SOURCE: "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 456-74.

[In the following essay, Traub considers how Falstaff and Katherine of Shakespeare's Henriad "are constructed as female Others who must be repudiated or subjugated in order for Prince Hal to assume phallocentric control as King Henry V" and thus "suggest ways in which the phallocentric order might be undermined."]

Despite the specific meanings we may ascribe historically to the female reproductive body, its biological potential remains irrefutable, ineffable. In our own cultural tradition the female reproductive body is simultaneously an object of terror (fears of maternal engulfment) and idealization (the Virgin Mother). A "dark continent" traversed by every infant, whence we are conceived, labored, and delivered, it exists in our pre-natal memories—before culture, language, law, before knowledge of the father, before the Law of the Father.

Psychoanalysis offers a brilliant reading of the enculturation of the infant who is expelled from this body into the social order, of the simultaneous development of its subjectivity, gender, and sexuality. But, as feminist critics have made abundantly clear, the psychoanalytic narrative of psychic development is predicated upon a male subject. Not only is the trajectory of the male posited as normative, but that subject is constituted in relation to a fantasized Other—an Other that is at once engendered as "woman" and eroticized in reference to female reproductive functions.

The reflexivity and redundancy of the psychoanalytic narrative of psychic development also characterize its analysis of literary texts: it generally tells the same tale, a story of "real" or fantasized loss, with all psychic conflict organized around the threat of castration. Despite the variety of literary plot, image, and metaphor, psychoanalytic criticism rehearses a drama of the same, seeing only its own image in the face of the Other.

In an attempt to break out of this circle, I pose the female reproductive body as the repressed figure upon which two paradigmatic narratives of male subjectivity depend: Lacan's revision of the Freudian oedipal drama as the subject's entrance into the symbolic order, and Shakespeare's drama of the development of a "prototypical" male subject in the Henriad. In a recursive reading of drama through psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis through drama, I will argue that despite the significant differences in family and social structure between late-sixteenth-century England and twentieth-century Vienna and Paris, Shakespearean drama and psychoanalytic theory share in a cultural estimation of the female reproductive body as a Bakhtinian "grotesque body," and consequently repress this figure in their narratives of psychic development.¹ Fol-lowing a discourse-based model, I am interested not so much in posing the Henriad as case history, applying psychoanalytic terminology to individual characters, but in the interrogation of persistent repetitions of psychoanalytic and dramatic narratives, repetitions that demonstrate their cohabitation within a certain structure of gender. The Henriad and psychoanalysis are parallel narratives, similarly positioning male subjectivity and the female reproductive body. By using the terms "drama" and "narrative" in reference to both, I mean to stress that psychoanalytic theory is as shaped by the politics of narrative convention and the constraints of an historically constructed cultural unconscious as is early modern drama.

In asserting such a connection between Shakespearean and psychoanalytic texts, I admit the acute risk of effacing historical differences. However, differences between sixteenth- and twentieth-century ideology in child-rearing practices, differences in the status of heterosexual desire and in biological paradigms—differences that are only now being explored²—do not, I would argue, translate into significant differences in the construction of the maternal body. Renaissance materials in fact demonstrate indigenous cultural rationales that, as today, construct the maternal as a figure of profound ambivalence. If, as scholars now argue, in the Reinaissance the fear of being turned back into women was constitutive of masculine subjectivity, if fear of male "effeminacy" shaped erotic relations between men and women, then "getting back to the mother" was massively prohibited.³ Early separa-tion from the mother, competition for maternal nurturance, ambivalent object-relations, and fears engendered by the dominant biological paradigm all converge in the construction of a maternal object that is desired, resented, and, most importantly, feared.

In noting the similarities that exist despite the historical differences in family and social structure, I do not propose that the line between Shakespeare and Freud is direct, continuous, or noninterrupted. Clearly, as the Victorian idealization of the maternal attests, the female reproductive body has been variously constructed and valued within different periods. Rather, I mean to suggest that in respect to the female reproductive body and its influence on male subjectivity, Shakespearean drama and psychoanalytic theory share in a cultural moment, much in the way that we can say that the narrative strategies of Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote share in those of the "postmodern moment." History is neither smooth teleology nor total disruption. It may repeat itself—but always with a difference. The salient difference between the Henriad and psychoanalysis, I would argue, is less ideological than stylistic.

. . . . .

The relationship of feminist critics to Shakespeare's history plays has been one of not-so-benign neglect. For many feminists, the lack of powerful female characters in the histories forecloses the critical questions they bring to Shakespearean drama. "Women don't figure" seems to sum up the stance of many critics who turn their analyses of gender and power to the greater presence of women and to the themes of chastity, courtship, marriage, and adultery in the comedies, tragedies, and romances.⁴ In a recent article Carol Thomas Neely takes the feminist argument even further: she maintains that the focus of new historical critics on the histories is in part evidence of their antipathy to feminism.⁵

In arguing against this trend of dismissing the histo-ries, I mean to suggest that the Henriad is a "seminal" point for an examination of the construction and maintenance of phallocentric ideology, particularly in regard to male subjectivity and sexuality. Although the histories depend on a resolutely hierarchical representation of gender difference, they do not merely exclude women; they stage the exclusion of women from the historical process (an exclusion that is the historical process), thus exhibiting the kinds of repressions a phallocentric culture requires to maintain and reproduce itself. By means of this staged exclusion, the Henriad represents a marginal discourse, if only to demonstrate the containment of that discourse. This containment, however, is neither final nor total; we thus see not only the "rehearsal" of power stressed by new historical critics but also the possibility of the deconstruction of dominant sixteenth-century ideologies of gender, sexuality, and power.⁶ In short, male dominated as it is, the Henriad contains within itself the means for its own meta-critique.

Access to this meta-critique is possible through a reading of the Henriad as paradigmatic of the gendered and erotic repressions upon which sixteenth-century male subjectivity depends. In psycho-dramatic terms, Prince Hal's subjectivity is constituted, first, in his relation to Falstaff, whose somatic iconography metonymically positions him as the fantasized pre-oedipal maternal, against whom Hal must differentiate; and, second, in relation to the French princess, Katharine, whose linguistic subjugation demonstrates the extent to which the male subject's (hetero)sexuality depends upon the repression and control of the female Other.

My reading of the Henriad draws an explicit parallel with the Lacanian description of the development of subjectivity within phallocentric culture. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the individual is constituted simultaneously as a subject, a gender, and a sexuality through entrance into the symbolic order of language. With the insertion of the third term, the phallus, into the Imaginary pre-oedipal relation of mother and child, the child loses its fantasized symbiosis with the mother, falling into a pre-existing order of culture that, through its endlessly substitutive chain of signification, enforces an always-divided subjectivity or "lack-in-being."⁷ The signifier of this lack-in-being is the phallus: first, because by breaking the Imaginary dyad, it inaugurates all subsequent desire as substitutive; and, second, because all subjects, male and female, are psychically castrated, learning the meaning of separation and difference through alienation into language.

