, subtitled “the dying Life and living Death of the Body.”³⁹ Even as the emblematists propagated this message of spiritual resurrection, they were doing so through highly physicalized motifs. Wither's notion of “Life … new-begunne” is conveyed through the tangible representation of a living, growing plant; Sambucus, and Paradin do likewise. And, of course, Holbein's picture of smiling Eve with “Life … new-begunne” in her arms is almost heretical in its humanism. It is a short step from these ideas to the sense of new life as physical procreation, a notion aptly articulated by Audley in Edward III, a play, as Tobin⁴⁰ has noted, in which Shakespeare's hand is quite possibly present:

For from the instant we begin to live
We do pursue and hunt the time to die:
First bud we, then we blow, and after seed;
Then presently we fall, and as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.

(Edward III IV.iv.136-40)⁴¹

Audley's sense is rather more reflective than triumphalist, but two of the central motifs of the emblem books are present: the image of vegetation and the cyclical notion of seeding and death. What is absent here, but attendant elsewhere in the play, is the sense of inherited chivalric spirit, of son replicating father in an unending cycle of English greatness.

Northumberland's speculation in Richard II that “even through the hollow eyes of death / I spy life peering” has, then, both a physical and a spiritual sense. Harry Hereford is the flesh and blood son of his father. More than that, Northumberland understands him to be, as well, the spiritual descendant of his father. The iconographical incompatibility of physical life and spiritual life is here abandoned. In the dramatist's view of regenerating English excellence on earth, the two become mutually dependent. Notice how earlier in the play Hereford had addressed his father as he prepared for battle with Mowbray:

O thou, the earthly author of my blood,
Whose youthful spirit, in me regenerate,
Doth with a twofold vigor lift me up
To reach at victory above my head,
Add proof unto mine armor with thy prayers,
And with thy blessings steel my lance's point,
That it may enter Mowbray's waxen coat
And furbish new the name of John a' Gaunt,
Even in the lusty havior of his son.

(I.iii.69-77, emphasis added)

This is exactly what Canterbury and Ely tell Bullingbrook's son in Henry V when he is about to set out in chase of the French crown. Well, not quite exactly, because there no one mentions his father, Bullingbrook, or his grandfather Gaunt. The focus is on the unequivocal legitimacy of his great-great-grandfather, Edward III, and of his great-uncle, the Black Prince. Here, Hereford thinks along immediate familial lines, proposing a simple paradigm of a son inheriting, and living up to, the name of his father. It is quintessentially a humanist ambition. Gaunt is the “earthly author” of his blood but the “youthful spirit” of which he talks in line 70, and the “prayers” and “blessings” in the three lines that follow, endow this earthly enterprise with its own kind of “secular” sanctity. This explains why there is no mention of God, and still an unmistakable sense of heroic “spirituality” in his words. Gaunt offers something similar when he talks of England as “This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, / Dear for her reputation through the world” (Richard II II.i.57-8). The “souls” are dear not for their piety but for their earthly “reputation.” While the Biblical ideal of life-in-death offers a clear disjunction between the flesh and the soul, the conception of Gaunt and Hereford harmonizes them, attaching to the ideas of soul or spirit that sense of intangible earthly honor.⁴²

Shakespeare's designs in his early historical works reveal a willingness to manipulate life-in-death imagery experimentally. Images of heroic renewal are subverted into representations of cyclical depravity; the process of inheritance, as a defeat of mortal death, is reconstructed as a bequest of death. This is understandable in situations of moral ambiguity, and these were plentiful in those reigns that preceded and followed the golden age of Henry V. The construction of an English Eden, foreshadowed by the Trojan innuendoes of the First Tetralogy and Gaunt's paradisial vision, and founded on the notion of regenerating humanity and warlike spirit, would seem to find its natural domain in the French exploits of Henry V. In fact, if this was Shakespeare's intention, it falls short of the mark as many have observed. Patricia Carlin, for example, suggests that the defiance of death, having failed in the preceding histories, is again engaged within the particular circumstances of Henry V.⁴³ But she notices, also, that “The king who presides over this play is a figure new to drama, a ruler who is associated with life and death at the same time” (p. 89). Marlovians may contest the claim to uniqueness but it is certainly true that Shakespeare's Henry is, at once, the ultimate hero of English myth and yet persistently linked with what Carlin calls “the infliction of death” (p. 89).

