[In the following essay, Caldwell analyzes Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry V in the context of French and English historians' and artists' representations of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).]

The sequence of invasions and expulsions known since the nineteenth century as the Hundred Years' War may be read in such divergent historical narratives today as to question whether those narratives refer to the same events. Their differences depend largely on the historian's nationality or national alliance, beliefs about the legitimacy or necessity of that war or of war in general, and historical circumstances. Popular representations of that war in art and literature are no less divergent, and at this remove from the events, it is clear that the popular and professional representations have become dependent on one another in complex ways. Further, whether their provenance is from the historical or popular arena, representations of the Hundred Years' War have become intertwined with constructions of nationalism both by the English and the French. To underline the extent of nationalistic influence on those representations and the commentaries they prompt, I should like first to consider some refigurations of that war across the centuries. Each is based on a textual account or inscribes the Hundred Years' War in accordance with written tradition. I shall then turn to the literary inscriptions of the Hundred Years' War in Henry VI, Part 2, at the moment of emergent English nationalism. Since that time, the temptation has persisted to use this war to write “analogue history” of one's own time. Once some of the nationalistic trappings of these representations have been discussed, it may be possible to acknowledge some of the broader social costs such foreign wars exacted. Focusing first on some French versions may move us away from the language of the invaders; focusing on Shakespeare's early plays may help us see the English view from below.

FRENCH REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WAR

Around 1373, Louis I, duc d'Anjou, commissioned a series of tapestries depicting the vision of John as described in the book of Revelation. Completed in about seven years, these immense Apocalypse tapestries are exhibited today in a modern gallery designed for their display in the château fortified by St. Louis at Angers. They comprise one among several tapisseries historiées [narrative tapestries] on different subjects, commissioned first by the young duc d'Anjou and then by his brother, Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne.¹ The designs for these tapestries were created by Charles V's painter, Hennequin de Bruges, who used as his inspiration thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse; according to a note appended to the inventory of his library, Charles V “a baillée a mons. D'Anjou pour faire son beau tapis” [gave to Monsieur D'Anjou, for the making of his fine tapestry] a manuscript of the “Apocalipse en françois toute figurée et ystoriée” [Apocalypse in French, fully embellished and illuminated].² Two panels clearly reminiscent of those illuminations are of interest here. Panel 24 (21), that of the sauterelles [locusts], represents the fifth blast of the trumpet, or the appearance of fantastic grasshoppers that arise from the abyss to torment men for their sins. The passage from Revelation compares the sauterelles to horses ready for combat, and the designer of the tapestry has drawn them as such: they have the faces of men, heads crowned; the hair of women; cuirasses of iron; bodies of horses; tails like scorpions. Their king, the Angel of the Abyss, in Hebrew Abaddon, in Greek Apollyon, the Exterminator, is mounted on one of them. Behind him, emerging from the earth, are five more of the composite animals. Their crowned human heads and upper equine bodies alone are visible. In the tapestry the bearded Abaddon has the wings of a bat, as in the miniature tradition, and is therefore, in the iconography of the Middle Ages, satanic. Panel 26 (23) represents the sixth blast of the trumpet, in which the thousands of horsemen unleashed from hell punish a third of humanity for its sins and its idolatry. On the tapestry the horsemen appear as six armed soldiers riding horses equipped with the tails of serpents and the heads of leopards that issue smoke and sulfur from their mouths. With their lances these soldiers do violence to unarmed men.³ There is a tradition, currently relayed to those visiting the tapestries at Angers, that in panel 24, the figure of the demonic Exterminator is intended to represent Edward III, followed by his five sons. In panel 26, the primary horseman is meant to represent the Black Prince in battle. I would further add that on other panels of the tapestry, the seven-headed beast is represented much as a seven-headed lion rampant, the heraldic symbol under which, quartered with the fleur de lys, Edward III claimed France.⁴

Why the young Valois prince would have commissioned an enormous series of tapestries of the Apocalypse remains unclear. From the insertion of his arms and secret symbols, however, one can assume he was in general responsible for the subject. What is often vaguely noted is Louis d'Anjou's acknowledgment of the catastrophic experiences of the French during the fourteenth century, including the war with the English and the visitations of the black plague.⁵ Is it possible to be more specific? Louis I, duc d'Anjou (born July 23, 1339), second son of Jean II (called le Bon), was present at the battle of Poitiers, but was sent from the field or, as some chroniclers believe, fled before his father and his younger brother Philippe were captured by the soldiers of the Black Prince. The consequences of this defeat for the French must have seemed apocalyptic; it was followed by a popular uprising, as well as direct threats to the dauphin Charles by a Parisian mob. One of the conditions of King Jean's 1361 release from captivity in London was his replacement by royal hostages; Louis d'Anjou was foremost among them. In 1362 these hostages were removed to Calais after they concluded a second treaty with Edward III. In 1363, at a shaky moment in the negotiations, when the dauphin and the Estates refused to ratify this second treaty, the hostages were detained. Louis had had enough. He escaped from captivity to join his wife, Marie de Blois (daughter of the duc de Bretagne), whom he had not seen in thirty months. Although his elder brother Charles, the dauphin, tried to convince him to return as a hostage, Louis refused. Edward III wrote castigating him with these words: “vous avez moult blémi l'honneur de votre lignage” [you have gravely offended the honor of your ancestors].⁶ Jean le Bon, mortified by his son's lapse of chivalry, and perhaps also not too unhappy to revisit his cousin Edward III, returned to London to stand hostage for Louis. Jean le Bon died there in captivity in 1364, a disastrous turn of events, for the ransom still had to be paid.⁷

In 1373, when Louis d'Anjou commissioned these tapestries, he was thirty-five years old, powerful and ambitious. By the time they were completed, he and his brothers had effected the reconquest of most of the disputed territories and had outlived both Edward III and his deadly son the Black Prince. Of all the sons of Jean le Bon, Louis d'Anjou was most instrumental in the French recovery of strongholds held by the English, especially in the south of France, where he was lieutenant and governor of Languedoc, but also in Normandy and Bretagne. While Charles V reformed currency, the army, his internal administration, and dictated policy and strategy, his brothers Louis, Jean, and Philippe, most ably assisted by the constable Bertrand du Guesclin, methodically recaptured citadel after citadel. Thus, when Louis d'Anjou came to commission these tapestries, he had experienced firsthand and to his great personal distress the turbulence and military humiliation of the Hundred Years' War, captivity in enemy territory, and eventually victory. Would Louis d'Anjou have so honored, commemorated, or condemned the English king and his sons by having them woven into his costly tapestry? Later his brother Philippe would commission an Apocalypse tapestry as well as one on the Battle of Roosebeke (which took place November 27, 1382, and at which he defeated the bourgeois rebels of Ghent).⁸

Historical subjects and the exploits of the commissioners were not unknown in the representations on these tapestries. If the horsemen do represent Edward III and his sons, then those men Jean le Bon considered his princely cousins are here revealed as figures made bestial by their dynastic symbology of the lion or leopard, and their war is rendered monstrous, a virulent plague sent by the heavens to punish mankind. These assumptions are consistent with those of many contemporary writers, who viewed the war with England, particularly the captivity of Jean le Bon, as the scourge of God, punishment for the sins of the French people. In particular, Françoise Autrand notes the Benedictine monk François de Montebelluna, who claimed the captivity was divine punishment and who compared Edward III to “le prince des sauterelles paré de fleurs étrangères” [the prince of locusts adorned with foreign flowers].⁹ This exegetical tradition seems the most likely origin for any legends about Edward III and his sons as blasts of the trumpet. The biblical authority implied in the awe, the impending doom, and the occultic sentence of Revelation may thus be the final word on what this war meant for the French, and no amount of admiration for the prowess of a feudal enemy could efface the indictment of the tapestries: the war was demonic punishment delivered by the English in their many invasions and pillagings of France in the fourteenth century. And this was before the more sustained encroachments of the fifteenth century had been conceived. Further, the tapestries suggest that despite their extrahuman powers, the forces of the English, like those of Abaddon and his crew, will eventually be defeated.