The symbolic order governed by the Law of the Father is implicitly phallocentric, in part because of the resolute binarism by which it structures all categories of being and thought, beginning with gender: "The Father's Law enjoins the subject to line up according to an opposition, man/woman. . . ."⁸ From this binarism of gender, all subsequent difference is defined as oppositional and hierarchical, leading to the ascription of a host of related oppositions: rational/irrational, strength/ weakness, civilized/primitive.

Like Freud, Lacan describes a sequence of psychic events—the movement from the pre-oedipal through the oedipal—that is both constituted by and constitutive of patriarchal culture. For feminists, the value of Lacanian analysis is precisely in this description of how phallocentrism reproduces itself within and through a family structure that is inscribed by larger cultural codes. Despite its embeddedness in patriarchal ideology, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides the means for a critique of the pretensions of phallocentrism. As the signifier of the fiction of unmediated presence and integrated identity, as the metaphor for a fragmented and precarious subjectivity, the phallus exposes even as it upholds the artificiality of the division upon which gender and sexual identity are based. As Jane Gallop remarks, "The penis is what men have and women do not; the phallus is the attribute of power which neither men nor women have."⁹

As Gallop is well aware, however, the danger in this formulation is that, historically, the phallus has stood for precisely the kind of power men have had—as metaphor for their male identity and as figuration of their sexual, political, and economic power over women. A feminist psychoanalysis must therefore conscientiously resist subsuming gender hierarchies under the aegis of the radical instability of all speaking subjects.¹⁰ While retaining the Lacanian description of the way gendered subjects are constituted by and through phallocentric culture, language, and logic, feminists will continue to assert the possibility of a strategic intervention into this course of events.

. . . . .

Psychoanalytic criticism of the Henriad has tended to perceive Prince Hal's developmental problem as a choice between two fathers: a biological father, King Henry IV, standing for conviction, duty, and control, yet burdened by his guilty acquisition of the crown; and a father substitute, Falstaff, whose hedonism, lawlessness, and wit provide an attractive, if temporary, alternative. In his classic 1952 formulation Ernst Kris argued that Prince Hal dissociates himself from the court both as protest against his father's regicide and to escape his own unconscious temptation to parricide.¹¹ Upon his father's death, Hal ascends the throne, displacing his parricidal impulses onto his father substitute; his harsh rejection of Falstaff thus acts as a symbolic killing of the father.

Kris's normalizing account of psychosexuality celebrates the successful reintegration of the wayward, unruly child into the patrilineal order of kingship. The tetralogy ends as a comedy, with the marriage of the newly crowned and martially victorious King Henry V to the French princess Katharine insuring the continued generation of patriarchal power through the expectation of male progeny.

More recently, Murray Schwartz and Peter Erickson also posit Falstaff as a paternal figure, but they view with ambivalence the tetralogy's close. In stressing that Falstaff represents in non-legitimate, infantile ways adult male fantasies of omnipotence, avarice, orality, and egotism, Schwartz argues that as low-life "sport" is channeled into high-minded military exploits, the drama expresses the cultural legitimation of infantile egotism.¹² And Erickson's examination of male bond-ing suggests that the guilt Hal feels toward both Henry IV and Falstaff prevents the Henriad from reaching a clear resolution. Both father figures are "scapegoats who refuse to stay away."¹³

I see Schwartz and Erickson as beginning a movement to problematize psychoanalytically the Henriad from the perspective of a troubled masculinity, based in a flawed father-son dynamic that replicates the larger problems of patriarchy. I want to take their analyses of patriarchal relations one step further by arguing that Falstaff represents to Hal not an alternative paternal image but rather a projected fantasy of the pre-oedipal maternal whose rejection is the basis upon which patriarchal subjectivity is predicated. I see in this process of the oedipal rejection of the maternal and identification with the paternal not merely the individual psychosexuality of one character but a paradigm for the cultural construction of phallocentric subjectivity. Furthermore, through his militaristic courtship of Katharine, Hal's subjectivity is established as thoroughly phallocentric, depending upon the repression of the object of his erotic desire.

That Falstaff is figured in female terms is suggested first by his body, which is associated with the metaphors of women's bodies and carnality that Shakespeare elsewhere exploits in his denunciation of female eroticism. Physically, Falstaff is most like The Comedy of Errors' spherical, oily kitchen maid (variously referred to as Luce and Nell, who mistakenly attempts to seduce the Syracusian Dromio) and the bawdy Nurse of Romeo and Juliet, who, like Falstaff, huffs and puffs as she waddles on fat legs.¹⁴ In con-trast to the disembodied voices of Shakespeare's other fools, Falstaff's being is exceedingly corporeal; indeed, his corpulence is referred to repeatedly, invoking, in the emphasis on a swollen and distended belly, associations of pregnancy.¹⁵ In the space of three scenes,Hal calls Falstaff "fat rogue" twice, "damn'd brawn" (pig or fatted swine), "fat-kidney'd rascal," "fat-guts," "whoreson round man," "clay-brain'd guts," "emboss'd [swollen] rascal," and "my sweet beef."¹⁶ Not only fat Jack's gut but also what goes in and comes out of his body is the object of constant discussion—especially sweat and oil: Falstaff is an "oily rascal," a "greasy tallow-catch" who "sweats to death, / And lards the lean earth as he walks along."¹⁷

Such a focus on the bulging and the protuberant, the openings, permeabilities, and effusions of Falstaff's body situate him as a "grotesque body." According to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, who reformulate Bakhtin's paradigm, early modern somatic concepts were organized into mutually exclusive iconographies of the low and high, the open and closed, the grotesque and the classical, with the grotesque body being

an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, 'spirit', reason). . . . a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange . . . it is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context.¹⁸

When Hal calls Falstaff "gross as a mountain, open, palpable" (1HIV, 2.4.224), or "this bed-presser, this horsebackbreaker, this huge hill of flesh" (1HIV, 2.4.240-41), or a "tun of man," a "bolting-hutch of beastliness," a "swoll'n parcel of dropsies," a "huge bombard of sack," a "stuff'd cloak-bag of guts," a "Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his belly" (1HIV, 2.4.443-48), he instantiates Falstaff as a grotesque body.

