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Gender, Genre, and Elizabeth’s Princely Surrogatesin Henry IV and Henry V

Meghan C. Andrews

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 54, Number 2,Spring 2014, pp. 375-399 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/sel.2014.0016

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Meghan C. Andrews 375SEL 54, 2 (Spring 2014): 375–399ISSN 0039-3657© 2014 Rice University

Gender, Genre, and Elizabeth’s Princely Surrogates

in Henry IV and Henry V

MEGHAN C. ANDREWS

In his seminal article “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Louis Adrian Mon-trose reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a particularly male fantasy of dominance over various queens (fairy or otherwise), a fantasy that he argues was born from the anxieties Elizabeth I’s unprecedented rule provoked in early modern men’s psyches.1 Suggesting that the play contains no one allegorical representa-tion of Elizabeth, Montrose nevertheless imagines A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a dream in which patriarchal gender relations are restored when “Shakespeare’s text splits the triune Elizabethan cult image between the fair vestal, an unattainable virgin; and the Fairy Queen, an intractable wife and a dominating mother” and “uses one against the other to reassert male prerogatives” in order to “symbolically neutraliz[e] the forms of royal power to which it ostensibly pays homage” and “contes[t] the princely claim to cultural authorship and social authority.”2

I quote so liberally from Montrose’s article because it has greatly shaped this play’s critical interpretation—and Shakespeare criticism more generally—over the last thirty years. Katherine Eggert, for example, observes that Montrose’s article, reprinted over half a dozen times, “enable[d] critics who follow[ed] him to find the queen everywhere, in every figure of either rampaging or squelched female authority.”3 While this mode of reading has produced much compelling scholarship, Eggert inadvertently

Meghan C. Andrews is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. She is finishing her dissertation, “Shakespeare’s Networks,” with the aid of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

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376 Gender, Genre, and Elizabeth’s Princely Surrogates

identifies one of its weaknesses: it assumes that a literary repre-sentation of Elizabeth must be a woman. Montrose sees Elizabeth refracted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s female characters al-most exclusively. The only instance in which he identifies her with a male character—in this case, Theseus—is a moment wherein the Athenian duke, Montrose argues, is unambiguously wrong; that is, only when Theseus underestimates and misunderstands theater’s power to shape the monarch’s representations does he become “not so much Queen Elizabeth’s masculine antithesis as … her princely surrogate.”4

But here it is worth pausing to ask whether we unnecessarily limit our inquiry into the workings of Shakespeare’s imagination when we align Elizabeth with A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fe-male characters only. Could not Theseus be Elizabeth’s surrogate in other ways, specifically as the ruler who, by the end of the play, claims the monarchy’s prerogative in arranging marriages, thereby denying this right to the involved parties or their families? Montrose notes that Elizabeth “frequently intervened in the per-sonal affairs of those who attended her, preventing or punishing courtships and marriages not to her liking.”5 Similarly, we can see traces of Elizabeth, who revived her Court’s Petrarchan dy-namics in the 1590s, in Oberon.6 He is a powerful monarch-lover who is enraged by the defiance of his subject-wife and frustrated that she loves another, so he designs a humiliating punishment for Titania, just as Elizabeth punished Walter Ralegh when he married Elizabeth Throckmorton.7

Such gender-inverted identifications can stretch beyond A Midsummer Night’s Dream to other Shakespearean works, such as his Venus and Adonis.8 Instead of seeing Elizabeth in Venus—a reading that has gained increasing support during the last century—what if we were to read her as Adonis, the perpetual virgin who teases but never pleases, who half-urges his suitor on even as he ultimately rejects her, who is determined to avoid romantic and sexual linkage at all costs despite worries that his untapped fertility will become sterility?9 Elizabeth, after all, was encouraged to marry with much the same rhetoric Venus uses to speak to Adonis and which Shakespeare uses throughout the procreation sonnets.10 By widening our perspective beyond simple male-to-male and female-to-female correspondences, we are able to identify resonances that generally have gone undetected by critics but that promise to be fruitful lines of inquiry. Such readings would necessarily interrogate our understanding of po-litical power’s cultural and gendered dynamics in Shakespeare’s

Meghan C. Andrews 377

works, not least because they would lend themselves to a more nuanced interpretation of gender more broadly. For, despite the work of scholars such as Thomas Laqueur and Stephen Orgel, much scholarship still casts masculinity and femininity as binary opposites and sees characters as strictly one or the other. Such a binary is anachronistically limiting, however; the early modern period imagined gender as a continuum, with men and women able to inhabit a variety of gendered positions.11 Broadening our readings beyond same-sex correspondences will allow us to interpret Shakespeare’s gender play in a more historically sen-sitive fashion and will be particularly important in the study of Elizabeth’s literary figurations. This essay will undertake such a reading, focusing on three plays in the Shakespeare canon—the nearly all-male The First Part of Henry the Fourth, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, and The Life of Henry the Fifth—in which a female monarch seems least visible and the gender politics most clear cut to investigate the informing presence of Elizabeth to Shakespeare’s dramatic, political, and historical imagination even in works that seem to omit her.12

Critics have long noticed that women barely appear in Shake-speare’s second tetralogy of history plays, and, when they do appear, are severely marginalized. Valerie Traub, for example, observes that the plays “stage the elimination of women from the historical process … exhibiting the kinds of repressions” upon which a patriarchal society depends.13 As a result, and especially because Elizabeth has long been identified with Richard II—largely on the strength of her apocryphal “I am Richard II. know ye not that?” to Thomas Lambard as well as the performance commis-sioned by followers of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, on the eve of his rebellion—1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V are often read as a backlash against Elizabeth’s rule, negating or repressing feminine political power.14 If we have learned to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Simon Forman’s dream, we might be tempted to read the Henriad as Essex’s: a fantasy, a cultural wish fulfillment in which England is a masculine, warlike state, unencumbered by feminine caution or sensibilities, with a strong male heir waiting to inherit the realm and restore a patriarchal gender hierarchy.15 As we will see, however, this fantasy is only one level of the plays’ imagination; both Henry and Hal, though in different ways, are shaped by Elizabeth. Even while these plays present fantasies of a male-dominated political sphere, then, they also reveal the impossibility of truly banishing Elizabeth from the text, reifying her cultural presence as they invert their own gen-


dered power structures. This acknowledgment of her power as an object worthy of masculine appropriation opens more space for feminine agency in the cultural imaginary than Montrose grants. Ultimately, investigating these plays’ cross-gendered treatment of succession and queen will allow us greater insight into the in-terplay of gender and genre in Shakespeare’s works of the 1590s.