Disturbing as this overview may be, the opening of Henry V reveals few signs of ambivalence. This is not surprising for a play that sets out to portray the most illustrious epoch of French-bashing since Poitiers. And perhaps small wonder, too, that it is to Edward III and his son, the Black Prince, that Shakespeare quickly returns. Near the outset of Henry V, and after Canterbury has completed his lengthy genealogical exposition in support of Henry's proposed expedition to capture the French crown, the king asks obtusely: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (I.ii.96)—and this after the Archbishop has just spent sixty-three lines endeavoring to answer the same. Immediately, Canterbury and Ely all but abandon the Salic argument and, enjoined by Exeter, appeal instead to a second source of moral justification:

CANTERBURY.
                                                                                                                        Gracious lord,
Stand for your own, unwind your bloody flag,
Look back into your mighty ancestors;
Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire's [Edward III's] tomb,
From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit,
And your great-uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,
Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy,
Making defeat on the full power of France,
Whiles his most mighty father on a hill
Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp
Forage in blood of French nobility.
O noble English, that could entertain
With half their forces the full pride of France,
And let another half stand laughing by,
All out of work and cold for action!
ELY.
Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,
And with your puissant arm renew their feats.
You are their heir, you sit upon their throne;
The blood and courage that renowned them
Runs in your veins; and my thrice-puissant liege
Is in the very May-morn of his youth,
Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.
EXETER.
Your brother kings and monarchs of the earth
Do all expect that you should rouse yourself,
As did the former lions of your blood.

(I.ii.100-24, emphasis added)

Canterbury takes us back to Henry's “great-grandsire's tomb”; Ely speaks of “these valiant dead”; and Exeter remembers Edward III and the Black Prince as “former lions of your blood.” Balanced against this emphasis on physical mortality is the powerful notion of regeneration. The word “spirit,” with its Hebraic overtones, is here anglicized into a mythology of heroic earthly renewal. It becomes a metaphor for a fine quality of military conduct and competence that can and ought to be passed on from one generation to the next. The “warlike spirit” of Edward III and the Black Prince stands outside the domain of physical mortality, never irretrievably lost in the death of the individual but, paradoxically, relying for perpetuation on the spawning of heirs. King Henry is not simply the physical descendant of his great ancestors, but their “spiritual” inheritor as well. The Archbishop insists that he must stand for his own and “Look back into your mighty ancestors” for, in aspiring to their “warlike spirit,” he may awake remembrance of them and, with his puissant arm, “renew their feats.”

The “renewal” of heroic royalty, of the warlike kingly spirit, parallels the physical “renewal” of the progenitor in the lives of his offspring. The relation of Edward III to his great son the Black Prince is the best possible exemplification of this—and Henry V is of their lineage. “You are their heir; you sit upon their throne,” the Bishop of Ely tells the king, and adds: “The blood and courage that renowned them / Runs in your veins.” It is this peculiar mix of “blood and courage,” as Ely puts it, of the physical and the abstract, that defines the nature of regal English inheritance. Henry does not stand in isolation. His debt to the past and, particularly, to the English ideal, is profound and unavoidable. Those, his ancestors, who have afforded him earthly life, he must reciprocate with heroic spiritual renewal. In fact, the Duke of Exeter, adding his testimony to the strength of the argument, observes that Henry's brother kings and monarchs “expect that you should rouse yourself, / As did the former lions of your blood” (emphasis added). This statement of open “expectation,” following hard upon the string of imperatives that Canterbury and Ely have leveled at the king, proposes the emulation of past heroic deeds as a kind of moral obligation. The genuine resurrection of an ancient kingly spirit becomes a moral necessity. In effect, it represents the demand, already discussed in relation to Richard II, to turn the latency of an English paradise into a kinetic, living actuality.

As I have suggested implicitly already, Shakespeare didn't suddenly arrive at this notion of regenerating English greatness in Henry V in a moment of arcane inspiration. He had been experimenting with the idea for perhaps ten years, his subject matter being the four plays of the First Tetralogy, and the first three of the Second. In these earlier plays, regeneration is presented in various forms—clumsily at first, but with a growing sense of assurance and artistry. By Richard II and the Henry IV his power is altogether more focused. Gone are the promiscuities of allusion and the inconsistent paralleling. In their place is a concerted and coherent attempt to articulate schemata of inheritance. I say schemata because there is more than one scheme. There is the benign sense of glorious regeneration, of a sort we have encountered already in Henry V and which finds expression, too, in Richard II. It is shadowed, though, by the deposition and murder of Richard II, a crime, as Michael Neill has suggested, that complicates and intensifies Bullingbrook's desire for retribution with “a profound nostalgia for a vanished prelapsarian order.”⁴⁴ The English paradise may be as readily lost as its biblical equivalent, and the landscape of beauties transformed into a blasted and death-blighted plain. To this theme is linked a different and grotesque life-in-death regeneration—a process of cyclical monstrosity which runs parallel to the idea of heroic inheritance and which is discernible in the early works but most cogently developed in Henry IV.