The second phase of the war ended in 1453; by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, chroniclers building on the earlier coverage of Froissart and the monastic compilations had transformed these accounts through their own views of the war's aftermath. By the 1590s, during Elizabethan investment in an emergent nationalism, Shakespeare would turn their narratives into his own elaborately staged versions of this second phase: the invasion by Henry V, the extermination of Joan la Pucelle, and the “loss” of Normandy, as I shall discuss below.

It is not until the nineteenth-century crystallization of French and English national identities that the revival of medievalism and “historical realism” sparked further memorable representations of the events of the war. During 1829-1830, before his Moroccan journey and in the months preceding his La Liberté guidante le peuple, Delacroix completed a commission from the duchesse de Berry to paint La Bataille de Poitiers, a work she neglected to accept.¹⁰ The English remember the battle as that in which the Black Prince captured Jean le Bon and his fourteen-year-old son Philippe on September 19, 1356.¹¹ In Delacroix's painting, the son shields his father, whose horse has fallen, as fighting men surround them; red pennons, presumably those of the English army, fly above the central figures as soldiers in variously emblazoned arms engage in combat in the foreground. Although it is perhaps possible that the event chosen for the canvas is intentionally ironic—the foolhardy king exposes his person in battle—the primary reminder seems to be that the French were steadfast, not that the English pummeled the French army, with lingering consequences for the populace. Michel Mollat du Jourdin notes that the defense of Jean and Philippe, based on the accounts of those who saw it, became legendary: “Nous devons au Florentin Matteo Villani [d. 1363] le récit du difficile combat soutenu dans un pays coupé de haies contre un ennemi embusqué dans les chemins creux, et celui, devenu légendaire, de la défense personnelle de Jean le bon, assisté de son fils Philippe, le future duc de Bourgogne: ‘Père. Gardez-vous à droite … à gauche’.”¹² [We owe to the Florentine Matteo Villani (d. 1363) the story of the difficult battle, fought in a countryside riddled with hedges, against an enemy hiding in ditches. We owe to him as well the story, now legendary, of the personal defense of Jean le Bon, assisted by his son Philippe, the future duke of Burgundy, “Father—look to your right … to your left.”] Delacroix's painting clearly recalls Villani's account or a later elaboration of it, with emphasis on bravery in the face of terrible odds, the pathos of the defense, and filial piety. This painting does not figure large in Delacroix's reputation, but along with his more celebrated Bataille de Nancy, it follows the tradition of battle painting revived by Napoleon. Although Delacroix's revolutionary impulses might seem at odds with the subject of royal bravery, the painting is in keeping with the militarism of the early nineteenth century, and its prominence in the Louvre assures its continued place in an expression of French nationalism rendered thus: soldiers should sacrifice themselves in the defense of the fatherland, even in the face of certain defeat.

There is a similar response to this first phase of the war in Rodin's extraordinary statuary group, Les Bourgeois de Calais. In 1884 the city of Calais decided to honor its medieval hero Eustache de Saint-Pierre, and when in 1885 Rodin received the commission to construct the monument, he chose to represent all six burghers of Calais as they prepare to surrender the keys of the city to Edward III. After a devastating eleven-month siege ending in 1347, Edward was convinced by Walter Manny to spare the lives of the citizens, whom he then expelled, repeopling Calais with English colonists.¹³ In return for such clemency, Edward ordered Manny to bring before him the six richest burghers of Calais: “alez vous en arriere et leur dittes que pour l'amour de vous tous je les recheveray voulentiers tous comme prisonniers, sauf que j'en vueil avoir VI des plus gros de la ville, lesquelx venront par devant moy en pures et simples chemises, la hart au col, et m'aporteront les clefs de la ville, et feray d'eulx ma pure volent锹⁴ [go back and tell them that for love of all of you I will willingly release them to you as prisoners; but I want six of them, the most important in the city, to come before me, dressed only in shirts, their necks in halters, and to bring me the keys of the city, and I shall do with them exactly as I please]. Led by Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the burghers surrendered. The description by the chronicler Jean le Bel seems indeed the moment Rodin represents, and it is known that he followed Froissart's more literary elaboration of the event from the earlier chronicler. When the Calaisiens viewed Rodin's maquette, they objected, claiming the sculptor had chosen the moment of the burghers' most desperate and degrading submission. Rodin defended his vision by saying that “Far from humbling himself before the king of England, the burgher was ‘leaving the city to descend toward the camp. It is this that gives the group the feeling of march, of movement’.”¹⁵ By rendering intense suffering in the immense hands, bodies, and faces of the burghers, old or grown old from their trial, Rodin does convey that the effects of the siege were brutal and inhumane. Like Delacroix's painting, Rodin's correspondence indicates that he was “eager to declare a personal vision of French history, of patriotism and sacrifice.”¹⁶

At the beginning of World War I, this vision was carried across the Channel and made fully, if ironically, analogical. The National Art Collections Fund acquired a casting of Les Bourgeois to be implanted in the gardens of London's Parliament in honor of Edward's queen, Philippa of Hainault. According to Jean le Bel, the reasoning, tears, and pleas of his commanders had failed to move the hard-hearted king to pity the burghers; Edward commanded that they be decapitated immediately. Then Philippa, who was heavily pregnant, fell to her knees and begged him to spare the burghers:

“Ha! Gentil sire, depuis que j'ay passé la mer en grand peril ainsy que vous sçavez, je ne vous ay riens demandé, si vous prye et requier a jointes mains, que pour l'amour du filz de Nostre Dame, vous vueilliez avoir mercy d'eulx.” Le gentil roy arresta un poy de parler et regarda la royne devant luy, à genoulx, amerement plourant; si luy commença ung petit le cueur à amollier, et luy dist: “Dame, j'amasse mielx que vous fussez aultre part, vous me priez si tendrement que je ne le vous ose escondire; et combien que je le face envis, neantmains prenez les, je les vous donne.” Si prist les VI bourgoys par les chevestres et les livra à la royne, et quitta de mort tous ceulx de Calais pour l'amour d'elle, et la bonne dame fist revestir et aisier lesdis VI bourgoys.¹⁷

[“Ah! Noble lord, from the moment I crossed the sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked you for nothing. So I beg and beseech you with clasped hands, for the love of the Son of Our Lady, to have mercy on them.” The noble king ceased speaking an instant and looked at the queen before him, on her knees, weeping bitterly. His heart began to soften somewhat and he said to her: “Lady, I would prefer that you were somewhere else; however, you ask me so passionately that I dare not refuse you. And as much as I regret it, nevertheless, take them, I give them to you.” Thus he took the six burghers by the halters and delivered them to the queen, saving all the citizens of Calais from death, for love of her. And the good Lady had the six burghers reclothed and did them ease.]

Duplicating the statuary group in London borders on the ironic; the moment of representation is that in which the burghers surrender to Edward III rather than the reprieve granted at Philippa's request, which in any event did not prevent the Calaisiens from being driven from their city. In October of 1914, Rodin gave a large number of sculptures to England “as a gift honoring the unified effort of England and France to stop the German menace.” Les Bourgeois would also have been unveiled at this time, but the secretary of the fund postponed it for fear the reference to Calais's submission some five hundred years earlier would be untimely at the moment when “the German armies are making desperate attempts to reach Calais and again compel its surrender!”¹⁸ Even during this era, the events of the Hundred Years' War were intentionally made the point of reference for patriotic self-sacrifice and were perceived as such by contemporaries.