I

One avenue through which Elizabeth enters the Henriad is, on the surface, ignominious: the joke. Hal, informed that his father has sent a messenger to fetch him to the Court, instructs Mistress Quickly to “Give him as much as will make him a royal man, and send him back again to my mother” (1H4, II.iv.290–1).16 Editors have generally interpreted this line as Hal telling his father’s messenger to go to hell. G. Blakemore Evans’s gloss, for example, reads “i.e. get rid of him permanently. The Prince’s mother, Mary de Bohun, had died in 1394.”17 However, without discounting the aesthetic symmetry of the father/mother exchange, the word “again” suggests that the messenger is returning to the figure that sent him: his father. Reading this line as Hal insulting Henry by calling him Hal’s mother has not, to my knowledge, been sug-gested before. Sigmund Freud reminds us, however, that the joke is a moment in which the unconscious erupts into language, and the image this joke conjures—that of a maternal monarch—is one that may have seemed uncannily familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences.18

Such a figure might well have reminded a contemporary theatergoer of Elizabeth herself. Although by the 1590s she had long since ceased presenting herself as the mother of her people, Elizabeth must have remained a maternal figure in the minds of many of her subjects, as Montrose argues is the case for Shake-speare as he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream.19 This maternal figuration, moreover, was not limited to literary texts. Lena Cowen Orlin has traced a persistent strain of pamphlet references to Elizabeth as her country’s mother running from the 1570s through 1600, and as late as 1602, John Harington names Elizabeth as “this state’s natural mother,” while Elizabeth was also referred to as a mother in several of the elegies on her death.20 Addition-ally, the emphasis in the 1590s on Elizabeth as a chaste Virgin Queen “associate[d] the queen with such mythological and reli-gious figures as Deborah, Diana, and, by implication, the Virgin Mary,” the last reinforcing the culture’s perception of Elizabeth


as a maternal figure even if she herself actively avoided the title.21 Hal’s seemingly offhand comment to Mistress Quickly thus taps into a prominent strain of Elizabethan thought, vocalizing the association of the monarchy with maternity and, in doing so, connecting his father with the reigning queen.

In a much broader way, 1 Henry IV further links Henry to Elizabeth through the King’s effeminacy. In the early modern period, masculine and feminine identities were performative, not biological essentials but statuses to be achieved. Consequently, the possibility of effeminacy, “the [male’s] disastrous slide back into the female,” was a major source of male anxiety.22 Men had to perform their masculinity in several different, sometimes overlapping registers, ranging in type from the biological to the sexual to the linguistic to the behavioral. Throughout 1 Henry IV, however, Henry fails to perform in almost all of these registers, and so an early modern audience may well have interpreted him as an effeminate man. We have seen already how Hal’s identifica-tion of Henry as his mother feminizes Henry linguistically, but Shakespeare begins 1 Henry IV by presenting Henry as feminized physiologically, evident in Henry’s self-description:

My blood hath been too cold and temperate,………………………………………………………I will from henceforth rather be myself,Mighty and to be fear’d, than my condition,Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,And therefore lost that title of respectWhich the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.

(I.iii.1–9; emphases added)

The early modern humoral model of the body imagined women as the cold and wet sex, men as the hot and dry.23 In detailing his cold wetness, Henry describes himself in terms that his con-temporaries would have connected with the female body and that recall Katherina’s description of women as “soft, and weak, and smooth,” with “soft conditions,” in her closing speech on women’s inferiority to men.24 Falstaff, too, later remarks on the “cold blood [Hal] did naturally inherit of his father,” again casting Henry as in possession of womanish humours (2H4, IV.iii.118).25 Henry’s speech also feminizes him in the linguistic register, as Hal later does, by connecting him to the weeping, effeminate Richard II; a variation of Henry’s “I will from henceforth rather be myself” is voiced no less than five times in The Tragedy of King Richard the


Second, each time referring to Richard’s lack of masculine au-thority.26 The phrase takes on particularly gendered connotations when, after Henry chastises Hal for his “wanton and effeminate” behavior, Hal claims that he will “[b]e more myself” in the future (1H4, III.ii.93).27

Henry’s lack of bodily control also detracts from his masculin-ity. Gail Kern Paster has drawn attention to the ways in which the early modern period figured women’s bodies as permeable and leaky, as “a particular kind of uncontrol” of the body was depicted as “a function of gender.”28 Men, on the contrary, were expected to discipline themselves, closing and containing their bodies, so that “a man’s humoral reduction to tears” indicated “a passive and feminized state.”29 During his confrontation with Hal, Henry enters this feminized state, as he finds that he cannot control his eyes, “Which now doth that I would not have [them] do, / Make blind [themselves] with foolish tenderness” (1H4, III.ii.90–1). Henry’s inability to control what elsewhere in the tetral-ogy is called the “mother [in] mine eyes” is also a synecdoche for his inability to control his son and country, another way in which he fails at achieving properly masculine authority (H5, IV.vi.31). For early modern men, it was “a test of their manhood that” in the public and private spheres “they should prove equally capable of managing their affairs”; Henry, with both heir and nation in disorder, consistently fails to keep either in hand.30

Henry’s failings are perhaps best emblematized at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Bruce R. Smith has observed that chivalric mas-culine ideology, which privileged military success, courage, and honor, is the main ideal to which Shakespeare’s aristocratic men are held, and the Henriad’s investment in this martial masculinity has been well documented.31 Henry, however, has very little suc-cess in arms. Wounded, he is saved by Hal, who is presented as the primary victor against the rebel forces. Furthermore, Henry appears particularly unmanly when he sends several of his men into battle wearing his coat and colors, thereby operating as his doubles. If the early modern duel “embodied a masculine code that shored up the faltering sense of masculinity among young male aristocrats,” Henry not only rejects this masculine rite for Hal, and by proxy himself when he refuses to allow Hal to chal-lenge Hotspur to single combat, but mocks this ideal when he sends many men into battle dressed as himself.32 In addition, Henry’s general lack of success in arms emasculates him, while his battlefield doubles suggest what Patricia Parker calls copia, uncontrolled reproduction associated with the feminine.33 It is


also notable that Henry’s failures are changes that Shakespeare made to the narrative provided by Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.34 Shakespeare’s deviations from his source focus the action on Hal by feminizing Henry, and the aggregate effect presents Henry as a monarch whose masculinity is more honored in the breach than the audience’s observance—and perhaps the other characters’ observance as well. Hotspur’s attack on the effeminate Court popinjay he characterizes as a “waiting-gentlewoman” comes in loco Henrici, and can be trans-lated to a criticism of Henry himself (1H4, I.iii.55).

