SOURCE: Burckhardt, Sigurd. “‘I Am but Shadow of Myself’: Ceremony and Design in 1 Henry VI.” Modern Language Quarterly 28, no. 2 (June 1967): 139-58.

[In the following essay, Burckhardt proposes that the hyperbolic, ceremonial language of Henry VI, Part 1 perfectly matches the play's dramatic action, in which the characters are impelled to disaster by their adherence to a ritualistic mode of confrontation, defiance, and combativeness.]

In speaking of Shakespeare's treatment of Joan of Arc, E. M. W. Tillyard observes that “in literature the things which initially are the most troublesome [often] prove to be the most enlightening.”¹ The observation is an excellent one—provided we allow ourselves to be troubled by the right things. Tillyard himself, for example, is much concerned to show that 1 Henry VI, far from being an episodic, chronicle-style dramatization of exciting events, is a carefully designed whole within the larger whole of the First Tetralogy. In keeping with his “integralist” view of the play, he argues (rightly, I think) that the hand of the dramatic strategist disposing events according to a master plan is everywhere discernible.² Yet neither he nor other integralists have been troubled by what he himself calls a “startling but irrelevant anecdote” (p. 158)—the scene between Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne (II.iii).

Quickly to recall it: Immediately after the conquest of Orleans, Talbot is invited to visit the Countess at her castle. When he presents himself, she firsts taunts him with his smallness of stature; when he turns to leave, she reveals that she has lured him into a trap and means to hold him prisoner. But Talbot has anticipated her plot; soldiers whom he has placed in readiness occupy the castle. The scene ends amicably, with apologies offered and accepted and a joint feast.

The scene seems indeed irretrievably anecdotal. It grows out of no prior event, leads to no subsequent one; the Countess appears in no other scene, nor is she heard of again. No major theme is illustrated, no moral pointed; none of the play's sources gives a hint of the incident. Shakespeare appears to have composed, with full deliberation, a scene as purely episodic as he knew how to make it. Why?

Here is the opening exchange between the Countess and Talbot:

COUNTESS:
                                                  Is this the scourge of France?
Is this the Talbot, so much feared abroad
That with his name the mothers still their babes?
I see report is fabulous and false:
I thought I should have seen some Hercules,
A second Hector, for his grim aspect,
And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.
Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!
It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
Should strike such terror to his enemies.
TALBOT:
Madam, I have been bold to trouble you;
But since your ladyship is not at leisure,
I'll sort some other time to visit you.

(II.iii.15-27)³

What happens here is that a ceremony is startlingly interrupted. The ceremony is that of the taunt, and the Countess' language is properly ceremonial, in the true Marlovian cadence: “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” Her lines call for a counter taunt or defiance, a reply in the manner at least of Gloucester defying Winchester: “Presumptuous priest! this place commands my patience, / Or thou shouldst find thou hast dishonoured me” (III.i.8-9). Substitute “lady” for “priest” and “thy sex” for “this place,” and the reply should serve quite nicely. Elsewhere in the play, Talbot himself knows what the ceremony calls for:

Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite,
Encompassed with thy lustful paramours!
Becomes it thee to taunt his [Bedford's] valiant age,
And twit with cowardice a man half dead?

(III.ii.52-55)

But here he refuses to play his part, to pick up the verbal gauntlet. With ironic urbanity, he implies that he has broken in upon the Countess as she was rehearsing a set piece; his apology leaves her in the silly posture of someone striking a mighty blow at a vanished target.

It is the Countess, not Talbot, who in this scene speaks the language of the play. About her style there is nothing unusual; it is of a piece with the play's world. That world is one of vaunt and taunt, of “high terms” ceremonially put forward and ceremonially responded to—usually with the explicit or implicit invocation of force as the final arbiter. Thus Charles challenges Joan:

Thou hast astonished me with thy high terms:
Only this proof I'll of thy valour make,
In single combat thou shalt buckle with me,
And if thou vanquishest, thy words are true;
Otherwise I renounce all confidence.

(I.ii.93-97)

“Single combat” or multiple—the sword is always at least half unsheathed to make good the words. Gloucester or Winchester, Red Rose or White, England or France, it is all the same; as the Mayor of London says: “Good God, these nobles should such stomachs bear!” (I.iii.90).