The similarity between these two nineteenth-century popular, supremely nationalistic representations, Delacroix's La Bataille de Poitiers and Rodin's Les Bourgeois de Calais, lies in their concentration on the victims of the war. Doomed defense or complete self-sacrifice for what will be a losing proposition, perhaps with the hope of eventual deliverance, are the nineteenth-century visions of France deriving from the Hundred Years' War.¹⁹ Differences between the painting and monument lie first in the choice of subject: the capture and imprisonment of the king must have been humiliating, but unlike the loss of Calais, it did not last two hundred years and did not represent so viscerally as the expulsion from Calais the suffering inflicted on noncombatants. Each work follows the written tradition to represent effectively moments particularly unhappy for the French during the Hundred Years' War. Neither, unlike most revisions created by the English, is designed to show those events from the point of view of the victor, either the Black Prince or Edward III.

But they are strangely in keeping with themes treated in the response of the written tradition of the fourteenth century recorded in the Apocalypse tapestries: the endurance and eventual defeat of the demonic invaders. If one can tentatively consider the Apocalypse tapestries as very early artistic and popular or even official representations of the war, then perhaps one should keep in mind what they mean for all representations of this war, contemporary and later. From the illuminated manuscripts of Froissart (himself sponsored by Philippa of Hainault, queen of Edward III) and other chroniclers; to propagandistic images produced during the fifteenth century, such as the Jesse trees of Henry VI in various manuscripts now in the British library, including one in which St. Louis presents Henry VI to the Virgin and Child;²⁰ to the window sponsored by “Foulques eyto[n]” in the church at Caudebec; to Shakespeare's Henry VI, Henry V, and perhaps Edward III;²¹ to Nicolas-Guy Brenet's La Mort de du Guesclin (1777) and J. E. Lenepveu's painting of Jeanne d'Arc, now in the Panthéon; to Rossellini's Jeanne d'Arc;²² despite the English invaders' efforts to contain resistance, they were very early on despised by those whom they invaded, even if at that moment one can speak only conditionally of a unified “France.”²³

Between England and France, and within both England and France, competing versions of the war continue to be constructed. Between the two nations, France presents victimization, self-sacrifice, and endurance against England's tale of glory in conquest. As late as 1989 Kenneth Branagh's film version of Shakespeare's Henry V managed to exalt the English monarch's invasion of France, while there is yet another film version of the war, this one in two parts, Jeanne la Pucelle: Les Batailles and Les Prisons, starring Sandrine Bonnaire and directed by Jacques Rivette.²⁴ By the starkness of their imagery and the absence of glorified battle scenes, these two films, unlike Branagh's Henry V, convey a sense of the tragedy of the war. Within England itself, differing versions of this war have long existed, but because of later nationalistic agendas, they are more difficult to delineate. I shall present first what one would normally expect to see here, Shakespeare's Henry V and its continued role in English nationalism, and then his much earlier and less well-known staging of the contraction from the Hundred Years' War in 1450-1453, Henry VI, Part 2.

SHAKESPEARE'S HENRY V AND ANALOGUE HISTORY

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Hundred Years' War in England's conception of itself as a nation. Edward III and his son the Black Prince are remembered as warrior king and prince. The colonization of Calais by Edward III is considered one of the most important military achievements of his reign. Similarly, the battles of Poitiers and Agincourt and Henry V's siege of Rouen are spoken of in terms of their superior English military strategy. With the subtitle of his book on the Hundred Years' War, The English in France, 1337-1453, at least one popular historian, Desmond Seward, acknowledges that the war was an invasion and describes the horrors of the English chevauchées. Although sympathetic to the French, even he cannot resist saying: “It is arguable that the Hundred Years' War was medieval England's greatest achievement.”²⁵

Repeatedly the life of Henry V, his invasion, and the battle of Agincourt are represented on the stage and screen, often from some version of Shakespeare's Henry V, written most likely in 1599 and entered in the Stationers' Register in 1600. Andrew Gurr's stage history in his recent Cambridge edition of the play notes the correlation between revivals of the play and national crises: it was restaged during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Boer War, World War I, the Battle of Britain, and D-Day.²⁶ Quite beyond what the king may have meant to Shakespeare in the very last years of Elizabeth's reign, he has continued to inspire analogue history; what that has meant to the English in the wars of this century is difficult to untangle. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield describe Shakespeare's disruptions to an ideology of national identity in Henry V; like Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, it reveals too much “the human cost.”²⁷ Chris Fitter, in a critique of Branagh's film version of Henry V, claims, “Shakespeare's play, however, satiric, ambiguating and interrogative, is clearly an exposé of imperialist rhetoric and a critique of the institution of monarchy. … Monarchical interests, Shakespeare repeatedly shows, are inimical to those of the common people, whose support must thus be ideologically reinforced through oratorical inductions of false consciousness.”²⁸

The most important production of Henry V during World War II is Laurence Olivier's film version (released November 22, 1944), which opens with the dedication “to the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain—‘the spirits of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture.’”²⁹ Olivier and those who supported him all appear to have recognized the nationalistic propaganda value of a film version of Henry V and to have received encouragement and support from the British government, particularly the Ministry of Information.³⁰ It is not possible to divorce Olivier's film production of Henry V from British war efforts or to ignore the propaganda at work on several levels in the film, from decisions about cuts in the text to decisions about particular shots or techniques.

Olivier excises from the play lines and scenes that render Henry V less than heroic; thus, there is no Cambridge conspiracy; no threatening of virgins, infants, and old people before the walls of Harfleur; no talk of putting to death the French soldiers captured at Agincourt.³¹ According to Harry M. Geduld, “Henry's scene with the conspirators was probably eliminated not only because, as James Phillips maintains, ‘it developed Elizabethan political ideas that are unfamiliar and even objectionable to modern audiences,’ but also because, in 1944, it would have been interpreted as an allusion to the existence of a well-organized fifth column.”³² Those “unfamiliar” and “objectionable” ideas include, on the one hand, the historical tradition of the nobility's open and secret liaisons with the French and, on the other, Henry's deceitfulness in exposing the conspiracy and his ruthlessness in executing his cousins.

Further cuts were made to accommodate the time Olivier chose to spend re-enacting the battle of Agincourt. Although Graham Holderness claims that inordinate attention has been paid to Olivier's Agincourt scene, it in fact merits even further analysis.³³ A significant piece of footage, the first to be shot, it is the most informative segment of the film.³⁴ As Olivier himself admitted and as many critics have noted since, this Agincourt imitates the celebrated “Battle on the Ice” in Eisenstein's Alexandr Nevskii (released November 23, 1938), a comparison worth pursuing.³⁵ The visual and emotional power of Olivier's Agincourt is attributable to the compositional intricacies of its model. In Eisenstein's film, the legendary Alexander Nevsky and his soldiers fight Teutonic Knights, armored as metallic automatons, for a clearly nationalistic cause: to defend the motherland from its invaders.³⁶ In his essay “My Subject is Patriotism,” Eisenstein explains that through this thirteenth-century subject the film was made to address the barbarism of contemporary German fascists, both in their treatment of the Jews and as they attacked the sanctity and integrity of Soviet nationalism.