Notes

1. Pliny (Plinius Secundus), 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 (London: T. Hacket, 1587), Eiii, p. 4. The book is an abstract translation (possibly by Hacket).

2. It also appears in the Elizabethan translation of the work. Paradin, The Heroicall Devises (London: William Kearney, 1591), trans. P. S., p. 110.

3. Nicholas Reusner, Emblemata Nicolai Revsneri (Frankfurt: 1581), p. 98.

4. M. D. Anderson, in History and Imagery in British Churches (London: John Murray, 1995), p. 249, suggests that this is the only known example of a phoenix in an English holy place—though it is possible that the many instances of birds with strangely branching tails may have been intended to represent phoenixes.

5. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Christopher Plantin, 1586), p. 177. Whitney's final emblem (p. 230) conjoins the idea of the “Phoenix rare” which “in time her selfe doth burne” with a final salutation to his queen and country.

6. For a discussion of the phoenix and its particular relation to Imogen in Cymbeline, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 228-37.

7. It seems to have been a wishful fashion of the age, though, to imagine King James as some kind of conquering colossus. Joshua Sylvester calls him implausibly “un Charle-magne encore” in his translation Du Bartas. His Diuine Weekes and Workes with A Compleate Collectio of all the other most delight-full Workes (London: 1605), sig. A2v; and Daniel Price (1613) is only marginally more judicious in styling James' son as “The Hope of Svcession, Englands Charlemaine” in Lamentations for the death of the late Illustrious Prince Henry: and the dissolution of his religious Familie (London: Tho. Snodham for R. Jackson, 1613), dedication leaf.

8. The religious inferences of the play have been much discussed. For example, Lee Bliss in “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), notes what he describes as “the dubious view that Henry VIII focuses on the defeat of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism” (10).

9. John Rastell, The Pastyme of the People The Chronycles of dyuers realmys and most specyally of the realme of England (London: 1529), sigs. C5r-D3r.

10. William Caxton, Chronycles of Englande (St. Albans: 1483).

11. William Wyrley, The Trve Vse of Armorie, Shewed by Historie, and plainly proued by example (London: J. Jackson for Gabriell Cawood, 1592), p. 81: “Princely Edward mirror of Cheualrie.”

12. Matthew Sutcliffe, 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 (London: Christopher Barker, 1593), sig. B3r.

13. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1960), p. 93. The Mirror is believed to have been first published in 1555.

14. Sir Walter Raleigh, Selections from his Writings, ed. G. E. Hadow (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 93-4. Raleigh cites the Black Prince as an example of the supremacy of the English soldier in foreign battle.

15. The print is housed in the Warburg Institute, London, and is titled “Adoration of the Magi.” It presents Edward III (father), Edward the Black Prince (son), and Richard II (grandson) as the three Magi.

16. Josephine Waters Bennett has explored the notion of England as “Elizium” citing, as one of her examples, Procopius of Caesarea who recounts a third-century legend that the souls of the dead were ferried across the English Channel to Britain. See “Britain Among The Fortunate Isles,” Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), p. 123.

17. James L. Calderwood, Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 49.

18. Calderwood, p. 50.

19. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Andrew Gurr (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1966).

20. Edward Hall, in the opening paragraph of The Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1584), fol. 1.

21. In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), Beatrice grieves that “Vengeance begins; / Murder, I see, is followed by more sins. / Was my creation in the womb so curs'd, / It must engender with a viper first?” (III.iv.163-6). And Vittoria in John Webster's The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), surmises her own tragedy in similar terms: “O my greatest sin lay in my blood. / Now my blood pays for't” (V.vi.240-1).

22. Andrea Alciati, Emblemata (Padua: Tozzi, 1621), emblem 195. This is an assemblage of Latin prints originally published in the period 1534-1551.