My point is not that the language is appropriate to the world, but rather that it allows of no other. Every major actor is compelled—not necessarily by pride and pugnacity but by the language available to him—to step onto the stage, assume the proper posture, and rehearse his piece. The burden of the piece need not always be self-assertion or defiance, though most often it is. The mode lends itself equally well to grief:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

(I.i.1)

or to praise:

And all the priests and friars in my realm
Shall in procession sing her endless praise.
A statelier pyramis to her I'll rear
Than Rhodope's of Memphis ever was.

(I.vi.19-22)

or even to submission:

In sign whereof, this arm, that hath reclaimed
To your obedience fifty fortresses,
Twelve cities and seven walléd towns of strength,
Beside five hundred prisoners of esteem,
Lets fall his sword before your highness' feet,
And with submissive loyalty of heart
Ascribes the glory of his conquest got
First to my God and next unto your grace.

(III.iv.5-12)

Praise and submission are almost indistinguishable from self-assertion. The ceremonial mode lends itself to every occasion, but what matters is that it makes an “occasion” of whatever it lends itself to. It is like Concord grapes: no matter what it is made into, the residual taste is always the same.

Prosodically, the mode engenders the end-stopped line. The lines of verse behave like the characters, each striving to stand in self-sufficient and self-assertive orotundity. A speech is like a recital of titles and honors (or dis-honors, it makes no real difference):

LUCY:
But where's the great Alcides of the field,
Valiant Lord Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury,
Created, for his rare success in arms,
Great Earl of Washford, Waterford and Valence;
Lord Talbot of Goodrig and Urchinfield,
Lord Strange of Blackmere, Lord Verdun of Alton …

etc., etc., for six more lines. Joan's response is predictable:

Here's a silly stately style indeed! …
Him that thou magnifi'st with all these titles
Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet.

(IV.vii.60-76)

But even in ridiculing the stately style, Joan pays unwilling homage to it by obediently falling into the vaunt-taunt pattern. The speakers may think they master and use the style, but in fact it masters and uses them. Margaret of Anjou becomes a kind of embodiment of it:

HENRY:
Your wondrous rare description, noble earl,
Of beauteous Margaret hath astonished me.
Her virtues gracéd with external gifts
Do breed love's settled passions in my heart,
And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts
Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide,
So am I driven by breath of her renown
Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive
Where I may have fruition of her love.
SUFFOLK:
Tush, my good lord, this superficial tale
Is but a preface of her worthy praise;
The chief perfections of that lovely dame,
Had I sufficient skill to utter them,
Would make a volume of enticing lines,
Able to ravish any dull conceit:
And, which is more, she is not so divine,
So full replete with choice of all delights,
But with as humble lowliness of mind
She is content to be at your command.

(V.v.1-19)

Is she indeed? This “volume of enticing lines” will presently become Queen of England: contentious rather than content, overbearing rather than humble. She will have a major share in the ensuing shipwreck. As she is here talked about, she furnishes as neat an illustration as we can hope for of a style which, seeming to do its master's bidding, drives him toward a disastrous conclusion.

Rhetorically, the mode engenders hyperbole—a compulsive reaching for the superlative, which, in the effort to outdo what has gone before, is sure to end in collapse. We are warned at the outset:

GLOUCESTER:
England ne'er had a king until his [Henry V's] time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandished sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings;
His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech.

(I.i.8-15)

Here the mortal contention, closing with a feeble gasp, is between the similes of one speaker; elsewhere it is between those of two. In either case it is a “jarring discord of nobility”:

EXETER:
But howsoe'er, no simple man that sees
This jarring discord of nobility,
This should'ring of each other in the court,
This factious bandying of their favourites,
But that he doth presage some ill event.

(IV.i.187-91)

Where every line, every trope, every man strives for pre-eminence, what can come of it but “intestine broils”?

The mode of 1 Henry VI seeks, in fact compels the seeking of, maximal self-assertion at every moment; it is impatient of indirection, refuses to sacrifice immediate effects for long-range gains. It permits strategic retreats as little as litotes, genuine negotiations as little as genuine dialogue; it always “goes for broke.” It has no sense of the implicit; whatever is not asserted does not exist. Its “order,” except where it is kept in check by external, higher authority, is that of combat; by inner necessity it escalates toward more and more violent confrontations. The duel, single or multiple, is its most adequate metaphor, until finally it drives even dueling into “mere oppugnancy,” sheer, vengeful slaughter (as in 3 Henry VI).