This is the subject of our film. We have taken a historic episode from the thirteenth century, when the Teutonic and Livonian knights, the ancestors of the contemporary fascists, undertook a systematic advance eastward in order to subjugate the Slavonic and other peoples, in precisely the same spirit as contemporary fascist Germany is trying to do, with the same frenzied slogans and the same fanaticism. … This is why the picture, though it deals with a specific historic epoch, with specific historic events, seems like a modern picture, according to the testimony of those who have seen it. The feelings which inflamed the Russian people in the thirteenth century when they repelled the foe are quite close to those which the Soviet peoples feel at the present time. Undoubtedly the same feelings fire those upon whom the predatory paws of Hitlerite aggression have already been laid.³⁷

It is always possible that Eisenstein writes here as prompted; other Soviet films from 1938 and 1939 are even more explicitly anti-Nazi. By the middle of 1939, the Nazi-Soviet pact sent all these films, Nevskii included, into recall.³⁸

Eisenstein considered the Battle on the Ice one of his three most successful sequences (with the “Odessa steps” and the “meeting the squadron” in Potemkin), and speaks of it frequently in other essays, especially in reference to the compositional methods by which he attempted to achieve emotional effect. He claims that all elements of the sequence were structured to parallel the beating of a terrified heart.³⁹ He credits D. W. Griffith, whom he met, as the progenitor of such scenes as his own in the development of Soviet montage. The charge of the knights thus must owe something in its conception to the charge of the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation; however, while admiring his technique, Eisenstein found Griffith's politics “repellent.”⁴⁰

In creating his 1944 Henry V, Olivier is clearly influenced by the montage and tracking shots of the attack by the “German wedge” and the subsequent battle on Lake Chedskoe. Aware of the emotional power attainable through the imitation of Eisenstein's techniques, Olivier transfers the charge of the knights, the precarious condition of the ice, Alexander's tactical brilliance and his rousing speeches about fighting for one's land to the charge of the French, the unforeseen natural phenomenon of the fields near Agincourt, Henry's speeches, and the defensive position assumed by the English. He further combines from Eisenstein an overstated nationalism with the notion that those who trust to their war machine instead of the heroic spirits of their soldiers become vulnerable in battle. Rather, those who face terrible odds will, by relying on their personal sacrifice, skills, stoutheartedness, spirit of brotherhood, and inspired leadership, outface their better-equipped enemies. Olivier easily appropriates Eisenstein's montage and the building to a pitch of emotion through the horses' hooves; the anxiety of the soldiers as they face the oncoming army and the flight of arrows from the German crossbowmen inspired specific shots in the Agincourt scene. Olivier makes much of the English bowmen who slaughter French soldiers as they become mired in the recently ploughed and muddy fields near Agincourt. Riding a white horse, his Henry V, like Nevsky, never flags before the effete, completely superficial, grandiosely armored and thus overconfident French commanders and soldiers.

The ways in which Henry V became a tempting vehicle for British propaganda as the D-Day landings grew imminent are easy to list and have been thoroughly discussed by Holderness. However, it has not been made clear how the play, matched against Alexandr Nevskii, provides a particularly aggressive and complicated vision of nationalism. As Gurr notes, there is no battle scene in the play besides the encounter between Pistol and Le Fer.⁴¹ Olivier detaches a moment of defensive posturing from a campaign which is otherwise construable only as an invasion, and therefore presents the soldiers as prepared to be sacrificial, much like those of Jean le Bon, or even like the burghers of Calais. To focus on the Battle of Agincourt is to forget that Henry V and his men resemble not the allies, but the German aggressors. However, Olivier was able to turn an arrogant assumption about ownership—Henry's tenacious hold on a fragile dynastic claim of France—into a vehicle for nationalistic propaganda to serve the interests, as he himself notes, of the descendants of the original aggressors.

Olivier's film accomplished several things at once. First and most important, it portrayed the English as heroic and superior soldiers in the most adverse conditions against their traditional enemies. Long after Normandy had been lost to the French in 1450, England once again invades victoriously in this re-representation of the Hundred Years' War. Through careful staging and redirecting of Shakespeare's play, the film, like Eisenstein's Nevskii, does create “analogue history.” Further, it serves to comment on the role of the English and French in World War II. In this film the French lack leadership; disorganized and factious, they sit playing mindless children's games; weak and effeminate, they present a surface culture with little depth, a clever indictment of the Vichy government. Second, it is designed to present the allies, led by the British in their version of nationalism, as victorious over the fascist Germans. Working through the Russian nationalism against the Germans in Alexandr Nevskii, Olivier's Henry V also strikes at the Germans' position in Normandy and their reliance on advanced weaponry and steel-reinforced concrete garrisons. The film suggests that an English invasion will be successful, despite the seemingly superior defenses of the Germans. Olivier's Henry V may be seen as attacking at once both the French and the Germans: the weakness of the French in succumbing to the occupying army, and the weakness of the occupying army despite its much vaunted military superiority. Olivier's film captures nationalistic feeling by staging a counter-invasion, not against the Germans, but against the French as they have been Germanized, or as they have been reduced by the Germans, or perhaps merely allowed themselves to be reduced, as “we” always suspected they might.

Raymond Durgant accepts the film's “rousing jingoism” but finds the topical references confusing. He remarks that in the wooing scene, “whether France here = France our ally, to whom Churchill had in 1940 impulsively proposed ‘marriage,’ or Germany our enemy whom we mustn't hate forever, is quite ambiguous.”⁴² The references are layered rather than ambiguous. The French are the French of the playworld, England's traditional enemy and Other. The French are further, via the representation of their effeminacy, also traditional, the French in submission to the Germans, that is, the Vichy government. The French are also the Germans outright, via the stated intentions of the filmmakers and backers, and implicitly, via unmistakable allusions to Alexandr Nevskii. The set speeches, “Once more unto the breach” and “We happy few,” are those both of an invader and a defender. Harfleur is successfully besieged while Henry's position at Agincourt is defensive, yet both are played to comment on the war with Germany.

Following the lead of Olivier's filming of Henry V, critical assertions about Shakespeare's history plays have been consciously and unconsciously shaped to a large degree by the events of World War II and the reactions and attitudes of scholars who lived through or fought in that war. It would seem that as the West has grown aware of the origins and dangers of nationalism through that war itself, the analogical reconstructions in those plays would become transparent. The pull of the “national hero,” however, is still quite strong, as the confused agenda of Branagh's Henry V reveals.⁴³

Like their earlier counterparts, many contemporary critics read Henry V through their own experience of war; for a younger generation of American critics in the late twentieth century, this is the Vietnam war, which, beyond addressing the question of war itself also interrogated the authority of political and military leaders, the value of nationalism, and the necessity of playing world police. Despite this new antiwar interpretation, many English and American representations of the Hundred Years' War, especially those deriving from Shakespeare's English histories, are nonetheless still markedly influenced by historical narratives of England's heroism, deriving at least from the nineteenth-century response to the Napoleonic wars and further hardened by attitudes toward the French and Germans in World War II. Reading Shakespeare against the grain of uncritical nationalism thus continues to be controversial. Since the recent fiftieth anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy, that reading is very delicate and to some even blasphemous to maintain.

HENRY VI, PART 2 AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE WAR

Historians who in some way treat the Hundred Years' War do not look with the same intensity at all of its long series of events. If Henry's invasion of Normandy and his claiming of it for his son are difficult to discuss outside nationalistic attitudes, it is far more difficult to address the end of the Hundred Years' War without becoming immured in chauvinistic rhetoric. What French historians call the “recovery of Normandy” is to the English the “loss of France,” a phrase which appears to capture genuine contemporary responses to the events, but which may also treat them with all the feeling of a much later era of nationalism built against the French. Of the full-scale English histories or more detailed articles on various segments of the Hundred Years' War, I have read few which do not to some degree regret, for complex reasons, that the English “lost” Normandy. The Hundred Years' War does seem to be on the consciences of some historians, such as Griffiths and Postan. But others, particularly McFarlane and his followers, assert that the war was morally justifiable and on the whole beneficial to the populace of England.⁴⁴ Most English historians, whatever they may think of the series of events during the English occupation, are of one mind about the end of the war: it was a mistake that could have been prevented.

