[In the following excerpt, MacKenzie highlights the unconventional use of the mythic figures of Mars and the Hydra in 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V. He suggests that although the struggle between Hercules and the Hydra was traditionally represented as a moral contest between good and evil, allusions to the many-headed monster in the Henry IV plays confound the issue of who is virtuous and who is vicious in the competition for the throne. Similarly, MacKenzie views the references to Mars in Henry V as an interrogation of the idea of the continual regeneration of English heroism.]

Henry IV's reign was notable more for its shadowy internal wranglings than for its golden foreign achievements. Even his burial was shrouded in intrigue, with rumors that his body had been mysteriously “lost” when the barge carrying it capsized on its way to Canterbury Cathedral. Some four hundred years later, the Age of Reason did what they thought to be the sensible thing and opened the tomb. And there lay King Henry, with crown, gown and scepter. Bullingbrook may have struck a rather dashing and alluringly romantic figure to Shakespeare's age but, as King Henry IV, he was decidedly less admired. At the heart of Elizabethan misgivings lay an obsessive fear of civil war. A succession of commentators bewailed its deformities, advocating the sanity of peace at home.¹

Central to the notion of civil war's monstrosity in the Elizabethan psyche was the concept of regenerating evil, of evil that died only to revive again even more virulently. It was a regeneration typically conceptualized in terms of the classical monster, the Hydra of Lerna. Here, for example, is King Edgar in A Knack to Know a Knave (1594):

Then as I am Gods Vicegerent [sic] here on earth,
By Gods appointment heere to raigne and rule,
So must I seeke to cut abuses downe,
That lyke Hydras heads, daylie growes up one in anothers place,
Which if with good regard we looke not to,
We shall, lyke Sodom, feele that fierie doome,
That God in Justice did inflict on them.(2)

The destruction of the Hydra, the monstrous offspring of Typhon and Echidna, was the second task imposed upon Hercules by Eurystheus. No ordinary beast, Thomas Cooper describes it as “A mõster, with whom Hercules fought, and as soone as he had stricken of one head of the monster, an other sprang vp immediately.”³ It is understandable, then, that the Hydra's fatal breath and multiplying heads necessitated the outside help of Iolas, Hercules' trusty servant—the only task, in fact, that did require assistance. As Hercules lopped off a head, so Iolas seared the stump with a burning brand. Opinions differ as to the number of heads involved. Spenser talks of “his thousand heads,”⁴ Cooper of “an hundred neckes with serpentine heads,”⁵ Combe of a “seuen-headed beast.”⁶ The precise figure is not overly important. What is significant, though, is the notion of a specific evil reviving and multiplying from one wicked generation to the next. To the print of Hercules battling the Hydra, Thomas Combe appends these lines:

When Hercules had ordaind to take his rest,
And from his former labours him withdrew,
Hydra that monstrous seuen-headed beast
Against him came, his troubles to renew.(7)

As an image of regenerating evil, reiterated in a gamut of emblematic literature (and notably in the work of Bocchi, Sambucus and Tertio⁸), the sixteenth century had available to it few monstrous images more frightening and disturbing than the Hydra.

“Sexuality,” as Kant observed in Lectures on Ethics, “exposes man to the danger of equality with the beasts.”⁹ Although the Hydra did not procreate in the normal conjunctive manner of most animal species, regenerative allusions to animals are generally deprecatory in early modern writings. Robert Watson has suggested that this was part of the culture of Shakespeare's age in which “human beings are encouraged to project their unacceptable mortality onto other animals.”¹⁰ This composed, as Watson suggests, part of the rhetoric of denial in which the baser instincts of human nature, like sexual reproduction itself, are consigned to a convenient scapegoat in the hope that “annihilation can be isolated in an Other” (p. 29). The idea links also to that postulated in the last chapter, namely that in Elizabethan and Jacobean writings the erotic impulse is traceable back to the physical predilections of the apes rather than to the divine inspiration of God. As a consequence, the linkage between human and animal sexualities is at least distasteful and usually repellent in Shakespeare's theatre. Calderwood cites the example of Iago's “beast with two backs” (Othello I.i.116-17), suggesting that “Only a professional degrader like Iago or a morbidly disillusioned prince like Hamlet will want to keep such images before him. For ordinary men animalistic sex and its mortal corollary must be vigorously repressed.”¹¹ The reproductive characteristic of the Hydra, unwholesome because of the bestial undertones alone, assumes utmost moral repugnance through its association with the proliferating extremities of human wickedness.

Shakespeare's use of the Hydra is intriguing. In the classical myth there is no question about the moral resonances of the encounter between the hideous beast and Hercules. The Hydra represents unmitigated evil; the fact that in some versions of the story one of its heads was immortal served only to underscore the idea that evil may be subdued but never entirely conquered. Hercules, by contrast, stands for unambiguous virtue, the quintessence of mortal valor and wholesomeness in the face of regenerating evil. This is a key theme of a celebrated wall tapestry at Hampton Court Palace, west London, which reveals the various triumphs of Hercules, and situates his conquest of the Hydra as preeminent amongst them. … Yet, the first time Shakespeare deploys a coherent working of the Hydra myth (in the Henry IV plays), he deliberately undermines the moral polarities of the original story. This is the dissident Archbishop of York in 2 Henry IV:

But as I told my Lord of Westmerland,
The time misord'red doth, in common sense,
Crowd us and crush us to this monstrous form
To hold our safety up. I sent your Grace
The parcels and particulars of our grief,
The which hath been with scorn shov'd from the court,
Whereon this Hydra son of war is born. …

(IV.ii.32-8)

There is a clear insinuation that Henry has himself given birth to the monster (line 38) and that he is, in some perverse manner, the heir to his own misdemeanors. The corruption of the notion of generational replenishment is also interesting. York, of course, is a rebel engaged in the process of civil war. His excuse is that “The time misord'red” has forced him and his colleagues into “this monstrous form.”