Thus, over the course of 1 Henry IV, Henry accrues a number of feminine characteristics. While not as effeminate as Richard II (a fact which has generally led critics to cast him as Richard’s masculine opposite), an early modern audience would neverthe-less have registered his feminized status, seeing in him a monarch possessed of both masculine and feminine qualities.35 His combi-nation of these characteristics forges a greater connection between him and Elizabeth, for Elizabeth’s appropriation of masculine language and prerogative to create a doubly gendered identity for herself as a ruler was one of her major rhetorical and ruling strategies. Her apocryphal but famous speech at Tilbury—“I know I have the bodie, but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and Stomach of a King, and of a King of England too”—is only the best known of a whole host of strategies she possessed for presenting herself as the realm’s king as well as its queen.36 Double gendering was, of course, endemic throughout Renais-sance drama, but the portrayal of a monarch with both masculine and feminine attributes must have conjured up visions of Eliza-beth for an early modern audience, especially as said monarch was elsewhere identified as his realm’s mother.

In its portrayal of topical concerns, moreover, the Henriad vir-tually demands that we associate the maternal, doubly gendered Henry with Elizabeth. Without offering one-to-one, à clef corre-spondences, 1 Henry IV reflects many of its moment’s concerns about the queen and her Court, which in the last decade of her rule seemed to be ripping itself apart in factional struggles.37 Its depiction of an aging, infirm monarch, who worries incessantly over the succession and who is pressured by a young and hot-tempered but popular and militaristic noble, provides an inescap-able parallel to Elizabeth’s situation at the close of the century. In 1597, the country’s mood was somber because Elizabeth was facing precisely the same challenges that the play dramatizes.38 Audience members could not have failed to connect England’s


situation in 1 Henry IV with their own. While critics have dis-cussed some of these historical resonances, they nevertheless have not noticed that Henry’s maternal and doubly gendered figuration would have made these parallels especially striking for Shakespeare’s audience when they looked to their own maternal monarch.39

The same dynamic is at work in 2 Henry IV, just as it is re-peated with Hal’s surrogate father, Falstaff. Critics have amply documented Falstaff’s womanly side; many of them interpret the last scene of 2 Henry IV as Hal turning away from the maternal and rejecting Falstaff’s feminine influence to attain full masculine subjectivity.40 The banishment of Falstaff at the end of the play, coupled with Henry’s death, thus seems to separate the mater-nal from the Henriad and Hal himself. 2 Henry IV’s conclusion celebrates the ascension of the kind of figure late Elizabethan culture claimed to desire—a strong, warlike male heir to succeed the aged, effeminate monarch, a man isolated from any feminine influences—which, as in King Richard the Second, seems again to put Elizabeth figuratively in her grave.

At the same time, however, scenes that suggest her pres-ence frame the action of 2 Henry IV. Frederick Kiefer notes that Elizabeth was identified with Fame in Elizabethan iconography.41 Rumour, so close to Fame (especially as described in the stage di-rections) and the figure that opens the play, might uncannily have suggested Elizabeth in the minds of some playgoers.42 Moreover, 2 Henry IV’s epilogue makes a point of kneeling to “pray for the Queen” even as it promises that Falstaff, too, will rise from the ashes and return, false promise though it may be (V.epilogue.17). With these scenes emphasizing Elizabeth’s presence bracketing 2 Henry IV, the play’s own attempts to bury Elizabeth and the maternal are, it seems, premature.

II

If 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV encode Elizabethan society’s longing for a fully masculine heir to the throne, Henry V—and Hal—would seem to dramatize that desire’s fulfillment, to be the answer to the country’s prayers for a strong male monarch. No longer the “wanton and effeminate boy” of the tavern, Hal is militarily successful and self-possessed, governs steadily, prosecutes his rebellious nobles, threatens Harfleur in language that emphasizes English virility, conquers the delicate French, and wins Katherine without betraying an effeminizing excess of


passion.43 Yet the prologue to the play opens by describing how “the warlike Harry, like himself” should act, its language and the sentiment it conveys—that Hal has previously not fully achieved masculine norms and rule—linking Hal back to Henry and Richard before him (I.prologue.5; emphasis added). This opening sugges-tion is prophetic, as Hal will also accrue feminine characteristics throughout his titular play.

Several critics have demonstrated how Henry V’s obsession with establishing Hal’s masculinity betrays what it desperately tries to repress: the female power at the heart of Hal’s endeavor. His claim to the throne of France comes through the female line, but the characters in the play cannot bring themselves to articu-late this genealogical fact. Instead, Hal’s male lineage is obses-sively recounted; all throughout the play, “the superior manliness of the English is … insisted upon,” the play attempting to foreclose the dangers of any reliance upon the feminine.44 But as Alan Sin-field and Jonathan Dollimore observe, the “exclusion of sexual disruption has to be repeated all through the play: banishment of the feminine and the female … cannot easily be achieved,” as at-tempts to do so always betray a frisson of unease.45 Furthermore, Shakespeare’s linguistic play exacerbates Henry V’s discomfited presentation of masculinity. Parker, for example, demonstrates that “the rhetoric of English manliness in this play is shadowed by the danger of effeminacy” through its focus on conveyance, translation, and seconding.46

Beyond Henry V’s linguistic tactics, however, I suggest that Hal’s rhetoric itself is one of the unacknowledged feminine pow-ers at the play’s core. For even as Henry V was being written, early modern culture’s understanding of what it meant to be a man was in flux. Speaking of the “refashioning of aristocratic versions of masculinity during the reign of Elizabeth,” Jennifer C. Vaught observes that “the male aristocracy was no longer de-fined by military service but rather by courtly display, including dress, gestures, and emotionally moving rhetoric.”47 As Vaught describes, the courtier’s development of his rhetorical skill, his abililty to move his listeners, one of the major aspects of this paradigm shift, was a development suffused with gender anxiety.48 Rhetoric was a discipline vulnerable to charges of effeminacy, and rhetoricians felt the need to defend themselves against this charge, ultimately unsuccessfully, as we see when Hotspur ac-cuses Henry’s perfumed envoy of using “holiday and lady terms” when he speaks “like a waiting-gentlewoman” (1H4, I.iii.46 and 55).49 Parker notes that late Elizabethan culture was particularly


self-conscious about the issue, as “the shift of style between six-teenth and early seventeenth-century England was also associ-ated with the shifting of the monarch’s gender … Already in the sixteenth century, the figure of the effeminate courtier or wordy popinjay … appeared on the English stage … [and was] linked to an excessive indulgence in words.”50 Accordingly, to save their rhetoric, men privileged a plainer, more masculine style, thought to be lean and sinewy, concise and unadorned, over feminine, fleshy copiousness, as was Elizabeth’s style.51