My intention has not been to show up once again the obvious faults of Shakespeare's “immature” style, but rather to suggest that he himself was fully aware of them. Even in this early play, he has mastered the trick of making the style he employs comment upon itself. Is a better description of it imaginable than “rigour of tempestuous gusts,” a phrase which catches precisely both its rigid compulsiveness and its destructive, blow-hard yet short-winded unrestraint? But more important: Shakespeare has discovered that there is a perfect analogy between the verbal and the social order—an analogy that is almost an identity. Both the modus loquendi and the modus agendi of a society are governed by the same inner law or laws. For the dramatist who grasps this law, the stage is the world.

II

But what and whose world? It was the world of the Hundred Years' War and of the Wars of the Roses; was it also that of the God of history? It was the world of the chronicles; was it also that of the playwright? Was its inner law a grim and destructive necessity governing kingdoms, plays, actors, and discourse alike? Or was there a truer and better law for the ordering of men and events?

I shall suggest that Shakespeare asked himself these questions—that he had to ask them because they concerned not only his subject but his craft. I shall also suggest that, in asking them, he took a searching look at the image of order, the “world picture” which underlay the ceremonial style in the affairs both of state and of the stage. In doing so, I may seem to be “reading Shakespeare's mind,” but I intend what follows as no more than a model—a hypothesis designed to solve the problem of the Auvergne scene.

The first need would seem to be the discovery of what might be wrong with the “picture.” What were its essential qualities? One was that it was static; it existed in space but not in time. It allowed for a limited amount of internal motion (though even that seemed rather an unhappy violation of its spirit, commotion rather than motion); but it did not allow for general progressive change. It valued stability to the point of rigidity; what occurred in it was not so much an ordered sequence of events, leading from the past into a different future, as a succession of exempla, episodes meant to point the same permanent morals. Enthroned at its apex sat God, the fount of honor, the source of all authority, more unmoved than mover, more substance than energy, a figure encrusted with the symbols of macrocosmic sovereignty. Below Him, step by step, stood the hierarchical “orders”: the angels in their various “degrees,” and then men—kings, nobles, burghers, peasants, and even (near the very bottom) vagrant comedians.

A second quality of the picture was that it was insistently analogical. Differences were of degree; unity was assured by analogical identity. A king was “God in little,” while God was the “King of kings.” A kingdom was to Christendom what dukedom was to the kingdom. There were also, of course, innumerable “collateral” analogies, whose force was symbolic rather than legal: to the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the “little kingdom” man, the kingdom of the heavens. For the explaining of actual events, these analogies were heavily drawn upon: “distempers” or “perturbations” at one level were mirrored by disturbances at other levels; a king who did not control his subjects was like a man who did not control his appetites. Everything was like everything else; beneath the diversity in degree, there was a remarkable likeness in kind.

Thirdly, harmony at any level depended on both the acknowledgment and the effective exercise of the authority vested in the next higher level. Order was not implicit but always external to what was being “kept in order”—and consequently explicit. Of course, the picture as a whole was supposed, ideally, to rest in beautiful and total harmony; if every inferior acted in unfailing obedience and every superior in unfailing wisdom and justice, there was no reason why authority had to become explicit. But obviously this was a mere ideal, not the observable reality; and since the picture was in fact used as a tool of government, as a means to inculcate obedience and to discourage “rebellion,” what was emphasized was the danger and wickedness of conflict and the duty, whenever conflict did arise, to submit to “authority.” The picture militated against any distinction between political and religious duty, between unlawful acts and sinful acts. Disobedience was the root and prototype of all evil, private as well as public; to it all sins were reducible. At every level—since every level had some authority, i.e., some beings inferior to it over which it was appointed to rule—there was need for constant and explicit assertion of that authority. The logic that demanded submission in one direction demanded self-assertion, jealous insistence on one's place, titles, and prerogatives, in all others. “Answerability” was always vertical, never horizontal—always public, never private. When a man spoke on matters of importance, he spoke ceremonially, as belonging to a certain “order,” occupying a certain “degree” in the picture.