23. Jehan Lefèvre, Emblèmes (Paris: Wechel, 1536), emblem 69; Giovanni Marquale, Imprese (Lyon: Bonhomme, 1551), emblem 168; Bernardino Daza, Emblemas (Lyon: Bonhomme, 1549), emblem 69; Wolfgang Hunger, Emblemata (Paris: Wechel, 1542), emblem 69.

24. Whitney, p. 163.

25. Calderwood, p. 55.

26. As noted in a footnote to the Introduction, this book uses The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., eds. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) as the standard text of Shakespeare's works. Following the Riverside edition, I have preserved the name “Bullingbrook” (as opposed to the modernized “Bolingbroke”) since this is the form used in the earliest texts of Richard II and also in Holinshed, though sometimes without the “g.” The form “Bolingbroke” is an early eighteenth century invention, attributed to Alexander Pope. I should add that on other occasions I have had cause to dispute the Riverside's textual editing, but in this instance, at least, the case it makes for “Bullingbrook” (p. 847) seems reasonable.

27. See, for example, Clayton G. MacKenzie, “Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), pp. 318-39.

28. Edward Surtz, ed., Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 59n, quotes Erasmus as saying that More's Utopia “represented chiefly Britain” (Ep. 4.21). See also Joshua Sylvester, p. 462: “All Haile (deere Albion) Europes Pearle of price, / The worlds rich Garden, Earths rare Paradice.”

29. Thomas Stocker in the “Epistle Dedicatorie” to his translation of Marnix van Sant Aldegonde's A Tragicall Historie of the troubles and Ciuile Warres of the lowe Countries, otherwise called Flanders (London: 1583), sig. A2r.

30. The line is found in Bingham's prefatory poem to G. Peckham's A Trve Report, Of the late discoueries, and possession, taken in the right of the Crowne of Englande, of the New-found Landes (London: 1583), p. 10.

31. The quotation is from “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to Silvester Jourdan's A Plaine Description of the Barmvdas, now called Sommer Ilands (London: 1613), sig. A3r.

32. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973).

33. Willy Maley, “‘This sceptred isle’: Shakespeare and the British problem” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 94. Maley's chapter (pp. 83-108) provides a witty and erudite declamation of the English assumptions of Shakespeare's theatre.

34. Hans Holbein, Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti (Lvgdvni: apud Ioannem Frellonium, 1547), sig. B1v. Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti (1547) was translated into English within two years and appeared in various languages across Europe in the decades that followed. See Arthur B. Chamberlain, Hans Holbein The Younger (London: George Allen, 1913), II, p. 186.

35. Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, cum aliquot nummis antiqui operis, Ioannis Sambuci Tirnaviensis Pannonii (Antwerp: 1564), p. 240.

36. Claude Paradin, Les Devises Heroiques (1551 first publ.; Anvers: 1561), p. 151r.

37. The emblem is reproduced in Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trubner, 1870), p. 530.

38. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), ed. Rosemary Freeman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975), p. 21.

39. This was Donne's last sermon and referred to by the King's household as “The Doctor's own funeral sermon.” It was titled “Death's Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule against the dying Life and living Death of the Body,” and was delivered at Whitehall, in the presence of the king, at the beginning of Lent, 1630.

40. See J. J. M. Tobin's introductory article to Edward III in G. Blakemore Evans et al., eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., pp. 1732-4.

41. The version used is that in G. Blakemore Evans et al., eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Ed.

42. Harry Morris, in Last Things in Shakespeare (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), suggests that Richard II may be regarded as one of “Shakespeare's sovereigns who are also high priests of their kingdom” (p. 256). He demonstrates how this idea is promulgated through Christ symbolism and through the explicit identification of the king as Christ's surrogate (pp. 256-7). My own argument has focused on the largely secular idealization of kingship (mainly broadcast through Gaunt's English encomium where Christian service and the spirit of chivalric reputation co-exist). It is interesting, and perhaps revealing of his lack of chivalric reputation, that Richard, facing rebellion and unable to marshal his military forces effectively, lays repeated emphasis on the religious validation of his office—and intriguing, too, that Bullingbrook views Richard's murder in terms of the primordial homicide, an act against the benignity of God rather than an act against the code of chivalric conduct.

43. Patricia L. Carlin, Shakespeare's Mortal Men: Overcoming Death in History, Comedy and Tragedy (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 88.

44. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 249.