England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 by Paul Strohm (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER unsuccessful.But does it follow from this that the policies he pursued never stood any hope ofsuccess?" (p.439).As he justly points out, many of these same policies were to prove highly effective in the hands of Yorkist and early Tudor monarchs, so where, then, did Richard go wrong? Even when he has made allowance for the ratherdifferent politi­ cal climate ofthe late fifteenth century, Saul still seems to believe that it was simple political misjudgment (the way his favoring ofCheshiremen created factionalism in the countryside, for example) that cost Richard his crown.He seems oblivious to the larger forces at work against this Renaissance prince avant la lettre. Or almost: "in Richard's reign," Saul concedes, "the instruments ofautocracy were less highly developed than they were to be later" (p.441); and again, "the nature of the late four­ teenth century polity ...made it difficult for Richard to achieve the ends that he was seeking" (p.442).Well, yes; precisely! RICHARD FIRTH GREEN University of Western Ontario PAUL STROHM. England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.Pp.xiv, 274.$35.0 0. In this elegantly written book, Paul Strohm explores what he calls the "process ofsymbolization" (p.xi) and the "representational regimes" (p. 154) by which the Lancastrians sought to legitimize their usurpation of the English throne. His procedure is to explore in a series of essays the deep structures ofa variety oftextual events.The first essay begins with an interesting discussion of the role of prophecy and concludes with an account ofthe petition to the 1406 Parliamenturging that both Lollards and believers in Richard's continued survival be silenced.For Strohm this petition aimed at a far-reaching thought control: the Lancastrians meant to deprive their subjects ofthe "powers to form mental images of things not experienced, to constitute hypothetical alternatives to the present disposition of things, to engage ...in moral reflection across time....It harbors a political wish which exceeds any finite objective: the annihilation of the utopian imagination by superimposition of its own sanctioned symbolism on the individual capacity to image alterna540 REVIEWS rives" (pp. 30-31). Consequently, "functioning as a political uncon­ scious, the oppositional imagination produces an unending stream of representations alternative to every established or agreed-upon signifi­ cation" (p. 31), since the imagination operates "under the permissive domain of the pleasure principle" (p. 31). As this summary suggests, Strohm's preferred interpretive method is psychoanalytic, and it is deployed throughout the book to a single end. Over and over we are shown how the Lancastrians' effort to impose a single set of beliefs or "desires" upon the nation was thwarted by either history itself or the unruly psyches of their subjects. Chapter 2 argues that the Lollards were not a genuine political threat to the regime but an opportunity for the rulers to adopt a posture of orthodoxy. Yet it also claims (paradoxically) that they posed a symbolic danger: by rejecting the official doctrine on transubstantiation, they broke a crucial link in the "chain of sacramental signification" (p. 61) and allowed entrance to the thought that not even anointment with holy oil could turn a duke into a king. Strohm then describes both the Oldcastle rebellion of 1414 and the Southampton plot of 1415 as stage-managed or "invented" by the Lancastrians, with the "repressed" guilty knowledge-that the earl of March was Richard's legitimate heir-not returning until 1460 with Richard of York's genealogical claim to the throne. Richard II himself, in the next essay, is carefully reinterred by Henry V in an attempt to bury the dead and appropriate his "aura," and once again it is in 1460 that the repressed symbolic "return[s} from the 'real"' (p. 127). Chapter 5 returns to Lollards and the claim by the confessed counterfeiter Wil­ liam Carsewell that he was in league with Oldcastle. This event too is read as a challenge to the "obsessional" Lancastrian belief in the possi­ bilities of transformation, for while real counterfeiters can be appre­ hended, "imaginary counterfeiters"-and Strohm assures us that such people (whoever they might...