The theme of self-protection through monstrosity is one prepared in 1 Henry IV by Worcester who argues that Henry's oppression “Grew … to so great a bulk” that, for safety's sake, the rebels were forced to

                                                                      raise this present head,
Whereby we stand opposed by such means
As you yourself have forg'd against yourself

(V.i.66-8)

Again, the insinuation of Worcester's pun on “head” is that Henry's own actions have given life to a distorted head-raising inheritance. The king has, Worcester claims, “forg'd” hydraic insurrection himself. Henry's moral claim to the throne, shadowed by the murder of Richard, lies at the heart of this debate. Both Worcester and York acknowledge that they are rebels, monstrous rebels even, but neither accepts that he is wrong. Hydraic rebellion, as they see it, is the fault of the royal party and not their own. If insurrection is hydraic, then it is a just, if horrible, monstrosity forced upon them by the dangers and scorn of the court. From the rebel perspective, at least, the “Hydra” does not accept the certainty of its wickedness or the moral propriety of its Herculean foeman.

These confusions become powerfully visualized in the final theatrical emblems of the play as Douglas, the would-be Hercules, encounters hydraically reviving kings. His function in this last act is carefully prepared through a meticulous construction of “super-mortality,” initiated from the very first scene of the play. “That ever-valiant and approved Scot” (I.i.54); “that fiend Douglas” (II.iv.368); “renowned Douglas” (III.ii.107). He himself reprimands someone for talking about death: “Talk not of dying, I am out of fear / Of death or death's hand for this one half year” (IV.i.135-6). He is, by (almost) every account, the invincible warrior, the superlative mortal. When, at last, Douglas avows that he is the Herculean Hydra-subjugator, we could be forgiven for taking him at his word. Having killed Stafford and Blunt, who have been disguised as kings, he rounds on another king—this time the real one.

Another king? They grow like Hydra's heads.
I am the Douglas, fatal to all those
That wear those colors on them. What art thou
That counterfeit'st the person of a king?

(V.iv.25-8)

In invoking the persona of Hercules, Douglas makes not simply a soldierly claim but also a moral claim. The king has become the monster, the evil beast, and he the Herculean emissary of moral integrity charged with killing him.

Douglas' motivations here seem strange. Hitherto, the accent had been on bravery, valor, fiendish warriorship, military honor, renown. There was the sense that he had come for the fight, not for any inherently ethical reason. He is, after all, a Scot; a foreigner; a mercenary even. What has the question of English royal lineage to do with him? Yet, once he confronts the disguised kings, who seem to “grow like Hydra's heads,” his words veritably bristle with homiletic righteousness. Rather like the hero of the Stoical version of Herculean myth, he puts brute strength and ignorance to the back-burner and pulls forward an exalted sense of virtue.¹² Of the slain Sir Walter Blunt he observes, with heavy irony: “A borrowed title has thou bought too dear” (V.iii.23); and of the king himself he demands “What art thou / That counterfeit'st the person of a king?” (V.iii.27-8). Patricia Carlin has offered an insightful discussion of the issues of counterfeiting in the play and has noted also that “Monetary imagery perfectly expresses the moral/material problem of finding an acceptable source of value.”¹³ Certainly the emphasis on pecuniary terminology (“borrowed,” “bought,” “dear,” “counterfeit'st”) places Douglas' words on an imagistic path that leads back not only to Falstaff's fiscal exploits on the highway near Gadshill but to the King's own “theft” of the crown—a righteous appropriation in Falstaff's symbolic portraiture, but, for the Douglas of Act V, an unmitigated larceny.

I have mentioned Falstaff here, and I would like to stay with him for a moment. His rôle in relation to the Hercules / Hydra myth is significant. He is the only person to qualify the tag of invincible warrior so readily attached to Douglas by others. As early as II.iv.342-4, it is he who lampoons the myth created around Douglas, talking of him as “that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs a' horseback up a hill perpendicular.” The old rogue offers an interesting, and accurate, insight; but it becomes even more intriguing when we remember that Falstaff himself assumed Herculean pretensions earlier in the very same scene.¹⁴ In II.iv of 1 Henry IV, Falstaff presents his account of the Gadshill fiasco where his plan to mug rich travelers fails dismally. His narrative of the escapade is structured upon the Hercules / Hydra saga. How many has he slain? What begins as “two rogues in buckrom suits” (lines 192-3) grows to four (line 196), then to seven (line 201), then to nine (line 212) and ends as a veritable army of eleven men in buckram (line 218) all assailing the beleaguered hero. As if to lend weight to the hydraic nuance, Sir John pointedly brags in the same scene “Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules” (lines 270-1), and the monster motif is rekindled in the exchanges that follow. The Prince twice inveighs “O monstrous!” (lines 219 and 540), both in connection with Falstaff. Bardolph confesses at lines 312-13 (of Falstaff) “I blush'd to hear his monstrous devices”; and then, at lines 482-3, cries out that “the sheriff with a most monstrous watch is at the door” (significantly, this new monster also seeks confrontation with the “Herculean” Falstaff, but for reasons that cast a suitable irony on the paradigm's mythic pretensions!).

On stage, Falstaff's account of multiplying foes is essentially humorous, a parody of heroic action. No one, least of all Falstaff, believes this story of superlative heroism. In the Gadshill caricature, the innocent travelers, whom Falstaff would rob, are tongue-in-cheek styled as the Lernaean monsters and Falstaff, the robber, casts himself in the mold of Herculean hero. As obvious as the moral proprieties of this incident may be, and as transparent as the falsity of Falstaff's mythic pretensions may seem, the episode echoes yet again the more serious issues of the play. In the struggle for England's crown, the conundrum remains: on whose side falls the mantle of monstrosity, and on whose that of Herculean virtue?