By contrast, earlier and modern French historians, as do French writers and artists of various types and from various periods, as I have suggested above, inscribe the war in narratives differing greatly from those produced by the English. French historians emphasize the social and economic effects of invasion and of warfare. For the most part they consider the English attempt to bastardize the dauphin and the reversion of the French succession to Henry V as humiliations, viewing the latter's exploits in terms of the damage they inflicted on soldiers and civilians, and stressing his cruelty and ruthlessness. In historical surveys, the Hundred Years' War does not always claim the large place it does in English histories. Agincourt often receives only a brief account, and sometimes French histories do not separate the events from 1415 to 1453, seeing the first date as the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years' War.⁴⁵ One history which treats the entire period at length considers it “une occupation.”⁴⁶ The experience of World War II exerts great pressure on these historians as well, as they readily admit.

Competing narratives of the war and its effects were also accessible within late Elizabethan England; they, too, are narratives of resistance. The events portrayed in Shakespeare's Henry V can be played in opposing ways; the drama has the potential for military heroics and chauvinistic razzing of a traditional enemy, as well as for a dark and skeptical, even cynical reading of those very attitudes. It includes the visions of people from various orders of society. And it ends with a stark reminder that although this play is about the exploits of the warrior king everyone loves to admire, the playwright knows quite well what followed those military conquests: lingering foreign war and military defeat leading to internal strife and civil war. In a backward glance to the beginnings of his own career in the theater, Shakespeare ends Henry V with this sonnet epilogue:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen
Our bending author hath pursu'd the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small, most greatly lived
This star of England. Fortune made his sword
By which the world's best garden he achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king
Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed,
Which oft our stage hath shown—and for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take

(V.iii.1-14; emphasis added).

If this end of the war were so shameful as historians suggest, one wonders why Shakespeare began his career with a trio of plays about the king who “lost” the Hundred Years' War, and this closely following 1588, when the English more or less “defeated” the Armada.

At a moment when feeling over home territory and anxiety over the threat of invasion were running high and before he chose to represent Henry V or the landing at Harfleur, Shakespeare staged the death of heroism, the reputedly ignominious loss of Normandy, the popular rebellion of Jack Cade, and the Yorkist uprising known as the War of the Roses. Few critics have managed, to any remarkable degree, to establish why.⁴⁷ The answer may lie in part in the convergence of the influence of the chronicle sources with the necessity for England's state of wartime readiness in the late 1580s and early 1590s. Elizabeth and her subjects seemed propelled into war, after years of “relative” peace, by the Queen of Scots, by Philip II, by Liguers, by the Low Countries, and by her militant Protestants. Although critics often cite the aging queen's succession crisis as giving rise to domestic anxieties at the same moment as the war, the gravest succession question between 1589 and 1593 was not who would succeed the Virgin Queen or even who would sit in the Privy Council, but who would sit on the throne of France. The consequences of that decision were fearfully projected to the English. I posit here that the “matter of France,” the uncertainty of the French succession, and the complex of attitudes it fostered about war with England's traditional enemy, are the salient influences on Shakespeare's early plays.

In Act IV of Henry VI, Part 2, the rebel captain, Jack Cade, accuses the Lord Treasurer of a number of crimes and pronounces decisive judgment upon him: “[he] can speak French; and therefore he is a traitor” (IV.ii.155-60). This line, spoken by a character from the lower orders of society, is usually read as comic, if not ludicrous, and to some, as a measure of Shakespeare's antipopulism. Cade's anti-French attitude, in a playworld rent by factious leaders and terrorized by his popular uprising, might be read not so much as Shakespeare's demonizing of the lower classes as a negotiated representation of la guerre de Cent ans on the English home front. In some current historical reconstructions of the war's end, English military aggression in France is thought to have been internalized; I would add that then as later, France-bashing or the desire to conquer France and anxieties about losing it helped disguise domestic economic depression and anxieties about the succession questions both at home and in France. Through the chronicle sources of Hall, Holinshed, Stow, Grafton, and others, dramatists of the 1590s could read of an earlier period of external military failure and internal domestic distress punctuated by anti-Gallic sentiment. It played well. It was not, however, a matter of simple xenophobia or deflection to a scapegoat of frustrations about losing foreign wars.

In recent years, Leah Marcus, Phyllis Rackin, and Richard Helgerson have attempted to describe the complicity of Elizabethan drama in the development of English nationalism. To extend that effort, I should like to offer two premises, concluded in part from Charles Tilly's theoretical explanation of the role of war in the making of the state:⁴⁸ (1) Foreign war promotes nationalism in the form of chauvinism and of state centralization. (2) Internal responses to the economic pressures of war affect the ways in which nationalism proceeds; if the wars are lingering or unsuccessful, the pressures become acute and violence can turn inward. Those internal responses and effects are dispersed throughout the populace to surface in its writings, including the chronicle plays of the 1590s. In Henry VI, Part 2, which recounts the English response to the French recovery of Normandy, the venom, hurled not so much against France as on the Francophile activities of those who lost it, draws on accounts of the earlier period of popular anti-Gallic sentiment, the middle of the 1400s, to mediate a crisis in late Elizabethan England; the tension between national and dynastic identity filtered through continued warfare, particularly with Liguers-controlled France.

Even as Elizabeth's courtiers pursued a militant protestancy abroad, their wars in France, the costs of which cut deeply across the populace, were largely unfocused and unsuccessful.⁴⁹ The attitude toward France represented in Henry VI, Part 2, especially through the popular uprising led by Jack Cade, is as much a complex register of popular feeling about that war as it is of early modern nationalism: waging war and creating the state are inseparable, both historically and on the stage. Further, the complication of Elizabeth's tentative backing of Henri de Navarre invites us to explore the contradiction between traditional France-bashing and the undeniable admiration the English felt for Navarre as he battled his way to his throne. As Dickens and Bell have demonstrated, from 1589 the number of newsletters pouring into England on the wars of Henri de Navarre kept the reading public aware of his progress as he struggled to gain Paris. Those published only in France are copious, but many were translated and the number of those extant indicates the extent of their popularity.⁵⁰ English hostility toward Liguers and their activities from 1588 to 1594 is complicated by English admiration for Henri IV, who appeared as a heroic Protestant prince who might or might not succeed in gaining the throne he claimed by Salic law, as opposed to the candidate “Charles X,” or those put forward by Philip II, including the Infanta. This complexity informs Shakespeare's presentation of the French. The chronicle accounts of losing France in the 1440s and 1450s may have read to Shakespeare and other Elizabethans as a curiously familiar tale of the high price an ambivalent public pays for nationalistic or political war efforts sponsored by dynastic claimants. In the earlier period, while the public expressed a desire to retain the “French patrimony,” they balked at its cost in lives and other resources. In the latter period, while the public responded positively to the idea of supporting Henri IV and of defining itself against Catholic Liguers, it reacted negatively to the internal pressures created by the tremendous if inadequate costs of that war, which first legitimated taxation, and, although it was lingering and indeterminate, continued to demand taxation. These costs are both named and disguised by anti-Gallic sentiment and anger over the “loss of France.”