As one of Shakespeare’s most eloquent speakers, Hal is also feminized by the language he uses, as his language is as copious as the rhetoric Hotspur routinely derides. Canterbury, for example, describes Hal as speaking in “sweet and honeyed sentences” that charm men’s ears and even the air itself (H5, I.i.50). “Concise” and “unadorned” are not adjectives a reader would apply to Hal’s speeches—and worth noting is that Canterbury refers to the experience Hal does not have as the “mistress to this theoric,” implicitly gendering some part of Hal female (H5, I.i.52). Hal’s oratorical proficiency is especially evident in his final scene with Katherine, as his self-consciousness about his rhetorical prow-ess ensnares him. In disavowing his ability to “look greenly” and “gasp out [his] eloquence” and his “cunning in protestation,” in separating himself from the “fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favors”—explicitly casting himself as a plain soldier and not a courtier—Hal, in fact, gives himself away as the latter (H5, V.ii.143–4 and 156–7). Moreover, he gives himself away at a moment when, if not for this reminder, the audience might not even notice that Hal is exactly what he says he is not, thus betraying his own anxieties in his determination to cast himself as a blunt, plain-speaking soldier. His conduct stands as a microcosm for the play’s psychic mechanisms as a whole, insisting upon Hal’s martial masculinity to cover his rhe-torical skill. But his military successes are inextricably bound to linguistic proficiency, as Hal’s victories at Harfleur and Agincourt are portrayed as the direct result of his great speeches. Even the specter of Hal’s success is not reassuring. Just as French effeminacy threatens English masculinity throughout the play, the half-French fruit of Henry and Katherine’s union, Henry VI, will drastically fail to live up to his age’s masculine ideals in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, a fact gestured toward in Henry V’s epilogue: the ultimate failure of Hal’s martial project in Henry VI’s loss of France. Hal’s rhetorical skill, furthermore, is not solely used in service to the state. Even at the height of his martial


prowess, Hal is still playing indulgent rhetorical games as in his “wanton and effeminate” days. The glove sequence with Williams is nothing if not another tavern game, allowing Hal to keep one foot in its feminized, fertile world of “holiday and lady terms” (H5, IV.i.85–229 and IV.viii.24–72).

Thus, while Henry V tries to preserve Hal’s masculinity by isolating him from feminine influences, Hal’s wordplay neverthe-less betrays the effeminate courtier’s linguistic dexterity. This is not to say that Hal does not put his rhetorical skill to a relatively masculine use; it should be noted that, in using it as a tool of con-quest to win France in the form of Katherine’s body, Hal operates as a normative masculine king. However, the fact that character-istics coded as feminine are the foundation of Hal’s great power is striking because he, too, possesses several topical similarities to Elizabeth. Certainly, his use of political oratory suggests lin-guistic skill similar to hers. Annabel Patterson and Thomas Healy have cited strong parallels between Hal’s St. Crispin’s Day speech and Elizabeth’s apocryphal Tilbury address, while Helen Hackett notes that Henry V “can be interpreted as drawing nationalistic parallels” between Agincourt and the Spanish Armada invasion.52 Patterson observes that the quarto version of Henry V could be read as flattering the queen by creating “symbolic portraits and emblems of unqualified power and vitality” in Hal and that Hal’s “most obvious modern analogy was Elizabeth herself,” while Phyl-lis Rackin concurs that “the king who most resembles Elizabeth as an image of benevolent royal authority is Henry V.”53 But as with Henry, these critics have not taken into account the specifi-cally gendered way in which Hal resembles Elizabeth, inverting her gender strategies by accruing feminine characteristics and using them as instruments of rule just as she used masculine characteristics to legitimate her reign.54 Hal, like his father and Richard II before him, bears the traces of her influence. In this way, we can see that though the Henriad dramatizes a historical narrative of succession, it is always about its present. Elizabeth, far from being associated with one character or another through-out the tetralogy, haunts the very office of the king.

III

Henry V has almost universally been read as a play that es-tablishes for its protagonist full masculinity. Eggert understands Hal to be a “dauntingly masculine monarch”; Rebecca Ann Bach calls Henry V “a story of the potent, masculine, English warrior


body”; and Peter Erickson argues that in the play, Shakespeare “consciously dramatizes” a “sentimental dream of self-contained masculine purity.”55 Perhaps aided by the identification of Hal with Essex as “the general … / Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,” critics thus have tended to read Henry V as A Midsummer Night’s Dream-style wish fulfillment (H5, V.chorus.30 and 32). At the time the play was written, Elizabeth’s popularity was perhaps at an all-time low, with many of her subjects waiting impatiently for her death and the subsequent succession of a male monarch, so Henry V naturally seems to respond to these desires, banishing Elizabeth to crown a king.56 Traub, for instance, reads Henry V as a “negation of the Virgin Queen” because it “limits the reign of power to the male subject,” while Eggert argues that as part of its masculinization of the theater, the play “does succeed in erasing Elizabeth.”57 But, as this essay has shown, these plays still feel Elizabeth’s presence. We should not forget, after all, that Henry V’s chorus also mentions the “gracious Empress” of the general; as much as he might have wanted to, Shakespeare could not forget his monarch (H5, V.chorus.30). It is to this remembering’s implications that this essay now turns, for if plays represent “not only … an end but also … a source of cultural production,” we might wonder what work was being done by these representa-tions of the queen.58

First, these depictions complicate our understanding of the Henriad as a narrative of the repression of Elizabeth. Critics tend to see her buried with Richard, but we have seen that the basis of Hal’s patriarchal power is his use of a feminizing rhetorical style, making him, like his father, an echo of the aging queen. In fact, I would suggest that her image is bifurcated in these kings. Henry encapsulates all the disabling aspects of Elizabeth’s 1597 persona—her age, infirmity, loss of control—while Hal embodies her strength, vitality, and effective ruling strategies. We can also see Hal in particular as performing a particularly Elizabethan action in appropriating the opposite gender’s characteristics to construct his political authority. In so doing, Henry V does not negate the queen but instead offers a fantasy of a revitalized, renewed Elizabeth. Thus, the Henriad can be characterized as a return of the repressed female; what is imperfectly repressed—the objectionable truth—is precisely Elizabeth and feminine rule. The history plays also compulsively enact and reenact the shift from effeminate monarch to masculine monarch, only for the mascu-line monarch to become feminized—a repetition that dramatizes succession itself as a feminizing act and places it within what


Julia Kristeva has identified as a specifically feminine mode of temporality.59 We see this in the movement from Richard II to Henry IV, from Henry IV to Hal, from Hal to Henry VI, and even in Henry VI to Richard III. Such a repetition’s originary trauma is, I suggest, Elizabeth’s approaching death, and the country’s deeply embedded desire for her not to die. Elizabeth must be repressed because, conscious beliefs to the contrary, her rule is actually her country’s unacknowledged object of desire, and to retain her presence, each king must become her upon ascension. There is no doubt that, on one level, the Henriad does fulfill the cultural fantasy of a masculine prince replacing his effeminate predecessors and returning a martial masculinity to the nation. By reading against the grain, however, we can see that, on an-other level, in possessing feminizing characteristics and sharing various similarities with Elizabeth, Richard II, Henry, and Hal all suggest the impossibility of ever fully banishing Elizabeth from these texts—and the lack of a true desire to do so. In Henry V, Shakespeare might believe that he is writing an Essexian narra-tive of masculine triumph, but unconsciously he is still writing Elizabeth. This understanding also changes our conception of the tetralogy’s gender politics. Generally, critics have located its feminine power in the private realm. Marginalized and confined to peripheral spaces, women are figured as dangerous because they threaten to take men away from public duty and to lose them in private pleasures.60 This essay, however, offers an alternate view of the tetralogy’s treatment of the feminine principle, as feminine power is marshaled on Hal’s behalf to aid in his military endeavors, funneled into the public sphere as a positive force.