With wry humor, Shakespeare brings together the two mythic pretenders, Douglas and Falstaff, in the last scene of the play and even pits them, head to head, in a farcical battle for glory on Shrewsbury field. It is a confrontation that, according to the stage directions, occurs almost simultaneously with the clash between Prince Hal and Hotspur. The outcome of both contests seems to be decisive. Hal defeats Hotspur; Douglas defeats Falstaff. To Hal goes the military victory; and, if the Herculean sonorities are authentic, to Douglas the moral victory. There are, of course, abundant reasons to suppose that the moral sonorities are not correct. For a start, Falstaff feigns death (a most un-Herculean strategy) and Douglas the superhuman is apparently fooled by the ploy. In fact, Shakespeare goes to some lengths to demythologize the Herculean pretensions of the two men and the moral inferences of their presence in this last act. Within a few minutes Falstaff has hydraically revived, declaring vehemently that “I am no counterfeit” (V.iv.115), and immediately transforming himself into a Herculean Hydra-slayer once more. Having already claimed he had killed Percy (V.iii.46-7), Falstaff now stabs Hotspur's corpse and again reports that he has slain him (V.iv.140-3). This latest Herculean exploit, undertaken against Hotspur's miraculously reviving monstrosity, is calculated by Falstaff to secure him a material reward—most unlike the classical paradigm who, as a succession of Renaissance emblematists infer, asked for none. Douglas, too, escapes death but not demythologization. Within twenty lines of his Herculean boast, Shakespeare presents us with the stage picture of the would-be myth-hero running for his life and, in the next scene, we are given the ignominious details of his capture: “And falling from a hill, he was so bruis'd / That the pursuers took him” (V.v.21-2). While the physical contests of the play may be concluded definitively, issues of right and wrong are considerably more difficult to disentangle—as Shakespeare intended, no doubt.

The contest between Hal and Hotspur in the final act of 1 Henry IV, and indeed between the king and his adversaries generally, has rightly been accorded extensive critical focus. Michael Neill argues that what he calls the “macabre art” is very much in evidence in Shakespeare's designs here.¹⁵ Hal's reclamation of his honorable status, Neill maintains, is balanced by the specter of the dead Sir Walter Blunt (disguised as the king and killed by Douglas) whose demeanor in death, as Falstaff puts it, is one of “grinning honor” (V.iii.59)—a reference, no doubt, to the grinning skeleton of the danse macabre (p. 82). Neill suggests that “this transformation of the royal double into the sign of Death's authority anticipates an ending in which he Prince's own alter ego, Hotspur, having yielded to ‘the earthy and cold hand of death’, is transformed to ‘dust / And food for … worms’” (p. 82). None, be he counterfeit or king or pauper or prince, may escape death. The thesis is an intriguing one, particularly in light of the sense of paradise and paradise lost for which I argued in the last chapter and will do again in this. It is though only half the story and where Neill's approach and my own differ is in the estimation of Hal's act of slaying Hotspur. Like Hotspur, Hal will die—the inevitable victim of Death's authority. But unlike Hotspur, Hal will find his immortality through chivalric reputation, through the very act of defeating Hotspur in a battle that reverberates with mythic resonances. Those resonances, it seems to me, are deliberately intensified and validated by the mock-heroics of both Douglas and Falstaff, the second of whom goes to considerable lengths to disavow at V.i.133-40 the kind of honor upon which the whole notion of an English heroic paradise is constructed:

What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will['t] not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it, honor is a mere scutcheon.

Alastair Fowler examines usefully the opposition of this idea not only to Hal's view of honor but to Shakespeare's broader understanding of the term, which is used more than a thousand times in his canon.¹⁶ Our own age tends to view militarism with a suspicious eye, but we should be cautious in supposing that the philosophies of anyone as heterodox as Falstaff are necessarily intended for our approval.

From its outset, the first and final meeting between Hal and Hotspur on Shrewsbury field evidences a keen awareness of issues pertaining to lineage and inheritance:

HOTSPUR.
If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.
PRINCE.
Thou speak'st as if I would deny my name.
HOTSPUR.
My name is Harry Percy.
PRINCE.
                                                                                                                                  Why then I see
A very valiant rebel of the name.
I am Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

(1 Henry IV V.iv.59-67)

This is reminiscent of the emphasis on Talbot's “name” in 1 Henry VI. A name is a statement of identity, and lineage is an important part of identity. Both men assert their names but Harry identifies himself tellingly. He is the “Prince of Wales,” a title that can be held only by the first in line to the throne. As such, Hal claims moral propriety as heir to the throne, as inheritor of his father's crown. Since Hotspur challenges his legitimacy, there can be only a single consequence for it has become an impossibility for both men to live in the same world. If Hal will be king, then Hotspur must die. Hal's “title” as monarchical inheritor has been implicitly challenged earlier in the play when Hotspur refers to him as “Harry Monmouth” (V.ii.49). Bache and Loggins have pointed out that this “designates his rôle as the king's son” but not necessarily as the heir to the throne.¹⁷ Here, again, in their physical encounter, Hotspur refers to Harry as “Harry Monmouth” (V.iv.59), reiterating the idea that questions of inheritance are foremost in both men's minds.

We have seen already that Shakespeare's notion of heroic renewal is not only physical but spiritual as well. Not spiritual in the Biblical meaning of the word but spiritual in the sense of chivalric excellence. When Hotspur lies beaten and dying on the earth of Shrewsbury field, and Hal stands triumphant before him, his words point precisely to this issue:

O Harry, thou has robbed me of my youth!
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me.
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh.

(1 Henry IV V.iv.77-80)

His youth is his reputation. It is the time when a man, in the great cycle of heroic English regeneration, wins his place in the chronicle. This sense of a place lost in the familial chivalric pageant is succinctly expressed by Charlemont in Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy, after his father has tried to dissuade him from entering the wars:

Your predecessors were your precedents,
And you are my example. Shall I serve
For nothing but a vain parenthesis
I' the honoured story of your family?
Or hang but like an empty scutcheon
Between the trophies of my predecessors,
And the rich arms of my posterity?