Leah Marcus has examined Henry VI, Part 1 and its collapsing of Joan la Pucelle, the French woman warrior who consorts with demons, into Elizabeth and her lack of decisiveness in Protestant efforts abroad. “Want of men and money” led to frustration with the war effort: “When English audiences watched 1 Henry VI, what they saw was a bustling, bloody palimpsest of past and present militarism.”⁵¹ While Marcus focuses on the relationship between war and its effects at home as it is manifested in Part 1's implied criticism of Elizabeth for disgracing England by withholding funds adequate to win the war, I would like to emphasize that Part 2 considers the effects of that even inadequate resource extraction from those who cannot bear the costs and the resulting internal violence—hardships that are difficult to analyze because of the concurrence of dynastic and incipient nationalistic agendas. According to Charles Tilly, who describes state making as “organized crime,” the criticism often acts as a screen; it is in the interests of the crown and its agents to be able to “protect” their subject populations, and lingering or unsuccessful wars allude to the possibility that they cannot uphold their obligations of protection, and cannot therefore justify resource extraction.⁵² Moreover, it is difficult to compute the costs to those people in various lower orders of society, although their contributions to the war efforts in both periods are substantial.⁵³ Complaints about the various hardships caused by the war are imbedded in many forms of chauvinism, both historically and in these plays.

In the Henry VI trilogy, things fall apart: the loss of France is followed by rebellion and confusion, the loss of a strong moral center, and finally, civil war, all woven into the long and tortured reign of Henry VI. That reign spanned nearly forty years, carving, from Henry's majority, the middle out of the fifteenth century. Between 1445 and 1455 occurred several of the more important events of that reign: Henry's marriage to Margaret of Anjou; the development of Henry's court faction and within it, the rise to power and the murder of the Duke of Suffolk; the contraction from Normandy; the Cade rebellion; the contraction from Gascony and the end of the Hundred Years' War; the Yorkist rebellion and the first battle of Saint Albans between the Yorkists and Lancastrians. The liminal site between those two traumatic events—the Hundred Years' War and the War of the Roses—is characterized by instability, and the transition between them is effected by widespread rebellion, particularly Cade's rebellion of 1450. Two developments have an impact on the events of 1450: Henry's personal rule and the military contraction from France, both of them underscored by economic deterioration. The rise of Henry's faction after his majority resulted in a household affinity extending from court to county, which alienated the traditional aristocracy and the small-holders of the southern and eastern counties through the perversion of justice and corruption of offices.

In the popular and chroniclers' imaginations, however, “the loss of Normandy” began in 1445, with the marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou (great granddaughter of that Louis I who commissioned the tapestries at Angers), and popular anti-Gallic sentiment is reflected in chronicle statements about her:

This mariage semed to many, bothe infortunate, and vnprofitable to the realme of England, and that for many causes. First the kyng with her had not one peny, and for the fetchyng of her, the Marques of Suffolke, demaunded a whole fiftene, in open parliament: also for her mariage, the Duchie of Aniow, the citee of Mauns, and the whole cou[n]tie of Mayne, were deliuered and released to Kyng Reyner her father, whiche countreis were the very stayes, and backestandes to the Duchy of Normandy. Furthermore for this mariage, the Erle of Arminacke, toke suche great displeasure, that he became vtter enemy to the realme of Englande and was the chief cause, that the Englishmen, wer expulsed out of the whole duchie of Aquitayne, and lost bothe the countreis of Gascoyn and Gyen. But moste of all it should seme, that God with this matrimony was not content. For after this spousage the kynges frendes fell from hym, bothe in Englande and in Fraunce, the Lordes of his realme, fell in diuision emongest themselfes, the commons rebelled against their souereigne Lorde, and naturall Prince, feldes wer foughten, many thousandes slain, and finally, the kyng deposed, and his sonne slain, and this Quene sent home again, with as-muche misery and sorowe, as she was receiued with pompe and triumphe, such is worldly vnstablenes, and so wauerying is false flattering fortune.⁵⁴

Not only is Margaret of Anjou blamed for the loss of Normandy, she also lost Aquitaine and, with this explusion of the English from France, she is responsible for the War of the Roses. The French queen caused these wars.

Drawing from several such chronicle sources, Henry VI, Part 2 dramatizes the third phase of Lancastrian France, 1444-1453. It opens with the arrival in England of the French princess and the cession of Maine and Anjou to her father. The war party, headed by Gloucester, registers shock at the yielding of “the keys of Normandy” (I.i.113), and blames Suffolk, leading the peace party, for that loss.⁵⁵

What! did my brother Henry spend his youth,
His valour, coin, and people, in the wars?
Did he so often lodge in open field,
In winter's cold, and summer's parching heat,
To conquer France, his true inheritance?

(1.i.77-81)

Invoking the name of the conqueror is of no avail; Henry VI does not resemble his warrior father, and the incredible costs—the expense of aristocratic blood, subject blood, and physical resources—will have been for naught. Yet the words could apply to an Henri IV still in the process of gaining his throne, which may account for the Cardinal's curious response: “For France, 'tis ours; and we will keep it still” (I.i.105).

Although each character speaks of it in terms of his own physical expenditure in getting and keeping France, York explores the value of France as equivalent to one's landed title. His first reactions parallel Gloucester's, but then become far more personal and physically acute:

Methinks the realms of England, France, and Ireland
Bear that proportion to my flesh and blood
As did the fatal brand Althaea burnt
Unto the prince's heart of Calydon.
Anjou and Maine both given unto the French!
Cold news for me, for I had hope of France,
Even as I have of fertile England's soil.

(I.i.233-39)

Again, these lines suggests the human costs of such a patrimony. By I.iii, the court, to remove Gloucester from power, will accuse him of various crimes, including gouging the public and losing French territory. In Act III, news will arrive that all France is lost, as York, though in conspiracy, formally charges that Gloucester “took bribes of France” and “stay'd the soldiers' pay” (III.i.104-5). Two-hundred lines later in the scene, York accuses Somerset, who returns the volley, of losing France. And as soon as it is lost, Gloucester is removed as well, followed soon by the Cardinal. Thus all factions tying the court to Henry V and his conquest are removed and the forces of internal chaos are unleashed.

After Gloucester's death, however, the Duke of Suffolk and Margaret, as in many contemporary Yorkist-biased chronicles and witnesses, bear most of the responsibility for the loss of Normandy. Early in Act IV, a pirate tribunal charges that Suffolk “sold” Anjou and Maine to France (IV.i.85); that is, he has, like Elizabeth, alienated crown lands and brought home disabled soldiers. The accusation is telling:

By devilish policy art thou grown great,
And, like ambitious Sylla, overgorg'd
With gobbets of thy mother's bleeding heart.
By thee Anjou and Maine were sold to France,
The false revolting Normans thorough thee
Disdain to call us lord, and Picardy
Hath slain their governors, surpris'd our forts,
And sent the ragged soldiers wounded home.

(IV.i.86-89)

Suffolk is demonized for his cannabalizing pro-French activities, as crucial a part of the literary representation of la guerre de Cent ans as external demonizing is of the construction of English nationalism. His activities abroad reveal that the state can no longer justify its extraction of resources for the “ragged soldiers,” who have been sent home unattended and unprepared, historically, for what little awaited them when they arrived. The analogue of Normandy 1450/1590 must have seemed almost as strong as that of Normandy in 1415/1944.

Aside from the costs of the unsuccessful wars inflicted and endured by the aristocracy, those costs suffered by the underclasses are far more acute. After Suffolk's execution in scene IV.i, the remainder of the act is devoted to Cade's rebellion, which further develops the complicity of state-making and war through anger over the loss of France; the transition from foreign war to civil war is effected by that uprising. Significantly, Cade's concerns are with both arenas. Against Lord Say (whose head the butcher will have for “selling the dukedom of Maine” [IV.ii.153-54]), Cade alleges the castration of the body politic; that loss is clearly France, paid for physically by the populace. Later, during the mock tribunal, Cade charges that Lord Say is he “which sold the towns in France” (IV.vii.18); the formal accusation uses Francophobic language: “What canst thou answer to my Majesty for giving up of Normandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the Dauphin of France?” (IV.vii.25). Cade also orders the execution of (Sheriff) William Crowmer (Say's son-in-law), and then has their two heads paraded on poles, to kiss at every corner and then to part “lest they consult about the giving up of some more towns in France” (IV.vii.126-27). These actions, almost straight from the chronicle sources, visually reinforce Cade's complaint of the loss of France and the human costs of these unsuccessful foreign wars.