Moreover, this reading of Henry V also shifts our understand-ing of its psychic mechanisms toward another play, written within a year or two of Henry V and also deeply concerned with the succession. Stephen Mullaney has drawn attention to the ways in which The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark both reviles and preemptively laments for Elizabeth in the guise of Gertrude, mourning and misogyny inextricably mixed cultural imperatives in the play.61 We can see in Henry V the same linked impulses, the play’s surface-level misogynistic imperative undercut by a proleptic mourning and the fantasy of not mourning. But if Hamlet ultimately succumbs to its misogynistic revenge tragedy desires, the earlier Henry V charts a more optimistic course, preempting its own elegy by not allowing Elizabeth to die at all; her absorp-tion by Hal protects her presence and gives her a privileged, if incorporated, position.


Furthermore, in their attempts to appropriate her power, these plays are destined to be only partially successful, as ap-propriation inevitably also resurrects Elizabeth—in part because, as early modern culture’s central mother figure, she is impossible to erase, but also because this appropriation gives an acknowl-edgment of her authority as worthy of absorption. Foreclosing the possibility of taming her by not representing a female mon-arch—Shakespeare even changed the name of Hotspur’s wife from Elizabeth, the historical Lady Percy, to Kate—1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V construct Elizabeth as unassailable through her continual shadowing of the kings. Montrose’s article sug-gests that support for Elizabeth is necessarily at cross-purposes with a patriarchal imperative, that the reification of patriarchy demands Elizabeth’s subversion, and vice-versa. In this reading of the Henriad, conversely, those two impulses are no longer mu-tually exclusive. Here the reification of a male-dominated politi-cal structure involves Elizabeth’s affirmation, opening a greater space for her agency—and feminine agency more broadly—in the cultural imaginary than we would generally acknowledge. In this way and in a reversal of the generally accepted gender politics of Shakespeare’s genres, the history plays affirm feminine agency even as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy, circumscribes feminine power. Women thus do not have a small role in the sec-ond tetralogy solely because it offers the (impossible) fantasy of history as a masculine preserve; they do not appear because they are too threatening and because, more importantly, femininity is always already there.

This reading of the Henriad also has implications for Shake-speare’s treatment of maternity throughout his oeuvre. Janet Adelman has demonstrated that, in the second half of his career, Shakespeare’s plays are all deeply informed by men’s fear of the maternal, imagined as an engulfing presence upon which subjec-tivity is predicated but which also threatens masculine identity and so must be destroyed. Before Hamlet, though, Shakespeare’s male characters seemingly avoided this problem, as between The Tragedy of Richard the Third and Hamlet “mothers virtually disap-pear …. [and] masculine identity is constructed in and through absence of the maternal.”62 In Richard II, Henry, and Hal, how-ever, we can detect the presence of Elizabeth, England’s imagi-nary mother. If we take the maternal Elizabeth as hovering over the Henriad—nowhere precisely because she is everywhere—she becomes a disembodied but potent threat to the culture’s man-hood, necessitating a different response than Shakespeare’s late


mothers; for the mid-career Henriad, we can see an alternate but complementary system for management of the anxiety she caused. In this paradigm, male protagonists repress the maternal but absorb her feminine characteristics in order to defuse and appropriate her power. Critics have tended to see this mechanism at work only in Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays, with James’s stress on maternal bounty and generosity part of his kingly persona, not in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan plays.63 Yet we can see it in the Henriad, albeit motivated by a different pressure: not the creation of a monarch’s image but the neutralizing of it. This dynamic may even have served a larger compensatory function. Coppélia Kahn has argued that early modern England’s patriarchal society was vulnerable to women because it depended on women’s submis-sion and sexual fidelity to ratify masculine power and patrilineal succession.64 By appropriating the maternal, men also efface the threat women pose to patriarchy in a dream of male autonomy, a fantasy of psychic wholeness for masculine subjectivity. Adelman notes that maternity was threatening in part because “the longing to return to the maternal body” was a seductive “siren-song.”65 The Henriad, however, enacts a safe fulfillment of this desire, as men are able both to reunite with the maternal and retain their masculinity.

The return of this repressed feminine also suggests that possession of some feminine characteristics is necessary, or at least unavoidable, for Shakespeare’s kings, as he himself could not dream of a monarch who was not in some way his queen. The observation that until 1603 Elizabeth was the only monarch Shakespeare had ever known is a critical commonplace, but nev-ertheless, I think we underestimate the fact that, in very practical terms, it would have been hard for Shakespeare to envision a monarch who was not her. Yet if Shakespeare, after a lifetime of Elizabeth’s rule, could not imagine a fully male monarch, even-tually he was at least able to envision a king whose echoes of Elizabeth were not disabling; Hal’s feminine characteristics aid him. This understanding shifts Henry V away from plays such as The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, The Tragedy of Coriolanus, and The Tragedy of Macbeth, terribly concerned with enacting masculinity, and toward plays closer to it chronologically, such as Twelfth Night, or What You Will and As You Like It, with their more playful gender fluidity. Unlike Lear’s hysterica passio or Antony’s inefficacy, Hal’s feminine characteristics are construc-tive and controlled, just as Viola’s and Rosalind’s male disguises lead to the attainment of their desires. Moreover, Henry V may


also have allayed some of the concerns of Elizabeth’s male sub-jects, who felt that her mere presence on the throne feminized her subjects. Certainly the young militant nobles of her Court felt emasculated by her avoidance of military entanglements, often blaming her gender for this perceived weakness.66 Seeing a king for whom feminine characteristics were helpful and linked to conquest might have soothed some of this concern, reassuring men in Shakespeare’s audiences that they would not be made effeminate by their queen.

A more positive view of male effeminacy can also extend be-yond Shakespeare’s plays and inform our understanding of the relationship between stage and gender in early modern England. The theater itself was portrayed as a feminine institution, and critics such as Laura Levine have shown that it was dogged by persistent anxieties that it would leave male spectators “effemi-nated.”67 Eggert has suggested that Shakespeare was aware of these anxieties, and sought to defuse them in Henry V by regen-dering theatricality and spectacle as masculine and epic.68 But if we acknowledge that Hal possesses feminine characteristics, we can see Henry V redeeming the institution in another way. Ap-pearing in a commercial theater that threatened gender confusion, the doubly gendered “mirror of all Christian kings” could also become an alibi, a reassurance that feminine attributes could, in fact, be positive and enabling, reassuring male audience members that they would not be compromised by attending a play (H5, II.chorus.6). On the whole, then, Shakespeare’s feminized kings were performing quite a bit of cultural work, much of it aimed at soothing the anxieties of Elizabeth’s male subjects.