(I.ii.17-23)¹⁸

Behind Charlemont's plea lies the presumption that he can earn a noble place between the rich trophies of his predecessors and the rich arms of his posterity. This intention, as Charlemont himself discovers, is liable to frustration and unheroic diminution.

Hotspur makes a similar discovery. He has entered his war and lost; he becomes merely a parenthesis to a greater march of history. In Shakespeare's scheme of heroic renewal we have already seen many instances of youth reviving, or being invited to revive, the glories of ancestry. This is perhaps where Hotspur perceives his own failure. In falling to the sword of Harry, the myth of his soldierly preeminence, expressed time and again in the play, has been shattered. And, as important as that, with his death has come to an end the cyclical process of familial honor. Perhaps he is being a bit hard on himself. But, then, chivalry had its own etiquette, and Hotspur's reading of the situation is apparently affirmed by Harry. Drifting into oblivion, Hotspur's final sentence is completed by his foeman.

HOTSPUR.
                                                                                                    life, time's fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,
And food for—                                                                                          [Dies.]
PRINCE.
                                                  For worms, brave Percy.

(1 Henry IV V.iv.81-6)

Harry Morris understands Hotspur's words as an acceptance that “a man can dazzle the world only in the time of his life”¹⁹ but life, of course, must end. Seeking only an earthly reward rather than a religious one, Morris concludes, Hotspur inherits only “two paces of the vilest earth” (V.iv.91). More likely, it seems to me, Hotspur here implicitly acknowledges that he has lost eternity precisely because he has not dazzled in his time on earth, and that his reputation, in the manner of the English heroic myth, will not live beyond physical mortality. That failure is finally and conclusively summated by his defeat at the hands of Hal. In this regard it is revealing that Hotspur chooses, on one of the few occasions in the play, to address himself as Percy: “No, Percy, thou art dust.” Percy, not Hotspur. His allusion is to the familial name; he refers to himself but also, through the name, to his ancestral lineage. It is the family name that has become dust because heroic regeneration has been foiled.

There is, though, a regenerative process of sorts here. The worms. Percy's body will certainly provide the food for their regeneration. In this repulsive presentation of the life-in-death theme, just as in the benign version, Shakespeare echoes popular religious iconography—though not, on this occasion, from the emblem books. In the Wakeman Cenotaph in Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire, the sixteenth century alabaster effigy of Abbot Wakeman presents a decaying cadaver with stone worms crawling through the “rotting” joints. …²⁰ The tomb is covered in graffiti, much of it from the sixteenth century, so it was clearly a popular tourist destination in Shakespeare's day. The Abbey also had strong associations with royalty and the Wars of the Roses, leading one commentator to describe it as

                                        an acre sown indeed
with the richest, royallest seed.(21)

A lesser known parallel to the Wakeman Cenotaph is a mid-sixteenth century brass floor plaque at St. Andrew's Church, Oddington, a popular stop-over on the road from London to Stratford. Commemorating the life of Ralph Hamsterley, it depicts him as a shrouded cadaver out of whose eye-sockets, joints and stomach cavity crawl a seething mass of worms. … A scroll issuing from the skeletal mouth reads (translated from the Latin): “To worms am I given up and, thus, give the warning / That just as I am here toppled, so is all earthly honor overthrown.” These bizarre representations were clearly aimed at devaluing the notion of transient mortality and extolling the virtues of spiritual eternity. They endorsed the frequent allusions to “Wormes Meate” and such like in non-emblematic literatures, and it is entirely feasible that Shakespeare exploited the iconic dimensions of such images to encourage an array of unwholesome associations in the minds of his Elizabethan audience. They carried with them, as well, an acute sense of “life-cycle,” of the destruction of one physical entity by and to the advantage of another. For the worms to flourish, life must end; for Hal to survive, Hotspur must perish. The life-in-death bell tolls with dissonant irony.

An integral part of Gaunt's vision of a heroically regenerating English paradise was the notion of England as the “seat of Mars” (II.i.41). Elizabethan literati had good cause to celebrate the place of the war god in their mythopoeic encomium. They had it on the authority of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum that, looking upon the shores of Britain, Julius Caesar himself had declared that the Romans and the British had a common Trojan origin, and that Brutus had founded Britain, just as Aeneas had founded Rome, after both had fled the destruction of Troy.²² Since Mars was the patron of Rome and the esteemed father of Romulus, the ancient founder of that great city, it was perfectly natural for the Elizabethans to take a strong interest in his mythography—more so since the god was the sometime defender of Troy and the notion of London as the “New Troy” (Troynovant) had been espoused at least since the thirteenth century and reiterated frequently, most authoritatively perhaps in Caxton's Chronycles of Englande.²³ As the logical sequitur to a historical mythography of inheritance, pre-Elizabethan cosmography sought further to decipher the English temperament in Martian terms. Richard Argol, for example, describes the planet Mars as the controller of war-like England, and as the determinant of the English military disposition.²⁴

The English Mars was not the barbaric and destructive Mars Ultor described in Stephen Batman's The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577), the sixteenth century English vulgate of classical lore, who when he “inuadeth, all thinges are lefte desolate, & destroyed.”²⁵ Nor is he necessarily that Mars who Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy automatically associates with war: “where Mars reigneth, there must needs be war” (II.iv.35).²⁶ Sixteenth century England had engineered a particular kind of Mars as its patron, a sort of anglicized Mars. This native English Mars had a split personality. At home, he was the preserver of peace, the protector of the English realm; abroad he was the irresistible warrior. This function is well illustrated at Hampton Court Palace where a statue of Mars guards the central entrance of the Fountain Court (south facade). In this ancient seat of English monarchy, originally gifted to Henry VIII by Cardinal Wolsey, Mars symbolizes the defense of the realm against outward attack, a function reiterated by the menacing death's head depicted at the base of his shield. In sum, he was the consummate and advised warrior, whether he be defending at home or conquering abroad. The anglicized Mars, god of English war, is central to the revivification of paradise. He is that thread of immortality that finds earthly perpetuity through the cyclically repeating glories of individual English beings. Such beings, though themselves physically mortal and therefore transient, have yet the power to carry the mantel of superlative warriorship for their short space on earth, and to pass it on to their physical inheritors, their sons and their daughters, whose task it is in turn to replenish the myth and deliver it to their offspring.