These, then, were the essential qualities of the picture. But how well did it explain the actual events to be accounted for, the Wars of the Roses? At first glance, all seemed easy: England, under the rule of an ineffectual king, had fallen into dissension; her nobles had become rebellious and self-willed; and God had grievously punished her for these sins and failings. First she had lost her French possessions, and then she had turned upon herself, falling into chaos and tyranny, until finally God had mercifully sent a redeemer, Henry VII.

But upon a closer look, the picture proved to have some very disturbing consequences. Its structure of analogies contained the equation king-God; Tudor doctrine never tired of making that equation emphatically explicit—seemed, in fact, designed for no other purpose. But if under a king's ineffectual rule England suffered the horrors of the Barons' War, what followed about the King of kings and the horrors of, say, the Hundred Years' War?

A question not to be asked; and scholars and critics are virtually unanimous that Shakespeare, at least the Shakespeare of the histories, did not ask it. He would never have thought of drawing the analogy between the civil wars in England and the English wars against the “arch-enemy” France, however imperatively the God-king/Christendom-kingdom analogy seemed to demand it; his patriotism was logic-proof. But was it? Let us listen:

See, see the pining malady of —————————;
Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds,
Which thou thyself hast given her woful breast.
O, turn thy edgéd sword another way;
Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help.
One drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom
Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore.

(III.iii.49-55)

This is not Henry or good Duke Humphrey pleading with one of the English barons; it is the witch Joan persuading Burgundy to break off his English alliance and return to his true allegiance. To be sure, as soon as Burgundy yields, she comments cynically, “Done like a Frenchman: turn and turn again!” (85). But that is precisely the point: this fine patriotic rhetoric is as available to her as to the sincerest Englishman—and more effective. The rhetoric is quite independent of the speaker's motives; it belongs to the nation. Which nation? We are at liberty to fill in the blank. Shakespeare gives it to France; and it strains credulity to believe that he did not know what he was doing. If Elizabethan attitudes argue otherwise, what—apart from the picture's logic, apart from Shakespeare's composing such a speech and then giving it to Joan—about medieval attitudes? The time lay not so far back when Christian kingdoms were considered provinces of Christendom and wars between Christian kings were regarded as civil wars (so that the only pious war a king could wage was a crusade against the infidel). But if they were, what kind of sovereign was the King of kings?

There is, in 1 Henry VI, at least one clear sign that Shakespeare did ask this forbidden question. Claiming to “be umpire in this doubtful strife” between Lancaster and York, Henry puts on a red rose and explains this gesture, seemingly so contrary to the impartiality he has just professed:

I see no reason, if I wear this rose,
That anyone should therefore be suspicious
I more incline to Somerset [Lancaster] than York:
Both are my kinsmen, and I love them both.
As well they may upbraid me with my crown,
Because, forsooth, the king of Scots is crowned.

(IV.i.152-57)

I have not seen the last two lines glossed, though surely they are puzzling. Henry's argument makes sense only on the assumption that he happens to be King of England (and of France—he has just been crowned in Paris) in exactly the same sense as he happens to be of the house of Lancaster. Both are accidents of birth; they have no bearing on his function as umpire, which thus must rest on another quality altogether. That quality can only be his pious and loving Christian spirit, which is independent of his royal degree and both commands and entitles him to “instruct or teach” men to “continue peace and love.” This view of himself is perfectly in keeping with his bearing throughout the trilogy; but of course it is this same view that makes him so disastrously ineffectual as a king. Christian precept and example are not enough to keep the ceremonial world in order; what is required is the full exercise of higher authority. Henry's claim to impartiality even while he puts on the symbol of partisanship can mean only that he refuses to exercise that authority.

An impartiality truly divine; how many divisions has God? Suppose there is a war between England and Scotland (there had been so many that Scotland was almost as much an “arch-enemy” as France—was, in fact, usually in league with France against England); what then? Is not Henry here saying that a king of England warring against a king of Scotland (or any other Christian king) is, from the divine purview, doing exactly the same thing as Somerset quarreling with York? And in saying this, is he not faithfully obeying the “ana-logic” of the Elizabethan world picture? If, therefore, Christendom is continually ravaged by wars—

HENRY:
                                                                      I always thought
It was both impious and unnatural
That such immanity and bloody strife
Should reign among professors of one faith

(V.i.11-14)

—what blasphemous inference inescapably arises about the governance of the world and the fitness of its supreme head? Given the manifest facts of history, does not the world picture that is devised to give them meaning positively compel an impious conclusion?