Those responsible for the aftermath of the war, socially mobile members of the king's faction, are conveniently executed outside the king's tribunal. Yet, the concessions to the subject population do not end here; in the ensuing years the king's concessions will include, eventually, his own title. The struggle among various sectors of the population will also continue; Cade's rebels must be accused of using illegitimate forms of violence and must, in turn, be executed by the king's faction, that the select portion of the subject population may be protected from them. Apart from anger over the loss of France, Shakespeare's Cade's most insistent grievance is economic hardship, and his “program” includes radical reforms for access to property and power, the lowering of prices, with something like a subsistence economy assured for all. Thus between the two complaints, Cade glances at the economic effects of protracted and unsuccessful war; Shakespeare writes his own analogue history, applying the internal effects of the end of the French war to the effects of war in France in the early 1590s.⁵⁶

In its representation of Cade's rebellion, the play manages to expose those who bore responsibility for the extraordinary costs of waging a losing war on the territory of an historical rival: the agents of the state. In representing the end of the Hundred Years' War as turning in on England, the play allows Cade, an artisan suborned by the Duke of York, brutally to punish those whose most notorious crime is having “lost France” and extorted funds from the populace to exacerbate economic conditions. After the nobler characters accuse each other, Cade steps in to accuse his superiors as a class, using their own rhetoric. The common soldier has not lost the war. Cade's intended social reform glances at the institutions and agents of the “state,” and in his judgment on the war having ended with the “loss of France,” Cade reveals the economic costs of Elizabethan “war making and state making.”⁵⁷ He also embodies the costs in human life by initiating the first battles on the stage. In this excessively violent play, strewn with bodies and heads, the only battles occur at home, with Cade's uprising followed by York's. At the end of the play, Old Clifford dies fighting for Henry not against the French, but against York. Clifford's last words comment about the honor that is to be assessed through one's final actions, but the sentiment extends to the end of the French war and their lingering effects; he dies speaking axiomatic French: “la fin couronne les oeuvres.”

French and English narratives of the events of the Hundred Years' War, as the Apocalypse tapestries suggest, have always been in conflict. Further, the narratives produced on either side of the Channel have had conflicting claims within their own cultures. Examining these representations of the Hundred Years' War may lead us to a greater understanding of the varied constructions of nationalism: they justify the sacrifice of subjects, resources, and victims through selective memories and rhetoric. Now, perhaps, it is easier than during World War II, when dangers were severe and during which the rhetoric of “allied” nationalism seemed a mere statement of truth, to see the nature of these constructions as they have been made the vehicles for upholding the sanctity of the nation and those who proclaim themselves its authorities.⁵⁸ By contrast, earlier narratives, particularly Shakespeare's history plays, with their concerns about the increasingly negative effects of war on the invaders' home front made manifest through anti-Gallic sentiment, reveal his criticism of the role of continual warfare in the making of what was increasingly called the “state.”⁵⁹ In twentieth-century assessments and revisions of those plays, the focus has been on Henry V and its potential as the very stay and prop of nationalism, or its continued use by the British government to justify sacrifices and resources from the public.⁶⁰ It is thus perhaps in some measure corrective to remember that Shakespeare's first vision of the Hundred Years' War is far more cynical. Henry VI, Part 2 questions the practice of using foreign war to promote the interests of the state: the war's end exposed its costs and its futility.

Notes

1. The tapestries are divided into six sections (each more than 23 meters by 5 meters) of fourteen panels each. Details about the tapestries may be found in several sources; see La tenture de l'Apocalypse d'Angers (Nantes: l'Inventaire Général des Monuments et des Richesses Artistiques en Région des Pays de la Loire, 1993), especially 11-13, 35, 43, 84.

2. This frequently cited statement appears, for example, in Fabienne Joubert, “L'Apocalypse d'Angers et les débuts de la tapisserie historiée,” Bulletin Monumental 139 (1981): 125. This Apocalypse manuscript is MS. Fr. 403 in the Bibliothèque nationale. A comparison of the tapestry with various manuscripts reveals the extent of this iconographical tradition. See René Planchenault, L'Apocalypse d'Angers (Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1966), 26-27. A striking comparison may be made with the photographs of leaves from the Burckhardt-Wildt album (York, c. 1270-1280), in Catalogue of Single Leaves and Miniatures from Western Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Sotheby's, 1983), 34-121.

3. Francis Muel, “Notices,” in La tenture, 116, 149.

4. There is always the possibility that such interpretations are offered solely for the benefit of English tourists, just as those of Jeanne d'Arc are tendered at various monuments in Rouen.

5. Francis Salet, “Prologue,” in La tenture, 11.

6. For these and other details of Louis's captivity, see Edouard Perroy, La Guerre de Cent ans (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 117; and Jean Favier, La Guerre de Cent ans (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 285.

7. In fact, the history of the tapestries and of the payment of ransom is interwoven; in 1363, taxes were owed on certain tapestries that Louis d'Anjou had bought, taxes destined for the payment of the ransom; see Joubert, “L'Apocalypse d'Angers,” 138, n. 6.

8. Perroy, La Guerre de Cent ans, 160.

9. Françoise Autrand, “La déconfiture. La Bataille de Poitiers (1356) à travers quelques textes français des XIVe et XVe siècles,” in Guerre et société en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne XIVe-XVe siècles, ed. Philippe Contamine, Charles Giry-Deloison, and Maurice Keen (Lille: Université de Charles de Gaulle, 1991), 93-121.

10. See Frank Anderson Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1971), 179; and René Huyghe, Delacroix (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963), 191.

11. Although it is unclear exactly who erected the monument or authored the panneaux at the site of the battle, that account may to some degree be considered France's official though abridged version of what transpired.

12. Michel Mollat du Jourdin, La guerre de Cent ans vue par ceux qui l'ont vécue (1975; reprint. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 35, citing Matteo Villani, Istorie Fiorentine (republished Florence, 1823), chapter 18.

13. Thomas D. Hardy, Syllabus (in English) of the Documents … in the Collection Known as ‘Rymer's Foedera’ (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869-1885), 1:357: “12 Aug. 1347. Proclamation to be made throughout England that houses will be assigned to English persons willing to reside at Calais. Reading. R. iii. p.i.130. O.v.575. H.iii.p.i.16.”

14. Jean le Bel, Chronique, ed. Jules Viard and Eugène Déprez (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1904-1905), 1:162-63.

15. Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 204.

16. Butler, Rodin, 211.

17. Jean le Bel, Chronique, 1:166-67. Although Froissart's elaboration on the burghers and their fate has become famous, he in fact took it from this passage in Jean le Bel. This scene also appears in Shakespeare's Edward III, only recently included in the canon primarily because of Eric Sams's argument in Shakespeare's Edward III: An Early Play Restored to the Canon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). In the play there is no indication that Edward intends to depopulate the city after he releases the burghers.