The English Mars is proverbially guided by the wise counsel of the Roman goddess Minerva (the Greek goddess Pallas). Gerard Leigh in 1583 writes of the anglicized war-god as Pallas' knight, “an armed Mars, A champion pollitique in fielde to fight, or at home to defende.”²⁷ William Wyrley, in The Trve Vse of Armorie quotes a great English soldier as declaring: “For highly was my knightly seruice deemd, / As well for Mars as prudent Pallas grace.”²⁸ The position is summarized admirably by Henry Peacham in Minerva Britanna:

Though Mars defendes the kingdome with his might,
And braues abroad his foe, in glorious armes,
Yet wiser Pallas guides his arme aright,
And best at home preuentes all future harmes.(29)

This idea of Mars tutored by the wisdom of Pallas at home and abroad was not an English invention, though it was zealously adapted to local conditions. Its roots are classical; and its representation in art was familiar across Renaissance Europe. Rubens' painting “Mars pushed back by Hercules and Minerva” is perhaps the most celebrated example of such, with Hercules and Minerva restraining Mars as he attempts to drag a woman (representing Peace) by the hair.³⁰ Similarly, a sixteenth century etching in the New York Metropolitan Museum, after Tintoretto and titled “Minerva expelling Mars,” shows Minerva urging Mars to assuage his violent intentions, positioning herself protectively between the war god and two female figures, symbolizing Peace and Abundance.³¹ For the Elizabethans there was an obvious familial example for the dual Mars figure. York recalls in Richard II:

the Black Prince, that young Mars of men. …

(II.iii.101)

The Black Prince was the consummate home defender, and a foreign conqueror par excellence. The context of the utterance is important. York is upbraiding Bullingbrook for bringing civil war onto English soil. He remembers how he and Bullingbrook's father had rescued the Black Prince from “forth the ranks of many thousand French.” It is foreign conquest that wins the colors of an English Mars, not the fomenting of civil strife.

If the genuine “Pallas souldier,” to expand Gerard Leigh's comment, is “an armed Mars, A champion pollitique in fielde to fight, or at home to defende, An ordered Iusticer without respect,” then how does the newly ascended Henry V, the physical inheritor of Edward III and the Black Prince, measure up to the English myth? At the end of 2 Henry IV, Falstaff had been banished from the new king's company and the Chief Justice firmly embraced. That must be a good sign. And the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the outset of Henry V, ardently asserts the nature of the transformation:

Consideration like an angel came
And whipt th' offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T' envelop and contain celestial spirits.

(I.i.28-31)

Remember, this is the Archbishop speaking, the highest religious officer in the land, so he ought to know a thing or two about Adam and paradise. And he has no doubt that Hal's contemplative experiences have transformed him radically. His body has become the imagistic symbol of England as a second Eden, an embracing paradise. The sense of the king as England has been mooted once before. This is how Margaret consoles Richard in Richard II: “Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand” (V.i.11). She images him as the ruins of Troy, the remnants of what England was before insurrection destroyed his paradise. It's all a matter of opinion, sure enough, but Richard's party needs little convincing that Bullingbrook is the barbarous Greek who has shattered England's New Troy.

Momentarily, this takes us down a disturbing associative line. If it is Bullingbrook who is the decimator of paradise, then surely the principle of malign regeneration that is so powerful in Shakespeare's earlier History plays might suggest his son, his inheritor, may also emerge as a decimator of paradise. Not so, Canterbury assures us; the young man has reformed and is now the very essence of paradise itself. Certainly, the omens are good. Not only is Henry aiming at an ambitious foreign campaign but he is taking steps to preserve the kingdom's peace. Interestingly, in Holinshed's original chronicle of this episode, it is not Henry but Rafe Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, who raises the matter of protection from the Scots.³² Shakespeare's “complete king,” on the other hand, comes to that sage conclusion without the help of counsel. This, as Henry's advocates may point out, is a refreshing change. The problem with Richard's regime, allegedly, was that the “England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself” (Richard II II.i.65-6). It comes as little surprise that within the first few lines of Henry V the link with Mars is both re-established and re-affirmed.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the Port of Mars, and at his heels
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.

(Prologue 1-8)

In the writings of Samuel Daniel, frequently a source for Shakespeare, the (pagan) Mars is described as the “Muse-foe Mars.”³³ In the Prologue, Shakespeare moves tellingly in the opposite direction. He longs for a poetic “Muse of fire” so that he could more persuasively describe the thrilling scene of Harry assuming “the Port of Mars.” Even so, there are frightening dimensions to this Mars-like Harry. After all, he is about to engage in foreign conquest and, as a foreign conqueror, it is only appropriate that famine, sword and fire should “Crouch for employment” at his heels. These are the constructs of war—but note that they are “Leash'd in like hounds.” This anglicized Martian, unlike his Classical namesake, is distinguished by discipline.

By the end of the first act, an impressive profile has been established of the ideal English monarch embarking on a campaign to revive the glories of his ancestors and of England. The moral aspects of invading France are affirmed, regardless of whether or not we accept the Salic argument; appropriate parallels have been drawn to the exploits of Edward III and the Black Prince; and Harry has been ensconced as an anglicized Mars archetype. He is the regenerative successor, the heroic life-in-death, of his ancestors. There is a slight hiccup on the home front when Grey, Scroop and Cambridge are caught in conspiracy against the crown. In a rather extravagant declamation, the king labels them in suitably monstrous terms: “English monsters!” (II.ii.85), “inhuman creature[s]” (II.ii.95); and he goes on to lament that “this revolt of thine, methinks, is like / Another fall of man” (II.ii.141-2). The defilers of paradise are duly dispatched to the execution block, and the interruption soon forgotten.