IV

There are further implications for our understanding of Shake-speare’s plays, however, beyond the (re)gendering of authority in the second tetralogy, and this essay’s conclusion will explore some of them. If we pull our focus back from the Henriad, we might ob-serve that these plays are hardly unique in Shakespeare’s canon in their treatment of feminized male authority figures. The remaining history plays feature the effeminate Henry VI and Richard II, and critics also have suggested that Richard III progressively displays feminine characteristics as his eponymous play moves forward. Similar arguments have been advanced for Antony, Lear, Macbeth, Duncan, Prospero, Cymbeline, and Timon.69 Even Caesar, in a play noted for its topical engagement with questions of monarchical


privilege, relishes the thought that “from [him] great Rome shall suck.”70 These monarchs occupy different places on the gender continuum—Henry VI, a gentle and ineffectual leader who actively avoids the public sphere, is effeminized in part by his masculine wife, while the self-indulgent Richard II is effeminized through an identification with his spouse and the female complaint tradition—but Shakespeare’s deployment of the feminized male monarch is consistent throughout his career, a trope that deserves further study. Imagining gender identification on a continuum will allow us to pay greater attention not just to the flexible gender coding of each figure but also to investigate how much, and the particular ways, in which each figure is effeminized and how each signi-fies in a way unique to its play. Ultimately, however, the trope may suggest that Elizabeth’s example conditioned Shakespeare to envision political leaders as incorporating both feminine and masculine traits; as the masculine Margaret, Henry VI’s queen, can be in some ways a celebration of Elizabeth, so can Hal.

To restrict ourselves to the 1590s, we might place this Eliza-bethan paradigm in dialogue with the other genre that dominated the decade for Shakespeare: comedy. As noted above, mothers are absent from Shakespeare’s drama from Richard the Third to the end of the decade, and the plays written in this span are almost uniformly comedies and histories (sometimes both). Leah Marcus has suggested that the cross-dressing Portia, Rosalind, and Viola might well be reactions to Elizabeth, arguing that these heroines are “dazzling, idealized images of Elizabeth’s sexual multivalence” that instantiate “festival regeneration” of the aging queen, complete with the implication that they will have children as England wished Elizabeth had; similarly, Eric S. Mallin argues that Twelfth Night is a “retrospective political fantasy” that “mar-ries off the unmarried queen … rewrit[ing] the unfulfilled history of Elizabeth’s frustrating Anjou courtship,” and these identifica-tions have been taken up by many critics, all of whom argue that we can see different elements of Elizabeth refracted in the comic heroines.71 If we take Marcus’s suggestion that these heroines served as cultural wish fulfillment for a revitalized Elizabeth, we might wonder whether the same cultural fantasy actually undergirds the two genres—comedy and history—and whether the genres possess similar, not divergent, cultural dreams: that of a regenerated, refreshed Elizabeth, visible in characters as divergent-seeming as Rosalind and Hal, who promises to be fruit-ful and produce children, but who cannot be directly represented on stage. Though it is beyond this essay’s scope to answer fully,


we might extend the analysis further and ask: what is the rela-tionship between genre and cultural desire in the 1590s? That is, why were these two genres appropriate for these cultural fantasies in Shakespeare’s writing? Leonard Tennenhouse has suggested that comedies and histories were specifically Elizabethan genres because in both, the monarch is the sole figure able to unite order and disorder to effectively rule. He also argues that in the com-edies, part of the strategy included using the figure of the unruly woman to ultimately uphold patriarchal norms.72 Nevertheless, the fact that both genres resurrect Elizabeth gestures toward a more gendered psychic dynamic. Surely it is important that the romantic comedies and the second tetralogy are devoid of actual mothers—revealing a desire not to associate Elizabeth with any older and now-infertile maternal presences—and instead include fantasies of a reborn Elizabeth. Probing the similarities between the genres also allows us to reevaluate Henry V’s turn to roman-tic comedy in its last act. Instead of a puzzling or inappropriate end to the play, we might view it as fitting in that it unites two Shakespearean genres that share a similar goal, turning Hal into a romantic hero akin to Rosalind as a romantic heroine, complete with a Petrarch-twisting lover to match Orlando.

Alternately, if we were to focus on Montrose’s argument and read the comedies as limiting women’s social power (as he has argued for As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and as one might also argue for The Taming of the Shrew), we might compare how well each genre performed in London’s literary marketplace. Although, as this essay suggests, the Henriad reverses what we generally take to be the gender politics of the two genres, Shakespeare’s histories were by far his best-selling plays, outselling the comedies almost two to one (thirty editions to eighteen).73 The deposition histories were wildly popular, but The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream attained only two quarto editions before 1623, while neither As You Like It nor The Taming of the Shrew appeared until the First Folio.74 Apparently, London’s bookbuyers did not share Forman’s dream. Why did the histories strike a chord with the public in a way that the comedies did not? Perhaps because tragedies and histories were “deemed more respectable reading matter than comedies or generically mixed plays,” possessing “more social cachet,” or, at least, allowed to be more overtly topical, certainly more quoted in contemporary anthologies.75 If history plays were considered a more serious genre, and if they were more popular than Shakespeare’s comedies, might we not want to take them as


more constitutive of the early modern imagination? Either way—whether we agree with Marcus or Montrose about Shakespeare’s comedies—the fact that the histories were far and away his most popular genre suggests that their Elizabethan subtext has a great deal to tell us not only about Shakespeare’s cultural imaginary but also about the cultural fantasies surrounding England’s queen.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that the histories embody a fantasy of a renewed Elizabeth. We should not forget that through Falstaff and his compatriots, the Henriad is connected to The Merry Wives of Windsor—and, depending on whether one believes it was written before or after Henry V, we might even say that The Merry Wives of Windsor resurrects Falstaff.76 Supposedly requested by Elizabeth herself, The Merry Wives of Windsor is the Shakespeare play in which the setting is most contemporary, the women most dominant, and within which appears the only cross-dressed adult male character in Shakespeare’s canon: Falstaff, clad in the apparel of Mother Prat, the fat woman of Brainford. Given these factors, and despite its generally lower regard in the eyes of Shakespeare scholars, it may be that The Merry Wives of Windsor is not the poor relation or lesser sequel to the second tetralogy after all. The Merry Wives of Windsor may, instead, un-derstand the Henriad’s psychological dynamics more fully than any of Shakespeare’s other works.

NOTES

I would like to thank Douglas Bruster, Wayne Rebhorn, and Elizabeth Scala for their generous and generative feedback on multiple versions of this essay. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers at SEL for their very helpful suggestions.