18. Butler, Rodin, 496.

19. Representations of Jeanne d'Arc are also, of course, in this vein.

20. The famous genealogical tree is in BM Royal 15, E. vi, fol. 3; the Jesse tree is in BM Add. MS 42, 131, fol. 73; and the depiction of St. Louis and Henry VI is in BM MS Cotton Dom. A. xii, fol. 50. For discussions, see J. W. McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422-1432,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1965): 145-62; P. S. Lewis, “War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France and England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 15 (1965): 1-21; J. H. Rowe, “King Henry VI's Claim to France in Picture and Poem,” The Library, 4th series, 13 (June 1932): 77-88.

21. Shakespeare's hand in Edward III has long been suspected, but since the play has only recently been added to the canon, I defer discussion of it to another time.

22. Between 1898 and 1970, at least nineteen films were produced on the heroine. Directors include Pathé, Cecil B. De Mille, Roberto Rossellini, Otto Preminger, Victor Fleming; actresses include Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, and Sandrine Bonnaire (Musée Jeanne d'Arc, Rouen). In 1999 two films on Joan of Arc premiered: one was produced for CBS and aired in the United States in May 1999; the second, “The Messenger,” was directed by Luc Besson.

23. For this debate, which still rages, see the chapter entitled “De la modernité de la guerre de Cent ans: conflit féodal, dynastique ou national?” in Philippe Contamine, De Jeanne d'Arc aux guerres d'Italie: Figures, images et problèmes du XVe siècle (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994), 13-37.

24. There is simply no room to discuss here representations of Jeanne d'Arc. It must be acknowledged, however, that since the nineteenth century she has become the figure of French nationalism. To what presumably national crisis this version of her life responds is the subject of another inquiry.

25. Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453 (New York: Athenaeum, 1978), 17.

26. Andrew Gurr, ed., King Henry V, by William Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43-52.

27. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 206-27; here, 226.

28. Chris Fitter, “A Tale of Two Branaghs: Henry V, Ideology, and the Mekong Agincourt,” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 259-75; here, 274.

29. Gurr, King Henry V, 52. For the date, see DeWitt Bodeen, “Henry V,” in The International Directory of Films and Filmmakers, ed. Christopher Lyon (New York: Putnam, 1985), 195.

30. Harry M. Geduld, Filmguide to Henry V (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 13-17. Supporters included Dallas Bower, “a sound engineer turned filmmaker,” who conceived the idea of the film, had earlier written a script for Henry V, and worked with Olivier at the BBC during the war; and Del Giudice, who helped back the film financially.

31. Bodeen, “Henry V,” 196, remarks that “Olivier, preparing his own screenplay from the Shakespearean text, cut the play nearly a quarter so that he could give ample time to the staging of the Battle of Agincourt.”

32. Geduld, Filmguide, 52.

33. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (New York: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1992), 178-227, esp. 190.

34. Geduld, Filmguide, 19.

35. Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 162. He recalls that while working on Richard III in 1954, he was unhappy with the battle scene: “Somehow, after Henry V, I couldn't find another battle in me and even that one, which did seem to come off, was littered with petty larcenies from our Master of All, Eisenstein.”

36. Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook (Essex: Longman Group, 1989), 95, calls the film “[a]n historical epic serving as an allegory of Nazi aggression and Soviet heroism.”

37. Sergei Eisenstein, “My Subject is Patriotism,” International Literature 2 (1939): 91-94, especially 92.

38. Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: MacMillan, 1957), 218.

39. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Structure of Film” [1939], in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (1949; reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 152-53.

40. He cites Griffith's failure to perceive social injustice and castigates him as “an open apologist for racism, erecting a celluloid monument to the Ku Klux Klan, and joining their attack on Negroes in The Birth of a Nation,” in “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Film Form, 234.

41. Gurr, King Henry V, 52: “The central section of the film, the realistically portrayed battle, almost completely abandons speech (the whole script at 1,500 lines is not much above half the full text) for visual effects. Since there is no battle scene in the play itself apart from Pistol and Le Fer, that was an inevitable adjustment. It is all Hollywood, with a great charge of French horsemen taken from Griffiths [sic], an Eisenstein-like flight of arrows through the sky, and English soldiers dropping from branches to pull the French knights from their horses as in Errol Flynn's Robin Hood films.” All other critics, including Olivier himself, cite Eisenstein directly as the source for the horsemen, which seems very likely, given the nature of film distribution.

42. Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England, 109, cited in Geduld, Filmguide, 68-69.

43. Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled, is the best discussion on the film, but see also Kenneth Branagh himself, Beginning (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1989).

44. Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); C. T. Allmand, “The War and the Non-combatant,” in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Fowler (London: Macmillan, 1971), 163-83; M. M. Postan, “Some Social Consequences of the Hundred Years' War,” Economic History Review 12 (1942): 1-12. Opposed to these is the majority view of K. B. McFarlane, “War, the Economy and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years War,” Past and Present 22 (1962): 3-15.

45. See, for instance, Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300-1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Alain Demurger, Temps de crises, temps d'espoirs: XIV^e-XV^esiècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990); Michel Mollat du Jourdin, La guerre de Cent ans; Philippe Contamine, La Guerre de Cent ans, 6^e ed (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992).

46. Emmanuel Bourassin, La France anglais 1415-1453: Chronique d'une occupation (Paris: Librarie Jules Tallandier, 1981).

47. For example, here is the analysis of Peter Womack in “Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” in Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 126: “The answer is that so long as the dynastic legitimation of the monarch and the nobility is more or less working, the stage does not afford any space for anyone else. The community of the nation is not needed, so to speak, and so there is no call to imagine it. It is only when that hierarchical order fails that the undifferentiated totality of the realm appears, as that which is harmed by its failure. The theatre's obsession with the contentions of noble houses is not a reflection of contemporary political reality: Elizabeth by the 1590s seems not to have been particularly threatened either by lawless magnates or by rival claimants to her throne. Rather, the enactment of such conflicts operates like a ritual, in which the degradation of the institutional forms of the realm generates a manifestation of the comitatus, the prior, underlying body to which all—characters and spectators—can feel they belong” (emphasis in original).

48. Charles Tilly, “Western State-Making and Theories of Political Transformation,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 630.

49. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 130, claims that “The lack of any positive continental strategy inevitably resulted in the wasteful and pointless diversions of the last decade of the century.”

50. See A. G. Dickens, “The Elizabethans and St. Bartholomew,” in The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents, ed. Alfred Soman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 52-70; and David Bell, “Unmasking a King: The Political Uses of Popular Literature Under the French Catholic League, 1588-89,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 371-86.

51. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 52, 70, 76-80.

52. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-91.

53. Several historians have computed the cost in large terms: John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 343-47, 384-90; R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588-1595 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 564-67; Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588-1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 45-69.

54. Edward Hall, “The troubleous season of Kyng Henry the Sixt,” in The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, ([London: Richard Grafton,] 1548), chapter 46. Most of the material is from Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France [1516], ed. Henry Ellis (London: C. and J. Rivington et al., 1811).

55. Fabyan, New Chronicles, 617-18, who first mentions that Anjou and Maine “are called the keyes of Normandy.”

56. For a discussion of the debates on the economic conditions, see Ellen C. Caldwell, “Jack Cade and Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2,” Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 18-79.

57. This paper thus both appeals to and questions the theory of hegemonic containment as it has been applied to Cade. See Stephen Greenblatt's reading in “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1 (1983): 1-29; Phyllis Rackin's refinement of this reading in Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 207-22; Richard Wilson, “‘A mingled yarn’: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers,” Literature and History 12 (1986): 164-80; Brents Stirling, “Shakespeare's Mob Scenes: A Reinterpretation,” Huntington Library Quarterly 3 (1945): 213-40. Against these readings see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), passim; Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 17, 18, 20; and Michael Hattaway, “Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI,” Cahiers élisabéthains 33 (1988): 15.

58. See the discussion on such demands for sacrifice in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 187-206.

59. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 23.

60. Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled, 191-210.