The journey to what should be the fulfillment of the Mars myth, and the ultimate fulfillment of the idea of heroic life inheriting the spirit and replicating the feats of heroic ancestral dead, takes the English army through Harfleur, Picardy and finally to the battle field at Agincourt—all of these emotive names to an Elizabethan audience enculturated in notions of English greatness on French soil. The astonishing victory at Agincourt is preceded by a series of Mars allusions:

Dieu de batailles! where have they this mettle?
Is not their climate foggy, raw, and dull,
On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein'd jades, their barley-broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?

(The French Constable speaking of the English, III.v.15-20)

O God of battles, steel my soldiers' hearts,
Possess them not with fear! Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if th' opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.

(Harry, IV.i.289-92)

Big Mars seems bankrout in their beggar'd host,
And faintly through a rusty beaver peeps:

(Grandpré speaking of the English, IV.ii.43-4)

Few things would have pleased the Elizabethans more than praise from the French. Raleigh, for example, was fond of quoting John de Serre's celebration of English soldiership; others, including Shakespeare, looked to Froissart. There was something particularly satisfying in the notion of a cocky Frenchman having to admit that, yes, the English were better soldiers after all. So, the Constable's awed account of English valor in the battle for Harfleur would have gone down well with a London audience. Equally, Grandpré's arrant miscalculation of English heroism, suggesting that Mars was “bankrout in their beggar'd host,” would have raised English hackles to new elevations and urged on that moment when the Gallic cur would have to eat his words. In the event, death at Agincourt spares him that ignominy.

Harry's appeal to Mars is intriguing. The parallel passage in Edward Hall's chronicle reads as follows: “Therefore puttynge your onely truste in hym, let not their multytude feare youre heartes, nor their great noumbre abate your courages.”³⁴ Hall has the king addressing the Lord God at this point, not the God of War. Holinshed equally has Harry appealing to God, not Mars.³⁵ The king's petition in Henry V is one offered in a strangely detached manner—as if somehow we have moved away from the anglicized certainty of England as the “seat of Mars” and into a more tentative landscape where the patronage of Mars cannot be relied upon and where glory is not necessarily English. This is a curious movement because it contrasts so forcefully with the assertions of the Prologue at the beginning of the play. There, Harry was Mars. Famine, sword and fire crouched at his feet for employment. He was all-powerful, all-seeing. Now, he is something less than that. The diminution in his stature is discernible also in his address to the inhabitants of Harfleur at III.iii. He warns the townspeople to surrender while they still can:

                              Therefore, you men of [Harfleur],
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of deadly murther, spoil and villany.
If not—why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughter-men.

(III.iii.27-41)

Compare this to Tamburlaine's address to the Damascan Virgins, following the fall of their city. As the aldermen of Harfleur were to do, the Damascan city fathers had refused the opportunity to surrender:

Your fearful minds are thick and misty,
For there sits death; there sits imperious Death
Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge.
But I am pleas'd you shall not see him there;
He now is seated on my horsemen's spears,
And on their points his fleshless body feeds.
Techelles, straight go charge a few of them
To charge these dames, and shew my servant Death,
Sitting in scarlet on their armed spears.

(Tamburlaine, Part 1 IV.ii.47-55)³⁶

His last words here order the execution of the virgins, an act rapidly effected despite their terrified supplications for mercy. Barbarous, perhaps, Tamburlaine's inflexible “discipline of arms and chivalry” (V.ii.112) also carries with it the sense of the magical. His “servant Death” flits from slicing edge to spear point—commanded only by the whim of Tamburlaine's imaginative sleight of hand—until, at the last, his pun on “charge” effortlessly transposes fantasy into fatality.

That sense of command and control that Tamburlaine espouses so tellingly here is almost entirely absent in Hal's conceptualization of death to the townsfolk of Harfleur. There, his promise of universal destruction is one predicated on the claim that there will come a point when he has no control over his men. They will become as Death soldiers, mowing all before them—and he without power to stop them. The specter he presents of raped daughters, impaled infants, and wailing mothers is a grim caricature of the control that the opening prologue had promised us. Here is a picture of the English soldier, “the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand,” wantonly defiling an innocent landscape and barbarizing its women and children. Tamburlaine, by contrast, is the master of Death. Disturbing, too, is the comparison to Herod's “bloody-hunting slaughter-men.” It seems as though we are moving away from a spiritualized landscape of ordered foreign conquest into a pagan domain. In an analysis of the hermeneutics of conquest in Henry V, William M. Hawley has argued that Hal is both hero and tyrant and that the threats of rape before Harfleur are part of his tyranny.³⁷ The image is certainly disquieting but I am less convinced that Hal has sufficient control of this situation to be labeled tyrannous. It seems to me that Shakespeare is articulating, and Henry is “experiencing,” the disintegration of an English mythology of presumed heroism. The actuality of war is assuming an unpalatability of which Henry is aware but in the face of which he retains only marginal influence. Far from becoming the heroic anglicized Mars warrior paradigm abroad, reactivating and giving new life to the heroic splendors of a famous ancestry, Harry's English army is coming to represent an uncontrollable monstrosity, repeating its infamies in the march across France.

After Grandpré's misjudged reference to the absence of Mars amongst the English host, the war god is not mentioned again. In a stark inversion of the momentum that had been gathering at least since Richard II, the idea of the conquering English soldier abroad becomes synonymous not with the achievement of paradise but with its destruction. The Duke of Burgundy, pleading for Peace and Abundance, reminds us of Minerva beseeching Mars Ultor to spare the trembling damsels of Peace and Abundance in Rubens' painting or the Tintorettan etching:

                                                            let it not disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is,
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in the best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chas'd,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.