The many references to Falstaff as a pig, including his self-identification as "a sow that hath overwhelm'd all her litter but one" (2HIV, 1.2.11-12), not only further locate him as a grotesque body but also create a web of associations that direct our attention to Falstaff's belly, which becomes increasingly feminized.¹⁹ When, after a scuffle with Pistol, Hostess Quickly asks Falstaff, "Are you not hurt i' th' groin? Methought 'a made a shrewd thrust at your belly" (2HIV, 2.4.207-8), she shifts the linguistic emphasis from the masculine "groin" (in danger of castration) to the more feminine "belly," the "already castrated," vulnerable recipient and receptacle of a "shrewd thrust." False-staff becomes precisely a false phallus, in inverse relation to the Freudian declaration that, upon entry into the "phallic phase" of sexual development, "the little girl is a little man."²⁰ Falstaff himself makes the link between his belly, its "effeminacy," and his identity when, in response to the Knight Colevile's question, "Are not you Sir John Falstaff?" he replies, "I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. . . . My womb, my womb, my womb undoes me" (2HIV, 4.3.10, 18-22).²¹

I will argue soon that his womb does indeed undo him. For now, I merely mean to suggest that the associational chain from pig, sow, groin, belly, to womb effects a transposition from the grotesque body to the female reproductive body. As Bakhtin has argued, sexual as well as excremental functions form the core of the category of the "grotesque" that was operative throughout early modern culture. Although Bakhtin elides gender specificity in his work, the symbolic functioning of the bodily processes of menstruation, pregnancy, child bearing, and lactation that render women, particularly in respect to their genitals and breasts, open, protuberant, and never-quite-sealed-off, all metonymically instantiate the maternal body as "grotesque."²²

Obviously, Falstaff could be analyzed as a "grotesque body" without specific reference to his maternal functions: many resonances echo between the Rabelaisian carnivalesque and Falstaff's gluttony and drunkenness, between the early modern marketplace and the East-cheap tavern.²³ However, precisely because gender is repressed in Bakhtin's account, the demonstration of its salience is all the more pressing.

That the maternal was linked to the "grotesque body" in early modern societies is evidenced in part by the performance of certain pollution behaviors. The practice of "churching" women after menstruation and childbirth suggests that the products of women's sexual and reproductive bodies posed enough of a psychic threat to the social order to call for ritual purification.²⁴ I would argue, further, that the fantasy repre-sented by the non-sexualized maternity of the Virgin Mary further manages anxieties about female reproductive corporeality. With the Reformation's institutionalized decrease in Mariolatry, the social and psychic functions the Virgin performed were left with little institutional accommodation. The symbolic complex of the "grotesque body" was one intervention in this social field, performing the psycho-social function of containing psychic phenomena perceived as threatening. The danger posed by the grotesque-body-as-maternal is the physical contamination that, by virtue of how we are born into the world—"inter urinas et faeces nascimur," to quote Freud—the maternal body represents to our psyches, socially constructed as they are through a dualistic logic of mind over matter, spirit over body, or, to invoke Simone de Beauvoir, transcendence over immanence.²⁵ Because within our definitional categories masculinity is oppositional to femininity, Hal's development as a male subject depends not only upon separation and differentiation from a state of physical dependency and a fantasized state of psychic symbiosis but also on the exorcism of the figure responsible for and associated with that state: mother, mater, matter.²⁶ Hal's public disavowal and humiliation of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV—"I know thee not, old man" (2HIV, 5.5.47)—suggest his need to externalize just such an intra-psychic threat.

Falstaff's rejection, like the signification of his body, is overdetermined; within the cultural paradigm of masculine rule and kingship, his transgressions are obviously dangerous. Yet, interestingly enough, Hal's statement of rejection likens his previous relationship with Falstaff to a dream, a pre-œdipal fantasy of non-differentiation of boundaries: "I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane, / But, being awak'd, I do despise my dream" (2HIV, 5.5.49-51). As C. L. Barber notes, "elsewhere in Shakespeare, to dismiss dreams categorically is foolhardy."²⁷ Part of Hal's "dream" has in-cluded such role-playing as indicated by his statement "I'll play Percy, and that damn'd brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife" (1HIV, 2.4.109-10). While the homoerotics of the Henriad deserve fuller treatment than I can render here, it is apparent that homoeroticism infuses the relationship of Falstaff and Hal, signalled both by Falstaff's "feminine" qualities and Hal's predominant lack of interest in women. In the above quotation, Falstaff's eroticization is based precisely on the "grotesque body" ("damn'd brawn") of the mature woman—"Dame Mortimer [my] wife." Although Falstaff portrays himself as a womanizer, his relations with neither Mistress Quickly nor Doll Tearsheet carry the erotic impress of his bond to Hal. Thus, Hal's rejection of Falstaff serves simultaneously to temporarily assuage anxieties, first, about male homoeroticism and, second, about a heterosexuality based on the equation of woman and maternity. His repudiation of Falstaff exorcises both threats to Hal's development of adult heterosexuality. When Hal charges Falstaff to "Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; / Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men" (2HIV, 5.5.52-54), he not only pointedly situates Falstaff's grotesque body as the problem but metaphorically hurries this body off to its material end, Mother Earth's hungry maw.

Death holds specifically maternal associations for both Hal and his father. When a nobleman enters the tavern in quest of the prince, Hal retorts, "Send him back again to my mother" (1HIV, 2.4.288). Insofar as the queen, Mary de Bohun, had long been laid to rest, the editor of the Riverside Shakespeare perceptively glosses this line as "get rid of him permanently."²⁸1 Henry IV begins with the king imagining his country's recent period of war and destruction in maternal terms: "No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood" (¡HIV, 1.1.5-6)—a projection of maternal destructiveness later repeated in Falstaff's description of himself as a sow that has devoured her little (2HIV, 1.2.11-12).²⁹

That Hal is disturbed by precisely such associations between the "grotesque" maternal body and potential death is made evident by the language in which he voices his aspirations. He envisions his redemption in the eyes of men as a separation from "the base contagious clouds" that "smother up his beauty from the world." His maturity, identity, and freedom will be achieved by "breaking through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapors that did seem to strangle him" (1HIV,1.2.192-97). Such suffocation anxiety takes on the configuration of a bloody birth fantasy during his later repetition of this vow. He tells his father:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son,
When I will wear a garment all of blood
And stain my favors in a bloody mask,
Which, wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it.

(1HIV, 3.2.132-37)

The vapors that threatened to strangle him in the enclosure of the womb become the blood of birth that, when washed away, will scour off the filth of his maternal associations. Cleansed in a battle both martial and natal, the new-born babe will become simultaneously his father's son and his nation's hero.