III

At this point—if I may push my speculation a step farther—it may well have occurred to Shakespeare that there was a mode of ruling other than that which the picture provided for, a form of authority other than that of ceremony backed by force. He did not even have to invent it; it was embedded in the story itself, but so overlaid with the ceremonial pomp of the picture that it was easily overlooked. As told by Hall and others, the story was, after all, not just one of discord, a succession of more and more savage spectacles; it did have a unifying design: beginning, middle, and end. It began with Richard II and ended with Henry VII; it told how the English monarchy, once having fallen from the happy state of unbroken succession and unquestioned legitimacy, sank into ever deeper confusion (except for one brief and glorious reign) and had to suffer all the horrors of civil war and tyranny before order was restored through the happy “Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke” in the persons of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York. That was the over-all plot within which the events of the story had meaning; that was the design which created order out of the apparent chaos.

“Plot”? “Design”? What words were these? The effort to grasp the unity of the story seemed to call forth the vocabulary of sedition. In the picture, designs and plots were proscribed; they were the work of “designing, crafty knaves,” sinister and ill-meaning men whose “policy” could not stand the light of the sun. The world, unless it was disordered, was a “goodly frame,” essentially stationary, a palace that was like a statuesque body, or, in Spenser's image, a body that was like a palace:

And all her body, like a palace fair,
Ascending up with many a stately stair.

(Epithalamion, 178-79)

Men who had grievances expected, and men who had done evil were summoned, to appear before the throne of justice to have their cases adjudicated—openly, explicitly, in due form. Sovereign decrees were solemnly promulgated and proclaimed by heralds or angels; every occasion was an occasion “of state,” provided with the appropriate ceremony. Even war and combat, though temporary breaches of order, were ritualized; “stratagems” were wicked and dishonorable, devil's work. Indeed, all that was indirect and hidden belonged to the ignoble sphere of Satan; God's world had no room for it.

Oddly, the God of Tudor history turned out to be a being altogether different from what the picture called for. The range and complexity of His plots—not to mention the Master Plot from Fall to Resurrection—were the envy and despair of any merely human plotter. History, more particularly English history from Richard II to Henry VII, was anything but an orderly succession of events in the ceremonial mode of Henry VI's pastoral dreaming:

So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself. …(4)

“How sweet! how lovely” the world would be in which the Lord could be our shepherd. Evidently, He could not; at least, He was not. But neither was He the stern and prepotent judge and lord who in the fullness of His power and glory summoned evildoers directly and openly before His seat to receive their punishment and correction or in righteous anger led His hosts against the rebellious. If He had heavenly hosts at His command, they must be committed elsewhere; at least they were not deployed in Christendom to check the wicked. The King of kings, it appeared, was altogether unlike His ideal earthly image, altogether unlike what the analogy to Henry V would lead one to expect.

What was He like then? Surprisingly, He was like a dramatist. He planned, designed, plotted, employed stratagems; He worked by indirection and implication. Unable or unwilling to exert open authority and force, He nevertheless did not retreat into the pastoral mode, writing wistful Third, Fourth, and Fifth Shepherds' Plays and appealing to the still, small voice in men's hearts to do the rest. He wrote histories which, though on the surface they might look like savage spectacles, moved in truth by careful plotting toward an ordered conclusion. His purposes were hidden, wholly implicit in the design; while the action was still in progress, they could at most be guessed at. To the careless spectator as to the vain actor they were invisible: the actor would imagine that the play existed only to give him a chance to strut and rant and upstage his rivals, while the spectator would see it as a string of exciting episodes intended to entertain him, to confirm his nationalist self-esteem, and here and there (no pleasure is unalloyed) to point an obvious moral. But the divine dramatist knew better; in the end, and only then, His design would be manifest. And it might well be that the seemingly most episodic would, in retrospect, prove the most calculated and revealing.