1 Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 61–94; and Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 251–83.

2 Montrose, pp. 85–6.3 Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Liter-

ary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 2. For examples of Eggert’s point, see Leah S. Marcus, who reads The First Part of Henry the Sixth’s Joan as a distorted reflection of Elizabeth (Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discon-tents [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988], pp. 51–105); and Maurice A. Hunt, who sees Elizabeth in the Princess of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shake-speare’s Speculative Art [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], pp. 127–50). Peter Erickson writes that “Queen Gertrude functions as a degraded figure of Queen Elizabeth” (Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves [Berkeley:


Univ. of California Press, 1991], p. 86). In addition, Helen Morris, among oth-ers, links Cleopatra to Elizabeth (“Queen Elizabeth ‘Shadowed’ in Cleopatra,” HLQ 32, 3 [May 1969]: 271–8).

4 Montrose, p. 85.5 Montrose, p. 78.6 For the use of the rhetoric of courtship in English politics, see for ex-

ample Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 45–88.

7 Elizabeth’s punishment of Ralegh has been covered in many pieces of literary criticism, many focusing on Spenser’s dramatization of this in the Faerie Queene or in Ralegh’s (post-) imprisonment poetry; see, for example, Marion Campbell, “Inscribing Imperfection: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Eliza-bethan Court,” ELR 20, 2 (Spring 1990): 233–53.

8 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 1797–813.

9 For the reading of Elizabeth in Venus, see Erickson, Rewriting, pp. 31–56; or, in a recent treatment that speaks to that reading’s longevity, see Tom MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 147–54.

10 In the early days of her rule, Elizabeth was often urged to marry in order to reproduce and thereby provide a clear heir for the throne. For example, “The Commons’ Petition to the Queen at Whitehall,” 28 January 1563: “That forasmuch as your majesty’s person should come to most undoubted and best heirs of your crown, such as in time to come we would most comfort-ably see and our posterity shall most joyfully obey, it may please your most excellent majesty for our sakes, for our preservation and comforts, and at our most humble suit, to take yourself some honorable husband whom it shall please you to join to you in marriage” (in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000], p. 76). Similarly, having sex to reproduce while he is still young is one rationale Venus offers Adonis for why he should accept her advances (Venus and Adonis, lines 163–74), and similar sentiments are also echoed in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 1839–74), particu-larly the procreation sonnets. For example, “Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, / Which husbandry in honor might uphold / Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day / And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?” asks the speaker in Sonnet 13’s third quatrain, followed by an exhortation to reproduce: “O, none but unthrifts: dear my love, you know / You had a father, let your son say so” (lines 9–14; compare also Sonnets 3 and 6 with the Commons’ Petition).

11 See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); and Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 18–30.

12 Shakespeare, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, in The Riverside Shake-speare, pp. 884–927, hereafter referred to as 1 Henry IV; Shakespeare, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 928–73, hereafter referred to as 2 Henry IV; and Shakespeare, The Life of Henry the Fifth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 974–1021, hereafter referred to as


Henry V. Subsequent references to 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V are from these editions and will appear parenthetically in the text by short title and act, scene, and line number. The short titles are as follows: 1 Henry IV is 1H4, 2 Henry IV is 2H4, and Henry V is H5.

13 Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shake-spearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 53. See also Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 20–30 and 137–40.

14 Thomas Lambard, “That which passed from the Excellent Majestie of Queen ElizabEth, in her Privie Chamber at East Greenwich, 4° Augusti 1601, 43° Reg. sui, towards William lambardE,” in The Progresses and Public Proces-sions of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. John Nichols, 3 vols. (1823; rprt. New York: AMS, 1968), 3:552–3, 552.

15 For Simon Forman’s dream and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Montrose, pp. 62–5.

16 For ease of reference, I will refer to King Henry IV as Henry and King Henry V as Hal throughout this essay.

17 Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 903, n 291. 18 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and gen. ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 8:9–236, esp. pp. 159–80.

19 On literary representations of Elizabeth as a mother in the 1590s, see Montrose, pp. 64–5 and 78–84; Mary Villeponteaux, “‘Not as Women Wonted Be’: Spenser’s Amazon Queen,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 209–25; and Jacqueline Vanhoutte, “Elizabeth I as Stepmother,” ELR 39, 2 (Spring 2009): 315–35, 317–20.

20 Lena Cowen Orlin, “The Fictional Families of Elizabeth I,” in Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, ed. Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995), pp. 85–110, 90–2; John Harington to Mary Harington, 27 December 1602, in Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington and Thomas Park, 2 vols. (London: Printed by J. Wright, Denmark-Court, Strand, 1804), 1:320; Patricia Phillippy, “London’s Mourning Garment: Maternity, Mourning and Royal Succession,” in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 319–32, 319, 327–8.

21 Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 28. On Elizabeth as a Marian figure, see Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 26–33; and Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Houndmills UK: Macmillan, 1995).

22 Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, “History and Ideology, Masculin-ity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V,” in Faultlines: Cultural Ma-terialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, ed. Sinfield (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), pp. 109–42, 134. They add that effeminacy “included virtually everything that was not claimed as distinctively masculine” and was “any male falling away from the proper totality of masculine essence” (p. 131).


Throughout this essay, feminine or feminized will be used as a less strong version of the term effeminate; feminization eventually leads to effeminacy.

23 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 15–6.

24 Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 138–76, V.ii.165 and 167.

25 Reading 1 Henry IV through the humours, Smith suggests that Falstaff represents phlegm and Hotspur, choler (p. 22). If so, I would suggest that Hal then figures as blood and Henry as melancholy, again associating Henry with a female humour.

26 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 842–83, II.i.198–9, II.i.241, II.i.295, III.ii.83, and V.i.12–3.

27 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, V.iii.10. 28 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines

of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), p. 25.29 Paster, p. 9.30 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex,

and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), p. 4.31 Smith, pp. 44–8. On martial masculinity in the Henriad see Traub, p.

61; and Sinfield and Dollimore, pp. 133–5.32 Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern

Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 5. Henry re-fuses to let Hal duel Hotspur at V.i.101–3; we find he has dressed many as himself at V.iii.1–29.

33 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 8–35, esp. 13–4, 22.

34 Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2d edn., 6 vols. (London: Printed by Henry Denham at the expenses of John Harison, George Bishop, Rafe Newberie, Henry Denham, and Thomas Wood-cocke, 1587), 6:523.

35 See for example Howard and Rackin, pp. 142–8.36 Leonel Sharp to the Duke of Buckingham [n.d.], in Cabala, Mysteries

of State (London: Printed for M. M., G. Bedell, and T. Collins, 1654), p. 260. Though the accuracy of stories about Elizabeth at Tilbury has been chal-lenged—see for example Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” SCJ 23, 1 (Spring 1992): 95–114—the veracity of the stories is less important than the fact of their existence; that is, the legend itself became a kind of fact in early modern England. On Elizabeth’s double-gendering, see Rose, pp. 26–54; Marcus, pp. 51–66; and Levin, pp. 121–48.