Hal's escape from maternal suffocation, from threatened retention in the world of the mother—and thus a reenactment of Elizabethan boys' "breeching"—is predicated upon his assumption of martial arms and engagement in fraternal rivalry with a brother-surrogate, Hotspur.³⁰ Hotspur early provides both the opposition between femininity and militarism, and the equation of sexuality to violence, that will later designate Hal's assumption of the masculine role. As Hotspur says upon leaving his wife for battle: "This is no world / To play with mammets and to tilt with lips. / We must have bloody noses and crack'd crowns" (1HIV, 2.3.90-92). That "this" is not a time to "tilt with lips" implies that there is a time for amorous caresses—but those caresses are themselves imaged in violent terms.³¹

As if to underscore this relation between militarism and male maturity, 2 Henry IV begins with the official separation of Falstaff from Hal on martial orders of the king; Falstaff is to join Hal's younger brother, John of Lancaster, while the Prince of Wales asserts himself independently in battle. When the Lord Chief Justice comments to Falstaff, "the King hath sever'd you" (2HIV, 1.2.201), he incisively indicates the necessity for the newly minted soldier-prince to renounce the maternal in favor of the Name-of-the-Father. That the motivation for such identification is based precisely on a connection between aggression and masculinity is clarified by Nancy Chodorow: "A boy gives up his mother in order to avoid punishment, but identifies with his father because he can then gain the benefits of being the one who gives punishment, of being masculine and superior."³² Ironically, it is Falstaff's repeated use of the term "prick" to denote the selection of commoners for battle that enforces a chain of signification between military conscription, sharp weaponry, and the male sex organ (2HIV, 3.2).³³

By the beginning of Henry V, the violence of war has thoroughly permeated male subjectivity and sexuality. Both on the military front and in the French court, Henry V's language demonstrates the extent to which the phallus and military might are mutually constitutive. Henry V threatens the citizens of Harfleur with phallic violence: "What is 't to me . . . ," he says, "If your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation?" (HV, 3.3.19-21). Besieging a city is imagined as rape (HV, 3.3.7-35), just as the object of Henry V's desire, Katharine, is likened by her father to a city "all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never ent'red" (HV, 5.2.321-22).

With the conquest of France, the time is right for Henry, if not Hotspur, to "play with mammets and to tilt with lips." The achieved heterosexualization of Henry is a "triumph" that is perversely fulfilled by his inability to woo Katharine except through military metaphors. Henry himself is aware of his inadequacies as a lover; he remarks,

If I could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into my saddle with my armor on my back, . . . I should quickly leap into a wife. Or if I might buffet [box] for my love, or bound my horse for her favors, I could lay on like a butcher and sit like a jackanapes, never off.

(HV, 5.2.138-43)

As Peter Erickson notes, Henry's

"speaking plain soldier" (5.2.149) causes him to portray sexuality as a form of military aggression and conquest. Phrases like "I love thee cruelly" and "I get thee with scambling" [fighting] (202-3, 204-5) contain ironies the king cannot control.³⁴

Henry is, in his own words, "a soldier, / A name that in my thoughts becomes me best" (HV, 3.3.5-6).

The military dimension of Henry's sexuality is paralleled by his linguistic domination of Katharine. When he asks her to "teach a soldier terms / Such as will enter at a lady's ear" (HV, 5.2.99-100), his subsequent behavior attests that the linguistic emphasis is more on penetration than on the acquisition of a new language. As Henry says, "It is as easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French" (5.2.185-87). Like Lady Mortimer, who speaks only Welsh and thus relies on her father, Glendower, to translate even marital endearments, Katharine's linguistic status positions woman as a foreign language. It is she who must give up her native tongue—a French language and nationality that throughout the play are associated with the despised "effeminacy" of French nobles—for the "plain soldier" language and nationality of "Harry of England" (5.2.238, 280).

Thus far my analysis has suggested that insofar as Katharine is the object of Henry's discourse, Henry's subjectivity and sexuality are predicated upon his repression of Katharine's linguistic power. But what of Katharine as the subject of her own discourse? In the scene between Katharine and her lady-in-waiting (HV,3.4), in which Katharine not only learns English but metaphorically dismembers it—"d' hand, de fingre, de nailes, de arm, d'elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, le count" (11. 56-57)—we encounter a Katharine who skillfully engages in linguistic play.³⁵ Indeed, in this private scene between two women, Katharine takes control of the specifically sexual aspects of language; while asserting that "O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptable, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d' honneur d'user" (11. 50-52), Katharine nonetheless continues to recite "une autre fois" her "leçon ensemble," including the offending "de foot and le count" (11. 54-57). Insofar as this female appropriation of the sexual body directly follows Henry's threats of rape to the virgins of Harfleur, we are, I think, encouraged to see Katharine as temporarily escaping the play's overwhelmingly male representation of the proper role of female sexuality.

Despite her appropriation of linguistic and sexual power, however, Katharine fails to maintain such control once in the presence of Henry V. During the "wooing scene," her language is reduced to twenty-four short lines of maidenly embarrassment and deference compared to Henry's one-hundred-and-fifty lines of vigorous self-presentation. Listen to the tenor of her response to Henry's kissing of her hand, her longest speech (I follow the Bevington translation of her French): "don't my lord, don't, don't; by my faith, I do not wish [you] to lower your greatness by kissing the hand of an—Our dear Lord!—unworthy servant; excuse me, I beg you, my most powerful lord" (HV,5.2.254-58 n.). Katharine's predicament is structural; whatever her individual power, it is subsumed by her ideological, political, and economic function in the systematic exchange of women between men.³⁶ As Katharine says, when Henry asks if she will have him: "Dat is as it sall please de roi mon père" (HV,5.2.248).

That nationality in Henry V is gender-marked is often noted. Less obvious is that women's bodies are figured as territory: when Henry describes Katharine as "our capital demand, compris'd / Within the fore-rank of our articles" (HV, 5.2.96-97), not only does the giving of her body symbolize the capitulation of French territory; her body becomes that territory. Once married to the masculine kingdom of England, the subservient state of France embodied by Katharine will be partially enclosed, its watery borders policed by British soldiers. At the same time, Falstaff's body, that unruly "globe of sinful continents" (2HIV, 2.4.284), is tamed and appropriated through its transfiguration into a more manageable "state."³⁷

The symbolic substitution of Falstaff by Katharine thus effects a strategic displacement and containment, as the debased maternal is replaced with an idealized woman, the "classical body," which, as Stallybrass and White note, is "elevated, static, and monumental. . . . [with] no openings or orifices."³⁸ Katharine's virginal body, while presumably to be used for reproductive purposes, is yet in Henry V's fantasies free of implication in maternal bodily exchanges. As "fair Katharine" (HV, 5.2.104), "dear Kate" (1. 154), "gentle Princess" (1. 203), "queen of all" (1. 246), "an angel" (1. 110), "my fair flower-de-luce" (11. 210-11), Katharine is positioned, in the space of one hundred lines, as far as possible from the "grotesque" maternal body.

