Henry VI: Critical Essays (review)

This most recent addition to Routledge's Shakespeare Criticism series presents, paradoxically, a major collection of critical essays on plays that the collection's editor admits are "minor Shakespeare" (2). The time is certainly ripe for a collection devoted to Shakespeare's first forays into history—whether understood as the Henry VI trilogy or the first tetralogy, a matter on which the editor and contributors fail to reach a consensus—and this volume admirably fills the bill.

Pendleton's introduction undertakes a multitude of tasks. He begins his survey of the critical fortunes of the Henry VI plays by citing Shakespeare's epilogue to Henry V as the plays' first and most significant criticism before leaping across centuries of dormancy to discuss their landmark treatments in Alexander's 1929 memorial-reconstruction argument concerning the quarto versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Tillyard's influential defense of Shakespeare's providentialism in his 1944 Shakespeare's History Plays. In his engagement with these two critical works, which occupies most of his introduction, Pendleton addresses questions of text and authorship, delineates the major critical concerns the plays have traditionally raised, and locates these concerns within an inclusive, if admittedly conservative, review of both older and newer approaches to the works. Some readers will find Pendleton's self-avowed "essentialist, formalist, intentionalist, humanist, old-fashioned, old-historicist, guilty-on-all-counts theoretical stance (formerly point of view)" (17) annoying if not objectionable, leading as it does to a somewhat partial account of recent criticism. Ten of Pendleton's twenty-five introductory pages, for example, are devoted to explaining and defending Tillyard's providential reading of the plays—a defense that involves posing the question of the Henry VI plays' relationship to the strongly providential Richard III and asserting (not very controversially) the unity of the first tetralogy in order to show that "a great deal more of Tillyard's kind of providentialism, if not his particular formulation, is justified than is usually allowed" (17). Certainly other ways of accounting for the tetralogy's deus ex machina, the providential Richmond, might be and have been imagined by contemporary criticism. But here and elsewhere Pendleton's regrettable preference for a "dumbed-down Shakespeare" (24) hints at more innovative approaches to the plays only to shut them down.

Happily, this tendency is less apparent in the essays that actually comprise the volume, where a healthy variety of approaches to the plays are represented. The best essays combine rigorous examinations of the plays with theoretical sophistication to gesture toward critical and cultural issues beyond those of the tetralogy proper while affording sometimes brilliant insights into local concerns. James J. Paxson's "Shakespeare's Medieval Devils and Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI: Semiotics, Iconography, and Feminist Criticism" beautifully examines the figure of the "nether-faced devil" in order to refine critical notions of La Pucelle's "'demonic'" nature by fleshing out the term's "medieval iconographic and semiotic underpinnings" (150). Paxson's choice of illustrations makes his point resoundingly, and the essay is wonderfully paced and argued; his claim that the nether-faced devil functions "as a parturitional symbol" (144), which in turn "demarcate[s] Joan's diabolical agency in particular as well as the feminine status of the demonic and the demonic status of the feminine in general" (148), comes as a revelation. Nina da Vinci Nichols's "The Paper Trail to the Throne" follows the image, or literally the prop, of paper through the Henry VI plays, culminating in a discussion of Margaret's crowning of York with paper in 3 Henry VI as a gendered interaction with Crucifixion scenes from the medieval mystery cycles. And Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea's "Shakespeare's Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled?" follows this powerful character through her appearances in each of the plays of the first tetralogy, associating her with the Jungian archetypes of Virgin, Wife, Mother, and Crone, and arguing that Margaret "demonstrates a specifically...