(V.ii.31-40, emphasis added.)

The best garden of the world? France? At the end of the same scene the Chorus, that most patriotic of observers, concludes the work with a similar claim, referring to France as “the world's best garden” (V, Epilogue, 7). We have come a long way from the idea of England as a demi-paradise, basking in its native peace and reveling in forays abroad. Instead, fertile France has become the new Eden, the “nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births.” And within its bounds, the benign processes of regeneration have been subverted and perverted by the English invaders to the point where now “all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, / Corrupting in its own fertility.” It is now the English who have become the harbingers of corruption, the marauding Mars figures who lack the tutelage of Minerva and, as a consequence, have devolved into indiscriminate savagery. In the same speech, Burgundy goes on to offer a gamut of unwholesome references to the destruction of the beauteous garden: “disorder'd” (l. 44), “savagery” (l. 47), “uncorrected” (l. 50), “rank” (l. 50), “hateful” (l. 52). The English harmony of Mars and Minerva has been abandoned in this vandalizing of the French paradise, and Burgundy's words underscore the Classical tradition of Mars as the arch-enemy of Peace and Abundance, pointedly disavowing the English notion of Mars as the protector of paradise and styling him instead as its indiscriminate destroyer. Far from articulating the consummation of a glorious life-in-death panoply of reviving English greatness, the ultimate momentum of the play is characterized by stagnancy and death, a fact hauntingly reiterated by reference in its last lines to the marriage of Henry and Kate and the tragic reign of Henry VI, their son and heir.

The life-in-death theme in the English Histories was essentially an effort to create a valued and human permanence amidst the desolation of a fallen world. The central thesis behind this endeavor relied on the simple corollary of peace at home and heroic conquest abroad. The ideal English hero, be he king or foot soldier, was understood as a Mars-type warrior, sauntering forth from the haven of an English paradise and, having conquered foreigners, returning home to enjoy and preserve the peace and plenty of a second Eden. The historic paradigms—Edward III, the Black Prince, Richard I, but also the ordinary superlative soldier of English myth—all appeared, through the flattering prism of Tudor history, to have established and validated exactly this cycle.

Paola Pugliatti asks the seminal question: “if Henry V is intended to be perceived as the perfect Christian prince, why do so many voices, more or less directly and overtly, condemn his military venture and denounce the violence of the war so convincingly?”³⁸ The voice of this chapter has sounded in a similar direction, affirming Shakespeare's change of intention through his manipulation of the life-in-death theme in relation to the theme of heroic English regeneration. The debilitation of the myth is hinted at in the First Tetralogy, even as attempts are being made to articulate it, and further nuanced in the motifs of repeating monstrosity in Henry IV. But the full scope of its failure is preserved for Henry V, where the opportunity to exercise the “peace at home, conquest abroad” theorem founders, it seems, on the actuality of war and its cruel ways. In the end, the human detail of foreign conquest turns out to be every bit as unsavory and diminishing as that of civil war. The idea that death can be defied by a reviving and repeating cycle of mortal greatness stumbles in Shakespeare's increasingly unwholesome dissection of the very nature of greatness itself. In truth, Shakespeare's theatre does no more than articulate explicitly the realities of war. Despite the brutalities of his French campaign, the Black Prince was still heralded as the very essence of chivalry, his failings filtered out by the sanitizing lens of Tudor history. When Shakespeare comes to define the supposed glories of Edward's illustrious inheritor, Henry V, he moves towards a more pessimistic and cautious understanding of an epoch that the popular but ill-informed imagination had long idealized.

Notes

1. For example, Samuel Daniel, in “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to The Civile Wares betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke (London: 1595, first publ.; Simon Waterson, 1609), his verse account of the civil war, purposes “to shewe the deformities of ciuile Dissension” (sig. A2v); and Thomas Lodge, in The Wounds of Civil War, ed. Joseph W. Houppert (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), draws, as the Elizabethans were apt to do, on the precedent of Italy. The setting and characters may be Roman, but the lesson on “unnaturalness” is distinctly English: “Brute beasts nill break the mutual law of love, / And birds affection will not violate; / The senseless trees have concord 'mongst themselves, / And stones agree in links of amity” (I.i.260-3).

2. A Knack to Know a Knave (1594; facsimile rpt. Oxford: The University Press, The Malone Society Reprints, 1963), sig. A2r.

3. Thomas Cooper, Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae tam accurate congestus, vt nihil pene in eo desyderari possit, quod vel Latine complectatur amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, vel Anglice, toties aucta Eliotae Bibliotheca (London: 1565), sig. 7G3r.

4. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), VI.xii.32.

5. Cooper, sig. 7G1r.

6. Guillaume de la Perrière, The Theater of fine devices, containing an hundred morall emblemes, trans. Thomas Combe (1593, first publ.; London: R. Field, 1614), emblem XCIX. The original French edition appeared on the continent in 1540.

7. Combe, emblem XCIX.

8. Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum Quaestionum, De vniuerso genere, quas serio ludebat, Libri Qvinqve (1555, first publ.; Bononiae, apud Societatem Typographiae Bononiensis, 1574), bk. 2, p. 22 foll. and bk. 3, p. 92 foll. Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, cum aliquot nummis antiqui operis, Ioannis Sambuci Tirnaviensis Pannonii (Antwerpiae: ex officina Christophori Plantini, 1564), p. 138. Francesco Tertio, Austriacae Gentis Imagines (1558, first publ.; Venetiis et Oeniponti: Formis Gaspari ab Avibus, 1573), plate titled “Philippus Cathol Resc Hisp.”