Such a replacement of the "grotesque body" by the idealized "classical body" is, however, an ambivalent and troubling resolution; for although Hal's psychic anxiety is transcoded into erotic desire, the "classical" and the "grotesque" are two sides of the same coin, arising from the same cultural/psychic complex. Because of our dualistic system of thought, all women, regardless of their individual maternal status, are implicated in male fantasies of maternal omnipotence, nurturance, engulfment, and betrayal. To the extent that they are gendered, both the "grotesque" and the "classical" body are masculine projections—one, an anxious debasement, the other, a defensive idealization of the physical body from which we are born and to which, in the Shakespearean (and Freudian) equation of womb and tomb, we return.³⁹

. . . . .

The Henriad's fantasies and anxieties about women revolve, not like Othello and Hamlet, around the virgin and the whore, but, like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and King Lear, around the virgin and the mother.⁴⁰ Despite this distinction, it is clear that widely diffused anxieties about female sexuality (the virgin and the whore) and female reproduction (the virgin and the mother) articulated in Shakespeare's texts are mediated through fantasies of the grotesque body. Whores, like mothers, are agents of contamination—syphilitic, polluted, and corrosive. With the possible exception of Cleopatra, nowhere in Shakespearean drama does one meet the equivalent of the French or Italian courtesan—educated, politic, and refined—suggesting that the construction of female sexuality in Shakespeare's plays was always already preempted by fantasies and fears of the reproductive body.⁴¹

One of the unfortunate legacies of this conflation of sexuality and reproduction is the contemporary critical impulse to collapse the whole of female subjectivity into a maternal position defined by nurturance, fecundity, and non-differentiated access to the language of the body. This "resorption of femininity within the Maternal," in the words of Julia Kristeva,⁴² while an attempt to re-value traditional female activi-ties, obscures the psychic pain and violence of infants' early object-relations, as well as the autonomous desires of mothers; it limits women's right to choose not to bear children or to structure their involvement with children in alternative ways. Reversing the value accorded to the maternal position simply reenacts the same problematic from the side of idealization rather than debasement.

Recently, the "missing mother" has come into focus in Shakespearean criticism.⁴³ On the surface, at least,mothers seem to be expendable in Shakespeare's drama in a way fathers are not. And yet, despite her seeming erasure, the maternal figure often returns: the more benign "resurrections" of the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors, of Thaisa in Pericles, and of Hermione in The Winter's Tale only serve to offset the anxiety embodied in other maternal returns; as Sycorax in The Tempest and the witches in Macbeth suggest, maternal erasures can also reproduce maternity in a monstrous, "grotesque" guise. Even Falstaff, resurrected in The Merry Wives of Windsor (according to legend, at Queen Elizabeth's behest), turns out to be unkillable. The desire to bypass the maternal, then, seems to be a doomed project; if anything, these texts demonstrate the inevitable return of the repressed—oftentimes with a vengeance.

And yet, the negation of the maternal body continues in our own cultural milieu, albeit in modified forms. One of the principal propagations of this erasure is that of psychoanalysis itself. Volumes such as The (M)other Tongue and In Dora's Case show psychoanalysis to be, like the male subject, constituted on the basis of the repression of the maternal. As Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether write:

Psychoanalysis, whether it posits in the beginning maternal presence or absence, has yet to develop a story of the mother as other than the object of the infant's desire or the matrix from which he or she develops an infant subjectivity. The mother herself as speaking subject, as author, is missing from these dramas.⁴⁴

More recently, Sprengnether has argued that part of the problem is that psychoanalysis continues to relegate maternity to some place prior to and outside of culture.⁴⁵ By refusing to locate maternal functions within a cultural sphere, both object-relations and Lacanian analysis fail to transform the status of maternity.

I would add that the psychoanalytic figuration of the maternal is curiously devoid of corporeality: Lacan reduces the maternal to a position taken in reference to the Law. In contrast, Shakespearean drama suggests just how thoroughly the maternal can be saturated with specific bodily attributes. If Shakespeare persistently records the horror of an omnipresent maternal materiality, Lacan just as assiduously denies the maternal as a body. Denial and hyperbole are equally defensive reactions to a female biology that cannot be escaped, but whose meanings are open to renegotiation.

As a beginning of that renegotiation, the question to pose to both the Henriad and psychoanalysis is not who is the appropriate parent—the harsh, guilt-provoking father who administrates sexual difference through his Law, or the easy, libidinally free mother who signifies both nurturance and suffocation—as if, like judges in a custody battle, we are bent on determining which parent represents the best interests of the child. I am not advocating Falstaff as Woman of the Year, Mom of the Month, or Queen for a Day, nor do I mean to idealize his obvious faults: his greed, his egotism, his manipulation of others. Rather, what is at issue in both the Shakespearean and psychoanalytic dramas is why the parent who is rejected, metaphorically killed, is figured in the iconography of the female body, and why the mature heterosexuality of the male subject—the Henriad's "star of England" (HV,5.Epi.6)—depends upon this repudiation.⁴⁶

Psychoanalysis tells us that the mother is rejected in the "normal" course of individuation, the alternative being to remain neurotically attached to or dominated by her. But surely this narrative of the individuation process is to some extent suspect. As Chodorow writes:

It is possible to be separate, to be differentiated, without caring about or emphasizing difference, without turning the cognitive fact into an emotional, moral, or political one. In fact, assimilating difference to differentiation is defensive and reactive, a reaction to not feeling separate enough.⁴⁷

Perhaps, in its emphasis on the excessive, overwhelm-ing, engulfing mother, psychoanalysis exposes its own paranoia that, were it not for the decisive entrance of the father, the contiguity of the pre-oedipal period would seductively go on and on. What such a suspicion disguises is the belief that women are incapable of defining, enforcing, and representing cultural exigencies. I suspect that this relegation of women to a space and time prior to culture is both a defensive denial of the cultural work that mothers perform daily, as well as a masking of the longing to live outside of the imperatives of the symbolic in an endless and seamless "semiotic."⁴⁸

To my mind, neither rigid adherence to the symbolic nor immersion in the semiotic are viable alternatives. Given that our dualistic paradigm is created by humans with some measure of agency; given that the unconscious is not a transhistorical essence but is itself culturally constructed; and, given that women are no longer the sole nurturers of infants and can even embody the external "third term" to an infantnurturer dyad, perhaps the time is right for a refiguration of the maternal.

The primary difficulty in locating the maternal body more precisely may be that any discussion of the "preoedipal" can only with difficulty be divorced from our own adult fantasies and fears. Our understanding of that period is retrospective as we follow a trajectory back through our own childhoods. Thus, it always involves the risk of nostalgia, of the projection of our unmet early needs.