With respect to kings and men of power, God evidently resembled the “bad” much more than the “good.” Poor Henry VI, bullied by ambitious subjects, spoke his pitiful pieces and was discarded; but Richard III had an almost divine talent for long-range plotting. Generally, the more a king relied on the ceremonial mode and on the “picture” behind it, the surer was he to come to grief; witness Richard II. True, in the end even the plotters were only actors; the prouder they were of their subtle designs, the more harshly were they shown that they themselves had only played parts in a master plot. Their self-seeking vanity betrayed them; they could never resist the temptation to become explicit, to brag at least to the audience of their clever schemes. They fell short of the master dramatist's ultimate achievement: total self-effacement, complete immersion in the design. They wanted the glory as well as the power; even when, like Warwick, they were satisfied with being king-makers rather than kings, they wanted the world and the kings to know them as such. By their soliloquies they reimbursed themselves for the self-denial of plotting; they had not grasped the secret of divine dramaturgy: never to speak in the first person. Still, they had grasped enough of it to be temporarily successful. It was as though God, like men, judged less by virtue than by likeness to Himself and by pleasure received—as though He were bored by the arrangers of ritual and ceremonial tableaux and inclined to reward even wicked plotters for pleasing Him with genuine drama.

IV

I seem to have moved far away from the Talbot-Countess episode, to have plunged headlong into the Intentional Fallacy. To repeat: I know no more about Shakespeare's ideas than anyone else; I have tried to construct a model to account for an observable and deliberate oddity in 1 Henry VI. Like any other model, mine must be judged by the problems it solves—which brings me back to Talbot and the Countess, whom I hope I have kept in mind throughout.

Briefly to recapitulate: I began by pointing out that the scene shows every sign of being deliberately episodic, and I called attention to the programmatic contrast between the Countess' mode of speech and that of Talbot's reply. I identified the Countess' mode—which is that of the play as a whole—as ceremonial and argued that it is inherently combative. I then speculated on how Shakespeare may have discovered some disquieting analogies between questions raised by his subject and by his effort to give it dramatic shape and questions at the heart of the Elizabethan world picture. The answer to these questions I stated in terms of plotting.

Both Talbot and the Countess are plotters; but their plots are as different in quality as they are in final success. The Countess cannot resist telling us about hers:

The plot is laid: if all things fall out right,
I shall as famous be by this exploit
As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus' death.

(II.iii.4-6)

Contrast Talbot's acceptance of the Countess' invitation: “Come hither, captain. [whispers] You perceive my mind?” (II.ii.59). It is a contrast between a design announced, made explicit, and a design barely hinted at. At the same time, it is a contrast between a less and a more encompassing plot, as well as between one that aims at personal glory and one that has no such aim. The parallel to, respectively, the Countess' mode of speech and Talbot's is evident.

What does the parallel signify? This question leads to the second part of the scene, in which the reason for the Countess' ill success is explained:

COUNTESS:
Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me,
For in my gallery thy picture hangs:
But now the substance shall endure the like. …
TALBOT:
Ha, ha, ha! …
I laugh to see your ladyship so fond
To think that you have aught but Talbot's shadow. …
No, no, I am but shadow of myself:
You are deceived, my substance is not here;
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity. …
COUNTESS:
How can these contrarieties agree?
TALBOT:
That will I show you presently.
[winds his horn: drums strike up: a peal of ordnance: enter soldiers]
How say you, madam? are you now persuaded
That Talbot is but shadow of himself?
These are his substance, sinews, arms and strength.

(II.iii.36-63)

Talbot is the more successful plotter because he does not naïvely and vainly assert himself as a “first person,” a substantial being in and of himself. He is not what he is—to cite Shakespeare's favorite paradox for describing effective plotters. His strength lies precisely in his “negative capability,” his having learned the secret of self-effacement, of assertion only through the larger design.

We must be clear that this is the Talbot of the episode, not that of the rest of the play. The “character” Talbot does not essentially differ from the other characters. He is, to be sure, loyal to his king and country; he puts the common cause above personal gain if not always glory. But his style is ceremonial, and it is style that determines likeness. The first time we see Talbot, he shows himself as concerned about his dignity as the proudest baron. When he was a prisoner of the French,

          with a baser man of arms by far
Once in contempt they would have bartered me:
Which I disdaining scorned and cravéd death
Rather than I would be so pilled-esteemed.
In fine, redeemed I was as I desired.

(I.iv.30-34)

The French offer a remarkable bargain: the foremost English general for some nondescript soldier of their own. But ceremony is so much more important than function that Talbot refuses the bargain and, at risk of total loss, insists on a much worse one.

