Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
Then, as a skillful actor would, she uses her words to conjure up for Burgundy images of things invisible, impressing into him a concrete, tangible vision of a land not contained within the theater: “Look on thy country, look on fertile France, / And see the cities and the towns defac’d … / See, see … / Behold” (3.3.44–50). Her words prefigure those of the Chorus in Henry V, but with none of their implications of dramatic effect requiring strenuous imaginative effort from a disbelieving audience. Far from it: Burgundy’s conversion under these blandishments is practically instantaneous, figured both as a bewitchment, and as a sexual capitulation in which he is the feminized partner:
Either she hath bewitch’d me with her words,
Or nature makes me suddenly relent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am vanquished; these haughty words of hers
Have batter’d me like roaring cannon-shot
And made me almost yield upon my knees.
(3.3.58–59, 78–80)
Although at first the contest between Joan’s and Talbot’s literary modes is evenly matched, 1 Henry VI comes to make provisional inroads on depriving the theatrical feminine of its power, by beginning to assimilate a different version of dramatic power to the male and the epic. Talbot’s brand of heroism, even dependent as it is on what the stage cannot directly convey, accumulates a certain dramatic power of its own—a power paradoxically derived from the absence of visible, staged effects; and Joan’s female, flamboyant, immediate brand of theater is increasingly disallowed.31 To maintain his own masculine integrity, Talbot cannot, of course, practice Joan-like verbal seductions, which would immediately associate him with theatrical diversion and enchantment. Moreover, Talbot does not project a stage presence that immediately enthralls. The Countess of Auvergne makes much of his unprepossessing appearance, calling him nothing but “a silly dwarf … this weak and writhled shrimp” (2.3.21–22), and mocking him for bearing no resemblance to an epic hero: “I thought I should have seen some Hercules, / A second Hector, for his grim aspect / And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs” (2.3.18–20). Far from being ravishing, Talbot’s person is shrunken, detumescent, inconsequential. But in this encounter with the Countess, Talbot begins to contrast that kind of ravishment with a new kind of theatrical creation, one that is manifestly not feminine in Joan’s terms. Rather than seducing his audience into abandoning their right minds—as Burgundy follows Joan—Talbot projects a vision that requires his audience to exercise their minds, to follow him in imagining a world that the immediate surroundings cannot contain, but in this case a world where female allurement is supplanted by heroic imperviousness.
Talbot’s response to the Countess illustrates this proposal of theater as an exercise in projection. When she declares she will clap him in irons, he tells her it is impossible to do so:
No, no, I am but shadow of myself:
You are deceiv’d, my substance is not here;
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity:
I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious lofty pitch
Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.
(2.3.49–55)
Only then does he call in his men, actualizing on stage, we would expect, the means to overpower her. But when we consider what Talbot is claiming—that he can’t call in all his soldiers, there wouldn’t be room for them—we realize that his projection continues to depend on his audience, the Countess, imagining more than his stage, her house, can hold. Like Joan, Talbot anticipates Henry V’s Chorus, but whereas Joan’s stratagem with Burgundy depends on her spellbinding presence—that is, a presence that binds his attention only to her, and to the sexualized bewitchment she acts out before us—Talbot’s design is to direct attention away from himself, to what is beyond his ability himself to enact. At this moment, Talbot solves the Aristotelian dilemma of how to represent epic heroism on stage without the presentation seeming ridiculous. When staged representation is replaced by voiced projection, when a dwarfish Talbot refers to his massive army, the audience stops sniggering and immediately responds as desired: the Countess is cowed into firm belief, surrendering the stage to the English warrior. “I find thou art no less than fame hath bruited,” she says in capitulating, “And more than may be gather’d by thy shape” (2.3.67–68).
If Talbot can assume dramatic authority in this way, why, we might wonder, can Joan not attempt a reciprocal appropriation? Why can feminine theatricality not seize hold of projective authority? The answer may lie in the essential incompatibility between the immediate theatrical ravishment Joan controls, and the detached descriptions by which the epic vision may be brought on stage. This incompatibility may be measured, in fact, by what happens when such descriptions are brought to bear on Joan herself. The French readily encomiate Joan as the English do Talbot. But such tributes transform all too quickly into eulogy, and in the process demonstrate how any memorial project of this kind serves to control, rather than to enhance, the feminine theatrical presence.32 Immediately after he deifies Joan as Astraea’s daughter, the Dauphin imagines her dead, shifting the object of his adoration from Joan herself, to the container he will have made for her ashes:
A statelier pyramis to her I’ll rear
Than Rhodope’s of Memphis ever was;
In memory of her, when she is dead,
Her ashes, in an urn more precious
Than the rich jewel-coffer of Darius,
Transported shall be at high festivals
Before the kings and queens of France.
(1.6.21–27)
It is worth examining how this passage, although seeming to confer explicit forms of power upon Joan, progressively empties each form of any real influence. At first the Dauphin appears to cede Joan the place of highest honor, the place of epic: the coffer to which he compares Joan’s funerary urn is the one in which Alexander the Great stored the treasured poems of Homer, progenitor (to the Renaissance mind) of all epic. Moreover, the image of how that urn will be displayed is evocative of a saint’s remains, brought out in a precious reliquary “at high festivals” to elicit the crowd’s devotion. But ashes are not poems, and although Joan’s remains may be put in an urn befitting epic, they do not display in these lines an epic poem’s ability to speak—the ability for which, we presume, Alexander valued the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nor do the Dauphin’s words grant to Joan the power of saintly relics: we hear nothing of this urn having any effect on the kings and queens who will look on it. Thus, though the word “transported” promises religious ecstasy, it is a promise instantly reneged upon—here the word has only its mundane meaning. Hence the Dauphin’s memorial construction of Joan, in its jewelled silence, shows none of the dramatic skill the not-dead Joan plies so well. In the Dauphin’s vision, the Joan who has ravished him—skillfully improvisational, uncontrollably verbal, seductively coercive—is literally shut up in a vessel not of her own making. A panegyric to Joan, unlike one to Talbot, is therefore discontinuous with her kind of theatrical authority; it transforms her from an active maker of theater to a mere object of spectacle. The Dauphin’s speech manipulates her, like Tamburlaine’s Zenocrate, into a dead image serving the male epic project, an inspiration for conquests not her own. Darius’s jewel-coffer was Alexander’s battle prize.33
The plot and the politics of 1 Henry VI require Joan’s eventual dismissal; but because her activities have been identified with one mode of theatricality, her removal also involves showing that mode to be both devalued and ineffectual. In short, the play as a whole enacts the desire voiced in the Dauphin’s fantasy: a desire to cordon off the feminine as a ravishing force, projecting her instead as a mute and contained spectacle. Act 5, scene 3, in which Joan’s loss of power is revealed, demonstrates this shift most visibly. Throughout the play, as we have seen, both the French praise and the English epithets attached