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

10. Robert Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 30.

11. Calderwood, p. 50.

12. Following the later Stoics and Cynics, emblematists like Andrea Alciatus, for example, avoided focusing on the physical achievements of Hercules (i.e. the brute strength and ignorance that characterized some of the Twelve Labors), and instead stylized Hercules' remarkable feats as illustrations of cerebral triumphs of morality or ingenuity.

13. Patricia L. Carlin, Shakespeare's Mortal Men: Overcoming Death in History, Comedy and Tragedy (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 67.

14. See Clayton G. MacKenzie, “Falstaff's Monster,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities MLA, 83 (1995), pp. 83-6.

15. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 81-3.

16. Alastair Fowler, Time's Purpled Masquers: Stars and the Afterlife in Renaissance English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 115.

17. William B. Bache and Vernon P. Loggins, Shakespeare's Deliberate Art (Lanham, New York, & London: The University Press of America, 1996), p. 96.

18. Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy in John Webster and Cyril Tourneur: Four Plays, ed. John Addington Symonds (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966).

19. Harry Morris, in Last Things in Shakespeare (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), p. 261.

20. For a discussion of the so-called “monumental body” see Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500-c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991), pp. 101-8.

21. The lines are quoted, without attribution, in Lionel Gough's A Short Guide to the Abbey Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Tewkesbury, 5th Ed. (Tewkesbury: Friends of Tewkesbury Abbey, 1991), p. 9. The Abbey was famous for the confrontation between Abbot Strensham and the Yorkist king, Edward IV, who had his brothers George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester (later Richard III) by his side. Lancastrian pikemen, fleeing after the Battle of Tewkesbury, took refuge in the Abbey and the Yorkists entered the sacred precincts intending to kill them. The Abbot, who was saying high mass at the time, walked the length of the Abbey, holding the Bible aloft, and demanded that the carnage cease. The Royal party complied, agreeing that if the Lancastrians surrendered they would be unharmed. Such was the brutality of the Wars of the Roses that, having surrendered, most of the Lancastrians were marched 400 yards up the road to Tewkesbury Cross and executed. Ironically, George of Clarence, later murdered by his own brother, came to be buried in Tewkesbury Abbey, in a vault behind the altar and just a few yards from where the Wakeman Cenotaph now stands. And so, too, young Edward, the Prince of Wales, who had hoped to emulate the feats of his famous grandfather, Henry V, and “win our ancient right in France again, / Or die a soldier as I liv'd a king” (Richard III III.i.92-3), lies buried beneath a simple brass plaque in the middle of the choir.

22. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Britonum, ed. J. A. Giles (London: D. Nutt, 1844), p. 2: “Hercle ex eadem prosapia nos Romani et Britones orti sumus, quia ex Trojana gente processimus. Nobis Aeneas post destructionem Trojae primus pater fuit: illis vero Brutus, quem Silvius Ascanii filii Aeneae filius progenuit.” Translation: “In truth we Romans and the Britons have the same origin, since both are descended from the Trojan race. Our first father, after the destruction of Troy, was Aeneas; theirs Brutus, whose father was Sylvius, the son of Ascanius, the son of Aeneas.” G. H. Gerould, in his article “King Arthur and Politics,” Speculum, 2 (1927), p. 34, believes that Geoffrey issued his history between 1136 and 1138.

23. Caxton, Biiii, p. 4.

24. Argol is here writing in a prefatory address to the reader in Gerard Leigh's (sometimes Legh) The Accedence of Armorie (London: 1562, first publ.; R. Tottel, 1591), sig. A5v: “For this our clime being subiect to Mars … the people naturally must yeeld such effects, as that mighty planet imprinteth in these inferiour bodies his subiects. For as the heauens haue ruled old the earth, an vnmoueable masse, with their beneficiall effects: so in this our region, the fire of honour mounting by martiall prowes, the chiefe aduancer of gentry, must of force so long last in this nation, as matter minstred from aboue maintaineth it.”

25. Stephen Batman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577 rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), sig. 6r.

26. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedies: A New Mermaid Anthology, introduced by Brian Gibbons (Tonbridge, Kent: Ernest Benn, 1984).

27. Leigh, fol. 129v.

28. Wyrley, p. 135.

29. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna: Or A Garden of Heroycal Devices (London: Wa. Dight, 1612), p. 44.

30. Rubens' painting “Mars pushed back by Hercules and Minerva” is housed in the Real Academie de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain.

31. The etching is reproduced as plate 57 in Eric Newton's Tintoretto (Longmans, Green and Co., 1952). Evelyn March Phillipps, in Tintoretto (London: Methuen, 1911), p. 103, compares this print to Tintoretto's “The Three Graces,” and concludes that “The figure ‘Minerva expelling Mars’ while Venice feasts with Peace and Concord, among vines and fruits, has the same happy idyllic note.” See, also: Goltzius' engraving, after Hendrik Goltzius, catalogued by Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1866), p. 122, no. 1: “Pallas assise sous un pavillon au milieu de plusieurs guerriers”; and Vincenzo Cartari's Le Imagini de i Dei de gli Antichi (Venice: 1571), popularized in England through Richard Linche's 1599 translation (published in London), which presents an armed Minerva emerging from Jupiter's brain (opposite p. 458).

32. Holinshed's Chronicle, ed. Allardyce & Josephine Nicoll (London: Dent, 1965), p. 73 (iii.546): “Rafe Neuill, earle of Westmerland, and as then lord Warden of the marches against Scotland, vnderstanding that the king, vpon a couragious desire to recouer his right in France, would suerlie take the wars in hand, thought good to mooue the king to begin first with Scotland.”

33. Samuel Daniel, Delia (London: J. Charlwood for Simon Waterson, 1592), sig. G2v.

34. The comparison is made by John H. Walter, ed., King Henry V (London: Methuen, 1970), note to IV.i.295-8.

35. Holinshed's Chronicle, p. 78 (iii.552-3).

36. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane.

37. William M. Hawley, Critical Hermeneutics and Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 121.

38. Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 49.