Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

THREE Ambiguous Magic in Shakespeare’s First and Second Tetralogies

THREE Ambiguous Magic in Shakespeare’s First and Second Tetralogies Like Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s earliest histories offer an interesting, and often ironic, conjunction of the motifs of soldiering and witchcraft/magic. Sometimes poetically crude (the future master poet still producing, periodically, bad imitations of Marlowe), sometimes dramatically tedious (a fault arising occasionally even in the greatest of the later plays), the Henry VI plays nevertheless reveal Shakespeare’s genius for revealing how human personality develops fitfully and not always admirably through what often seems a drearily compulsive (and narcissistic) interaction with others. The fitful development of personality directly relates to anxieties concerning Protestant manliness, which provide an ideological and psychological coherence to plays that otherwise are critically notorious for their puzzling inconsistencies and lack of aesthetic unity. At least this critical assumption provides a satisfactory explanation for Shakespeare’s inclusion of what John D. Cox calls the “marginal fiends”1 of these plays. The crux in the first play of the tetralogy centers around Shakespeare’s presentation of Joan of Arc, the focus of much critical attention, in general due to the great confusion of interpretation that her inconsistent characterization has created. Some 97 98 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama consensus is suggested in Gabriele Bernhard Jackson’s initial summation that most critics agree in calling Joan “a coarse caricature , an exemplar of authorial chauvinism both national and sexual, or at best a foil to set off the chivalric English heroes of 1 Henry VI,” but the instability of the portrayal—in particular the contrast between the enigmatic but assertive warrior of the earlier scenes and the series of “progressively less dignified scenes” in act 5—results in the problematic nature of this role. I have much sympathy with Jackson’s observation that it is “typical of Shakespeare to present unexplained and suggestive discontinuities ,” and with her desire to offer a reading that avoids the extremes of both feminist and masculinist interpretations that wish to see the play as a simple critique or a simple confirmation of the “perceived dominance of patrilineal and patriarchal ideology in Shakespeare’s era.” Jackson bolsters her argument by pointing out that Joan “appears amidst a tangle of contradictory allusions.... a Sibyl, an Amazon, Deborah, Helen the mother of Constantine, and Astraea’s daughter to the French, but Hecate and Circe to the English.”2 This “tangle of allusions” is even more “contradictory” and less schematic than Jackson suggests; the controversial and obscure nature of Joan’s sexual status in the play—virgin or whore?—is complicated even by French response to her in her initial scene, since, while she insists on her sexual purity—“I must not yield to any rites of love” (1.2.113)—Reignier and Alençon make bawdy implications—“Doubtless he shrives this woman to her smock” (119)—of a sexual relationship between the Dauphin and his female “prophet.”3 We can, perhaps , accept one certainty about Joan, that, “because of the armor she is described as wearing and the military leadership she exercises , she is an example of what the Elizabethans called a virago, a woman strong beyond the conventional expectations for her sex and thus said to be of a masculine spirit.”4 The more positive allusions from within the French context, in particular that of a direct descent from Astraea, goddess of justice , potentially associate Joan with Elizabeth I, and Leah Marcus, Shakespeare’s First and Second Tetralogies 99 arguing in a new historicist analysis that Joan “functions in many ways as a distorted image” of the queen, focuses on Elizabeth’s martial self-presentation at Tilbury, “a glorious moment of patriotic triumph, but also...a spectacle that aroused distinct uneasiness among Englishmen.” Although Marcus admits that the appearance at Tilbury “was the only recorded occasion on which Elizabeth went to the extreme of adopting male attire,” she argues that “the basic rhetorical strategy Elizabeth employed on that occasion was by no means atypical.”5 The famous rhetoric of the speech at Tilbury is certainly noteworthy for its masculinist assertiveness: “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.”6 Still, the use of this particular historical exemplum to illustrate Elizabeth’s disturbing (to her male subjects) appropriation of a masculine role is questionable. Marcus states that “[Elizabeth] and the earl...