Talbot's notion of warfare is literally medieval, strictly ceremonial. When Joan takes Rouen by stratagem, he shouts “treason” and “hellish mischief” and challenges the French to come out and fight “like soldiers”:

TALBOT:
Dare ye come forth and meet us in the field?
JOAN:
Belike your lordship takes us then for fools,
To try if that our own be ours or no.
TALBOT:
I speak not to that railing Hecate,
But unto thee, Alençon, and the rest;
Will you, like soldiers, come and fight it out?
ALENçON:
Signior, no.
TALBOT:
Signior, hang! base muleters of France!
Like peasant foot-boys do they keep the walls
And dare not take up arms like gentlemen.

(III.ii.61-70)

Railing Hecate! There is no need to multiply instances; Talbot never opens his mouth but to pay tribute to ceremony. In the end it is not he who captures Joan, but the wily plotter Richard of York. Talbot, unsuccored by his contentious countrymen, is “tangled” in French “snares” and dies in nobly ceremonial rhymed combat with his son over who should flee to fight again and who should die for the honor of the Talbot name. He makes a grand exit:

Then follow thou thy desperate sire of Crete,
Thou Icarus; thy life to me is sweet:
If thou wilt fight, fight by thy father's side;
And, commendable proved, let's die in pride.

(IV.vi.54-57)

Just a reminder of what he sounded like when he did not get tangled in French snares, here is his reply to the Countess once more:

Madam, I have been bold to trouble you;
But since your ladyship is not at leisure,
I'll sort some other time to visit you.

(II.iii.25-27)

Which of these two men, so strangely yoked by one name, is the “real” Talbot? It is the Countess' question. Relying on “great rumour” and “rare report,” as well as on his picture in her gallery, she thinks to trap the man's substance, “writhled shrimp” though he suddenly turns out to be. His laughter compels her to ask: “Why, art not thou the man?” It develops that where before she had but the shadow of his shadow, she still has no more than his shadow; substantiality is inversely proportional to illustriousness and “presence.” The substance escapes her, but in that one little scene she and we come as close as we ever shall to seeing the real Talbot. For only in that scene is he gifted, for a moment, with the style of speech and action which must be learned if his true purpose, the cause of England, is to be served. Sincerity of intention is not enough; valor and nobility do not ensure success—rather, the contrary. His one brief moment, not of glory (of those he has only too many), but of genuinely dramatic effectiveness, comes when he realizes that his substance is in the “sinews, arms and strength” of common, anonymous Englishmen and in the plot, the design in which they are made to act.

I believe that we can and must expand the question: “Who is the real Talbot?” into the broader one: “What is the real play, the real 1 Henry VI?” Some critics have called it a “Talbot-play,” taking their lead from Nashe's Pierce Penniless:

How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lien two hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least, at several times, who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.⁵

(There is the Countess' “picture” again!) Others have argued that the real heroine of this as of the other histories is England, and that even Talbot is no more than a servant in her cause. I should say that they are demonstrably in the right—but mostly on the strength of the Auvergne scene. For it is there, and there only, that Talbot clearly eliminates himself as “hero”; everywhere else he plays the part to the hilt.

This suggests that this most episodic of episodes is the “real” play, just as the Talbot in it is the “real” Talbot. How can that be? I am afraid the explanation will sound rather paradoxical, because in answer to the question: “How can these contrarieties agree?” I am unhappily not in the position to “wind my horn” and enact the answer physically. I shall try, however, to find help in my model. I suggested that Shakespeare saw the Wars of the Roses as a function and necessary product of the ceremonial style. On the one hand, this meant that his immediate subject, if it was to be truly represented, required that style; on the other hand, his larger subject—the divine plot in which all the disorders and episodic contentions were but steps toward a new kind of unity and order—required a style altogether different. His way out of the dilemma was this: he plotted, on the whole, according to the new, functional style—looking ahead, condensing, eliminating episodic matter, adding and elaborating anticipatory scenes, strengthening the themes most important to the general design. But he wrote according to the old, ceremonial style—in part, quite possibly, because it was still the only style he fully controlled. But being Shakespeare, he could hardly be happy with these unresolved “contrarieties”—even though they were implicit in Tudor doctrine. So he plotted a scene which, looked at casually, seems purely episodic. But into the scene he wrote an utterly unexpected speech of three lines, which should startle us into looking closely. If we do, we discover that here the contraries, both in speech and in plotting, are made to confront each other, and that the victory goes to the new style—again both in speech and in plotting. Drama wins over ceremony, self-effacement over self-assertion, the implicit over the explicit.