For that reason any refiguring of the maternal must give priority to the lived experience of "real women"—the ones who predominantly carry out the demanding, crucial, if still devalued work of caring for children. Such a refiguration would begin with the refusal to conflate the maternal and the pre-oedipal, recognizing that maternal desires precede and continue long after the pre-oedipal dyad is dissolved, as does the work of mothers. As long as the actual experiences of mothering are ignored or, alternatively, mystified and idealized, the maternal will be vulnerable to the logic of the replacement of the "grotesque" by the "classical" body. Such a refiguration would not necessarily alter the disunification of all subjects in language—the replacement of the phallus as signifier of substitutive desire would not change the fact that all desire remains "a shadow pantomime of the primordial drama of Desire"⁴⁹—but it would detach the pain of loss from real mothers, real women.

Additionally, it seems crucial to recognize that the maternal body is a nexus of ambivalence and radical instability: representative simultaneously of lack and excess, nurturance and betrayal, it encompasses the most basic poles of positivity and negativity within which our individual subjectivities are formed. Because it inhabits both realms, the semiotic and the symbolic, the maternal is a potentially privileged position from which to interrogate precisely the binarisms that constitute our apprehension of "reality." Indeed, the experience of mothers suggests that it is possible to negotiate between various cultural necessities—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real—without forming allegiances or hierarchizing value. By conceptually placing the maternal body within culture—demanding women's full participation within the symbolic while refusing the seductive logic of a "masculinity-for-women"—we will be in a better position to refuse the gendered arbitrations that divide the pre-oedipal from the oedipal, the Imaginary from the Symbolic, mothering from fathering.

. . . . .

In the Henriad, subjectivity, gender, and sexuality are inseparable. For Prince Hal, subjectivity is imaginable only in gendered terms: to be a person is to be his father's son, which is to be his father's heir, which is to be a soldier, which is to be a king whose gender identification is maintained by the homosocial exchange of women in heterosexual marriage. As Henry V says to Katharine: "If thou would have such a one, take me. And take me, take a soldier; take a soldier, take a king" (5.2.166-68). And just as subjectivity is meaningful largely in terms of gender, so too is sexuality. To be masculine in Henry's world is to be the active subject of a sexualized violence and a violent sexuality. It is never clear which is cause and which effect: does the fantasized maternal produce a "grotesque" sexuality, or does a particular construction of sexuality trigger a fantasy of the grotesque maternal?

The unanswerability of these questions within the logic of the Henriad—the circuitous interdependency of subjectivity, sexuality, and gender—is, I believe, one of the most powerful legacies of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies, and is one reason why Shakespeare's plays so often seem a preview to the works of Freud. Both authors tend to view gender as a totalization that subsumes whatever it touches. Most recently, the psychoanalytic infatuation with "desire," referring simultaneously to subjectivity, sexuality, and gender, replicates this totalizing impulse—as if, because gender and subjectivity are constituted contemporaneously, they are identical, as if sexuality were reducible to gender roles. Interestingly enough, it is the difference between sexuality and gender that Shakespearean comedy explores—but that is the subject of another essay.⁵⁰

It would hardly be fitting to finish this discussion of the maternal in the Henriad without mentioning the two other mothers to whom its fantasy of repression is implicitly addressed. Henry of Monmouth's mother, Mary de Bohun, conveniently died in 1394 when the prince was seven or eight, thus doing her part to insure the relative absence of women in Shakespeare's histories.

The other maternal figure was not so obliging. Indeed, it is not, I think, fortuitous that the Henriad's phallocentric representation of power and the corresponding repression of women were staged at the moment when the most powerful person in the country, Queen Elizabeth, a woman, was in her sixties, having given birth to no heir.⁵¹ As the repeated interest in and intrigues surrounding Elizabeth's marriageability attest, hers was not only the body upon which power was annointed, but the body over which power was contested. To the extent that the Henriad limits the reign of power to the male subject, its compensatory function is complicated, doubling back upon itself in a negation of the Virgin Queen. Present in Henry V only as "our gracious Empress," Elizabeth I is supplanted by Henry V who, in his treatment of Katharine, decisively reverses Essex's subordinate position.⁵²

And yet, Elizabeth herself was not contained by such textual strategies. Indeed, as Louis Adrian Montrose has noted, her astute manipulation of virginal, phallic, maternal, and paternal metaphors transformed "the political liability of her gender to advantage for nearly half a century."⁵³ Elizabeth's own instantiation of the classical body—a secular Virgin Mary married to the Kingdom of England—allowed her to invest "her maternity in her political rather than in her natural body," while her adoption of the identities of Prince, Husband, and Shepherd underscored the particularly phallic pretensions of her power.⁵⁴ As an aging, "gro-tesque" body, and as the "virginal mother" to whom the Henriad's fantasy of repression is indirectly addressed, Queen Elizabeth acts simultaneously as source of male anxiety and model for its compensatory mediation. Indeed, her manipulation of gender and sexual ideologies shares with Shakespeare, Freud, and Lacan the pervasive circularity of phallocentric representation: not only is power constitutive of gender and sexuality, but so too are gender and sexuality constitutive of power.

In conclusion, phallocentric culture is neither monolithic nor impregnable, in part because it stages its own necessary exclusions—the Others, in diacritical opposition to whom its own identity is constructed. Those Others are also historical actors who, like Queen Elizabeth and no doubt countless other early modern women, found their own space of power within a determinate field of constraints. Both Falstaff and Katharine are constructed as female Others who must be repudiated or subjugated in order for Prince Hal to assume phallocentric control as King Henry V. But, to the extent that their exclusions are enacted, Falstaff and Katharine suggest ways in which the phallocentric order might be undermined. I am arguing, then, not for Shakespeare as proto-feminist or the Henriad as herstory but rather for a recognition of the return of the repressed in the act of psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis and the Shakespearean text.

Notes

I would especially like to thank Brenda Marshall, Abbe Blum, Peter Stallybrass, Carol Batker, Murray Schwartz, Peter Erickson, Lee Edwards, and Arthur Kinney for their help in revising this essay.

¹ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984). By "repression" I refer primarily to the psychic mechanisms operating not within character but within the text itself, whether that text is Shakespeare's, Bakhtin's, Freud's, or Lacan's. Through this broader, more diffuse focus on repression, I hope to move beyond a purely characterological reading toward a rendering of the ways characters are constructed and positioned in discourse.

² See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper and Row, 1977); Stephen Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Take Boys for Women?" South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 7-29; Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of the Reproductive Body," Representations, 14 (1986), 1-41. One of the salient differences between sixteenth-century child-rearing practices and those that have dominated the twentieth century is the Renaissance reliance on wet-nursing: infants of the upper and to some extent the middle classes were farmed out to working-class households for the first twelve to eighteen months of life. This initial disruption and the continuing separation of the "breast" from the biological and socially legitimated "mother" probably resulted in increased anxiety over separation, ambivalence towards the biological "mother" upon reunification, and ambivalent class identifications. And, for both groups of children—those who were wet-nursed and those whose own "mothers" were responsible for other children—one would expect increased competition for nurturance.