37 For an overview of the factional politics of Elizabeth’s Court in the 1590s, see for example Paul E. J. Hammer, “Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 65–86.

38 Guy provides an overview of the challenges of the 1590s in his “In-troduction” to The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 1–19, and those challenges are explored in that collection’s essays.

39 Lily B. Campbell noted similarities between Hotspur’s revolt and the Northern Rebellion (Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy [San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1947], pp. 170–212). Barbara Mather


Cobb also investigates the similarities between Elizabeth’s succession prob-lems and those represented in the Henriad (“‘Suppose That You Have Seen the Well-Appointed King’: Imagining Succession in the Henriad,” CahiersE 70 [Autumn 2006]: 33–8).

40 See, for example, Traub, pp. 54–70.41 Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified

Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 77–9 and 96.42 2H4, Ind. 1–40. 43 H5, III.i.17–25, III.iii.12–4, 19–21, 33–5. 44 Sinfield and Dollimore, p. 130. 45 Sinfield and Dollimore, pp. 128–9.46 Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 171.47 Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English

Literature (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), p. 91. See also Howard and Rackin, pp. 143–8; and Low, pp. 20–8.

48 “[E]motionally moving rhetoric” was one of the cultural forces powering the “effeminization … of English definitions of manhood,” linking rhetorical power with gender anxiety (Vaught, p. 91).

49 See Parker, Fat Ladies, pp. 8–35; Parker, “Virile Style,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 199–222; and Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 133–96.

50 Parker, “Virile Style,” p. 206. 51 Parker, “Virile Style,” pp. 201–3.52 Annabel Patterson, “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of

Henry V,” RenD n.s. 19 (1988): 29–62, 46; Thomas Healy, “Elizabeth I at Tilbury and Popular Culture,” in Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 165–77; and Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), p. 128.

53 Patterson, p. 46; and Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), p. 164. John D. Cox draws parallels between Elizabeth’s and Henry’s treatments of the church, theatri-cality, and the process by which both become legends (Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 104–27). C. E. McGee and Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh track similarities between Hal’s coronation procession and several of Elizabeth’s processions (McGee, “2 Henry IV: The Last Tudor Royal Entry,” in Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984], pp. 149–58; and Crunelle-Vanrigh, “Henry V as a Royal Entry,” SEL 47, 2 [Spring 2007]: 355–77). Peter C. Herman argues that a similar pessimism accompanies Hal and the Elizabeth of the 1590s (“‘O, ’Tis a Gallant King’: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Crisis of the 1590s,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], pp. 205–25). Do-natella Montini traces the parallels between Henry’s and Elizabeth’s lives as well as their ruling strategies (“The Regal Illusion: Machiavellian Strategies in the Speeches of Elizabeth I and in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 [1999]: 211–24).


54 One of the few critics to do so is Adam Max Cohen, who similarly relates Hal’s conduct to the new gender norms imported from Italy and notes that scenes of effeminization frame his two scenes of great military exploits (“The Mirror of All Christian Courtiers: Castiglione’s Cortegiano as a Source for Henry V,” in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contempo-raries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning, ed. Michele Marrapodi [Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007], pp. 39–50, 40–4).

55 Eggert, p. 76; Rebecca Ann Bach, “Tennis Balls: Henry V and Testicular Masculinity, or, According to the OED, Shakespeare Doesn’t Have Any Balls,” RenD n.s. 30 (1999–2001): 3–23, 5; and Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 54.

56 On popular discontent with Elizabeth at the end of her reign, see for example Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 160–5.

57 Traub, p. 69; and Eggert, p. 97.58 Montrose, p. 61.59 Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake,

Signs 7, 1 (Autumn 1981): 13–35, 16.60 Howard and Rackin, pp. 164–75.61 Stephen Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s

Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607,” SQ 45, 2 (Sum-mer 1994): 139–62.

62 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 10. See also Traub, pp. 50–2 and 59–60.

63 Both Curtis Perry and Suzanne Penuel investigate how Shakespeare’s males were imagined as maternal monarchs in reflection of James’s politi-cal program, which sought to augment his authority by “incorporat[ing] the maternal” (Perry, “Nourish-Fathers and Pelican Daughters: Kingship, Gender, and Bounty in King Lear and Macbeth,” in The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997], pp. 115–49, 119; and Penuel, “Male Mother-ing and The Tempest,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson [Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007], pp. 115–27). Similarly, Hackett argues that the romances’ patriarchs appropriate maternal language to claim the feminine power of storytelling (“‘Gracious Be the Issue’: Maternity and Narrative in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles [Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999], pp. 25–39).

64 Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berke-ley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 12–7. Her argument more recently has been taken up by others such as Kathryn Schwarz, who suggests that women pose their greatest threat to men when they willingly and eagerly fulfill their societally mandated duties (What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011], pp. 1–21), or Holly A. Crocker, who argues that The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate channels agency through mandated passivity (“Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing A-Part in The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 54, 2 [Summer 2003]: 142–59).

65 Adelman, Suffocating, p. 8.


66 Howard and Rackin, pp. 147–8; Marcus, p. 66; Eggert, p. 82; and Rackin, pp. 196–7.

67 Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effemi-nization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 1–25. Levine quotes Stephen Gosson, who argues in The School of Abuse (1579) that the theater “‘effeminated’ the mind” (p. 10).

68 Eggert, pp. 76–99.69 For Richard III, see Howard and Rackin, p. 109; and Eggert, pp. 70–6.

For Antony, see Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopa-tra” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 132–45. For Lear, see Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 33–49; Perry; and Adelman, Suffocating, pp. 103–29. For Macbeth, see Kahn, Man’s Estate, pp. 151–92; Adelman, Suffocating, pp. 130–64; and Perry. For Prospero, see Stephen Orgel, “Prospero’s Wife,” Representations 8 (Autumn 1984): 1–13; and Penuel. For Cymbeline, see Adelman, Suffocating, p. 203. For Timon, see Adelman, Suffocating, pp. 165–92.

70 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in The Riverside Shake-speare, pp. 1146–82, II.ii.87. See also Paster, pp. 93–112, for a discussion of the gendered implications of this statement.

71 Marcus, pp. 102–3; and Eric S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), p. 202. For similar readings, see, for example, Stephen Cohen, “(Post)modern Elizabeth: Gender, Politics, and the Emergence of Modern Subjectivity,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20–39.

72 Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1–101.

73 Publication statistics are derived from A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 2d edn., 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91). The statistics given refer only to discrete editions of single plays; editions in collections are not counted.

74 Ibid.75 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 50 and 142.76 On the play’s dating, see Hunt, “The Garter Motto in The Merry Wives

of Windsor,” SEL 50, 2 (Spring 2010): 383–406, 385.

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