The expression “wins over” contains an ambiguity most useful for my purpose; it can be read with the stress either on the first word or on the second. This brings me to the last part of the scene, which contains a final surprise. Of the “brave” Talbot, the “terror of the French,” we would surely expect that he would take the Countess' treachery in very ill part. How is a man who is outraged by a ruse of war (employed by a declared enemy) likely to react to the discovery that he was to be trapped by feigned hospitality? Given the general level of rage and vengefulness in the play, a clean killing—after fearful verbal abuse—would seem a mild form of retaliation. But no; apology is sufficient to win grace:

COUNTESS:
For I am sorry that with reverence
I did not entertain thee as thou art.
TALBOT:
Be not dismayed, fair lady; nor misconster
The mind of Talbot, as you did mistake
The outward composition of his body.
What you have done hath not offended me;
Nor other satisfaction do I crave,
But only, with your patience, that we may
Taste of your wine and see what cates you have;
For soldiers' stomachs always serve them well.
COUNTESS:
With all my heart, and think me honouréd
To feast so great a warrior in my house.

(II.iii.71-82)

End of our scene. Having won over the Countess, Talbot now wins her over. Not with words or postures of ceremonial forgiveness; there is no kneeling and lifting up, no begging for mercy and magnanimous, magniloquent granting of it. The reconciliation is managed with unassertive kindness and wholly implicit generosity: “What you have done hath not offended me.” It has not offended him because this is the real Talbot, whose mind we misconstrue if we interpret it by his “outward composition” in the rest of the play. This is the sovereign plotter, who has learned from his divine counterpart both the style and the responsibilities that go with such plotting and such sovereignty.

Shakespeare's ultimate purpose is not to unite the English by whipping and stirring them with self-assertive nationalist sentiment into once again being “the terror of the French,” by directing their vainglory and ceremonial combativeness outward. That style is outdated, undramatic; worse, it is self-defeating. Not only do the French master the same style (in fact, Henry V suggests that originally it was a French style, which the English adopted to their sorrow); it is too easily importable for domestic use. Having learned to employ it against the French, the Yorks and Lancasters, the Suffolks and Cliffords (as well as the Raleighs and Essexes?) are only too ready to use it upon each other. The disorder in the world of Henry VI is not so much a rupture, a break in the chain of ordered being; it is a disease, an infection endemic in the all-too-pure, all-too-ceremonial lily that makes the noble flower smell far worse than weeds.

Shakespeare's ultimate plot is larger, more encompassing, dictated by the new analogy (God-dramatist) he has discovered and by the old analogy (Christendom-kingdom) he has rediscovered beneath the rhetoric of nationalism. His immediate responsibility is to his nation; he does speak English, he is not God. But that responsibility is to teach his nation a new style: of grace, of easy self-confidence, of implicit courtesy and generosity, of function rather than ceremony. United by and in this style, England would deserve to “win over” other nations and to play a leading part in the divine master-plot. After the “Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke,” there is promise of a still greater union, no longer “noble and illustre” but for that very reason likely to prove finer and truer, more lasting and closer to men's real needs:

Nor other satisfaction do I crave,
But only, with your patience, that we may
Taste of your wine and see what cates you have.

But that final feast is still far off—many wars off. The action is still in progress; the design can only be guessed at. Meanwhile—a brief interlude of ease and grace in a spectacle of bloody stridency—the merest taste of it must suffice to keep up the soldier's energy and spirit: “For soldiers' stomachs always serve them well.”

Notes

1. Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), p. 163.

2. It is difficult to say anything about 1 Henry VI without raising the still vexed question of authorship. I would like to stay clear of it, so I will state my position as a working assumption, in the hope that what follows will bear me out. I shall assume that 1 Henry VI was written or thoroughly reworked—possibly both—by Shakespeare himself.

   For the most complete recent statement of the “integralist” case, literary as well as textual, see Andrew S. Cairncross' introduction to the Arden edition of 1 Henry VI (London, 1962), which refers abundantly to other criticism. For the opposite view, see John Dover Wilson's introduction to the Cambridge edition (1952).

3. First Part of King Henry VI, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Eng., 1952); all quotations from the play are from this edition.

4. Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), II.v.31-34.

5. Thomas Nashe, Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 64-65.