Children of all classes and of both genders were kept in an almost exclusively female world, wearing skirt-like dress. At the age of seven or so, boys were "breeched," or put into the pants of manhood. From then on, masculinity and femininity were ideologically constructed as both oppositional and hierarchical; in particular, femininity was seen as dangerous to the male. Unlike our own age, in which heterosexual desire is the mark of masculinity, for the Renaissance male, lust was seen as effeminating. In an attempt to explain this divergence, Stephen Orgel looks to contemporary medical literature which, as Thomas Laqueur has argued, conceived of males and females as structurally inverted: both genders originate as female, with the greater presence of "heat" in the male forcing outward that which lies hidden in the interior folds of the female—hence, male genitalia. This biological paradigm leads to the fantasy of a reverse teleology, in which men can be turned back into women.

³ I am indebted to Peter Stallybrass for this particular turn of phrase.

⁴ Important exceptions to this trend are Phyllis Rackin,"Anti-Historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories," Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), 329-44, and Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982). Marilyn French (Shakespeare's Division of Experience [New York: Summit, 1981]) and Irene G. Dash (Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981]) examine the Henry VI trilogy but not the Henriad. Coppélla Kahn (Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1981]), Peter Erickson (Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1985]), and David Sundelson (Shakespeare's Restorations of the Father [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983]) all include chapters on the development of male subjectivity through the reproduction of male bonds in the histories, but they do not focus specifically on the role of women. Marianne Novy (Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare [Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984]), Carol Thomas Neely (Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1985]), Kay Stockholder (Dream Works: Lovers and Families in Shakespeare's Plays [Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1987]), W. Thomas MacCary (Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985]), and the essays in Representing Shakespeare (eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980]) all focus on plays other than the histories.

⁵ Carol Thomas Neely, "Constructing the Subject: Femi-nist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses," ELR, 18 (1988), 5-18.

⁶ For the "rehearsal" of culture, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).

⁷ Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the phallus," Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 281-91, and Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1985). See also Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, "'Beyond the Phallus?' The Question of Gender Identity," Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 267-308, and Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).

⁸ Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 21.

⁹The Daughter's Seduction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 97.

¹⁰ Such a subjugation of gender categories under the rubrics of "identity" and "power" occurs in the recent Shakespeare criticism of Jonathan Goldberg, "Shakespearean inscriptions: the voicing of power," and Joel Fineman, "The turn of the shrew," both in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 116-37 and 138-59, as well as in Stephen Greenblatt's "Fiction and Friction," Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 66-93. For a critique of this subjugation, see Neely, "Constructing the Subject"; Lynda E. Boose, "The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics," Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 707-42; Peter Erickson, "Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves," Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 327-37; Marguerite Waller, "Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference it Makes," Diacritics, 17 (1987), 2-20; and Judith Newton, "History as Usual? Feminism and the 'New Historicism,'" Cultural Critique (1988), 87-121.

¹¹ "Prince Hal's Conflict," Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Univs. Press, 1952), pp. 273-88.

¹² Schwartz, discussion at the University of Massachu-setts, Amherst (1986).

¹³ Erickson, Patriarchal Structures, p. 46.

¹⁴The Comedy of Errors (3.2.81-153) and Romeo and Juliet (2.5.29-52). All quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd ed., David Bevington, ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1980) and hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text.

¹⁵ At least four other critics have noted Falstaff's "femininity." In "The Prince's Dog," W. H. Auden notes that a fat man "looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant mother . . . fatness in the male is the physical expression of a psychological wish to withdraw from sexual competition and, by combining mother and child in his own person, to become emotionally self-sufficient" (The Dyer's Hand and other essays [New York: Random House, 1962], pp. 195-96). In Man's Estate, Kahn credits Falstaff with a "curiously feminine sensual abundance" and goes on to remark that "a fat man can look like a pregnant woman, and Falstaff's fatness is fecund; it spawns symbols." However, Kahn sees in Falstaff mainly an "avoidance of sexual maturity," a "wish to bypass women" (pp. 72-73). Kahn refers to a talk by Sherman Hawkins, "Falstaff as Mom," given at the 1977 MLA Annual Meeting, but Hawkins's article has not, as far as I know, appeared in print. More recently, Patricia Parker includes Falstaff as one of the literary fat ladies in her book of that title (Literary Fat Ladies [London and New York: Methuen, 1987]). In a brilliantly "dilated" argument about the link between gender and the denial of textual closure, she sees Falstaff's corpulence as embodying Prince Hal's delay in "reformation" (pp. 20-22).

¹⁶1 Henry IV, 2.2.110, 2.4.540, 2.4.109, 2.2.5, 2.2.30, 2.4.138, 2.4.224-25, 3.3.158, 3.3.177.

¹⁷1 Henry IV, 2.4.521, 2.4.226, 2.2.197-98. Accord-ing to Dover Wilson, in Renaissance usage the word "tallow" referred to "liquid fat, as well as dripping or suet or animal fat rendered down . . . [H]uman sweat, partly owing perhaps to the similarity of the word to 'suet', was likewise thought of as fat, melted by the heat of the body" (The Fortunes of Falstaff [New York: Macmillan, 1944], p. 28).

¹⁸The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 9 and 22. In his essay "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed" (Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 123-42), Stallybrass suggests that the dominant Renaissance ideology constructed "woman's body" as "naturally 'grotesque'" (p. 126); he ends his essay with a "validation of the female grotesque" (p. 142). In "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory" (Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986], pp. 213-29), Mary Russo delineates the difficulties involved in such a validation. And, in an essay that complements mine, Gail Kern Paster deciphers blood as a trope of gender in a reformulation of the Bakhtinian "grotesque." See "'In the spirit of men there is no blood': Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar," SQ, 40 (1989) 284-98.

¹⁹ Falstaff is also referred to as "blown Jack" (1HIV,4.2.48), "brawn" [fatted swine] (1HIV, 2.4.109; 2HIV,1.1.19), "martlemas" [fatted ox killed at Martinmas] (2HIV, 2.2.96), "old boar" (2HIV, 2.2.138), and "Bartholomew boar-pig" [roast succulent pig] (2HIV, 2.4.228-29).

²⁰ Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), pp. 112-35, esp. p. 118.

²¹ In "Language, linguistics and the study of litera-ture" (Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical essays: film, linguistics, literature [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985], pp. 113-30), Colin MacCabe informs us that "The verb to womb, meaning to enclose an empty space, gave rise to a series of nominal derivations which included both the sexually unspecific stomach as well as the meaning of uterus that is current today. It is crucial to a reading of the role of Falstaff to recognise that both meanings were available at the end of the sixteenth century and we should not be surprised at Falstaff's consequent sexual ambiguity, particularly in the context of a claim about the disruption of the normal order of language. . . . [S]uch a figure should undermine even the possibility of representing sexual difference. Falstaff's body constitutes a polymorphously perverse threat to the possibility of representation. It even claims to undo the arbitrary and social nature of the sign and to speak its own name independently of any social order of language" (pp. 116-17). Ivy Schweitzer also suggested to me that Falstaff's linguistic style exhibits "maternal syntax" or the "semiotic" as described by Julia Kristeva.

²² Two references that specifically link mothers with the excretion of tears are 1HIV, 2.4.388-91, and HV,4.6.29-32.

²³ Falstaffs genealogical forebears in stage Devils, Vices, and Iniquity further position him as "grotesque."

²⁴ I am indebted to Stephen Greenblatt for bringing my attention to "churching" ("Martial Law and the Land of Cockaigne," Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 129-63).

²⁵ Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 47, and "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 69. See also Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1952).

²⁶ I have learned much from Janet Adelman's analyses of the maternal in Shakespearean drama; see especially "'Born of Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth" in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 90-121, and "'This Is and Is Not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida" in The (M)other Tongue, pp. 119-41. I am also indebted to the work of Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1976), Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1978). My thinking about the ways in which masculinity for Shakespeare's heroes entails a defensive denial of the female has also been influenced by Madelon Gohlke (Sprengnether), "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in The Woman's Part, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, Chicago, and London: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 150-70, and Susan Bordo, "The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought," Signs, 11 (1986), 439-56.

²⁷Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), p. 219.

²⁸The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

²⁹ Compare these and the following images of mater-nal destruction to those concerning Richard III in 3 Henry VI (3.3.168-81), and Macduff, Malcolm, and Macbeth in Macbeth. See Adelman, "'Born of woman,'" pp. 92-93, 100, and 107.

³⁰ See Joel Fineman, "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shake-speare's Doubles" in Representing Shakespeare, pp. 70-109.

³¹ The OED defines "tilt" (1511) as "a combat or en-counter (for exercise or sport) between two armed men on horseback, with lances or similar weapons, the aim of each being to throw his opponent from the saddle." Bevington glosses "mammets" as "dolls, or else, breasts."

³² Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 113.

³³ The OED defines "prick" as "penis" (1592). Its ear-lier definitions are "pointed weapon, esp. dagger or sword" (1552); and "to select (persons) . . . to appoint, choose, pick out" (1557).

³⁴ Erickson, Patriarchal Structures, p. 60.

³⁵ I am indebted to Lynda Boose for insisting on view-ing Katharine as a subject in her own right. However, I am aware that one can both laugh with Katharine and at her at the same time, depending on inflection and how the scene is played. Thus, as Peter Erickson pointed out to me, Shakespeare seems to have it both ways through the juxtaposition of Henry's Harfleur speech (3.3) and Katharine's tutorial (3.4): he detaches himself from Henry without going over unequivocally to Katharine's side.

³⁶ For an analysis of the homosocial exchange of women in Shakespearean drama, see Karen Newman, "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice," SQ, 38 (1987), 19-33. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), and Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210.

³⁷ Women's bodies figure territory in other of Shake-speare's plays; notably, Falstaff's counterpart in The Comedy of Errors, Nell, is imagined as a monstrous globe. "She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her," Dromio says, proceeding to enumerate the Western European nations embodied in her abundant flesh and foul breath (3.2.114-15). Comic though this treatment is (supposed to be), it was given a more serious precedent in the Ditchley portrait of Queen Elizabeth standing firm atop a map of England. See Roy Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 75-76 and plate XV.

³⁸ pp. 21-22.

³⁹ See Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.9-14, and Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets" in Vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey.

⁴⁰ See Valerie Traub, "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare's Plays," Shakespeare Studies, XX (1988), 215-38.

⁴¹ Although Othello's Bianca is technically a courtesan, she is treated as a "common whore" by the other characters. For an analysis of the courtesan, see Ann Rosalind Jones's essay on Louise Labé, "City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco," in Rewriting the Renaissance, pp. 299-316. For prostitution in Italy, see Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).

⁴² "Stabat mater," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 160-86, esp. p. 163.

⁴³ See, for instance, Coppélla Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," and Stephen Orgel, "Prospero's Wife," both in Rewriting the Renaissance, pp. 33-64.

⁴⁴ Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether, p. 25. See also In Dora's Case, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). In an MLA presentation (San Francisco, 1987) Margaret Homans provocatively suggested that the repudiation of the maternal body is replicated in the repressions of critical theory itself.

⁴⁵ Sprengnether, "Terminating Mothering: Lady Mac-beth and Other Aliens," Shakespeare Association of America, April, 1989, Austin, TX.

⁴⁶ For the critics' view of Henry V as Britain's hero, see, for instance, Maynard Mack's Introduction to the Signet Classic edition of 1 Henry IV, where Henry is called "an ideal image of the potentialities of the English character." Dover Wilson says Henry "represents the ideal king, whether leader or governor, in Elizabethan eyes" (p. 62). Moody Prior calls Henry a "near-perfect epic hero" in The Drama of Power: Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 272.

⁴⁷ Chodorow, "Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective," The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 8.

⁴⁸ I am using "semiotic" here in the Kristevan sense.

⁴⁹ Ragland-Sullivan, p. 271. I am most indebted to her discussion of transforming the symbolic, pp. 288-305. She suggests that the problem "has to do with a maternal linkage . . . of mother and female infant experience of loss and Castration during the first two years of life" (pp. 280-81). She advocates either changing "the gender of the primary source of nurture and identification . . . or chang[ing] the unconscious Desire of mothers who, by accepting their femininity at all, support a system of phallic values" (pp. 298-99).

⁵⁰ I explore those differences in "Differential Desires: The Relation Between Gender and Sexuality" and "The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy," both chapters of my dissertation.

⁵¹ For a discussion of the cultural response to the prob-lem of Elizabeth's succession, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The politics of Shakespeare's genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 85-86.

⁵² Prologue to Act 5, 1. 30. I am indebted to Peter Erickson for this insight.

⁵³ "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text" in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 303-40, esp. pp. 309-10. For Elizabeth's rhetorical cross-dressing, see "To the Troops at Tilbury, 1588," and for her manipulation of the subject positions of virgin, mother, and wife, see "Second Version of the Speech Concerning the Queen's Marriage, 1558," both in The Speeches of Queen Elizabeth, pp. 96-97 and 117-18. In addition, see Leah S. Marcus, "Shakespeare's Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny," Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 135-53.

⁵⁴ Montrose, "'Eliza, Queene of shepheardes' and the Pastoral of Power," ELR, 10 (1980), 153-82, esp. p. 159.