Dying Offstage: Gender, Materiality, and Martyrdom in 1 Henry VI

Elizabeth Williamson

Abstract:

Despite the fact that Joan of Arc’s death was well-documented, 1 Henry VI withholds the spectacle of her execution—in large part, I think, because it would have been impossible to convincingly stage the act of burning someone at the stake. Like some of her fellow martyrs who had their tongues cut out in order to prevent them from testifying to their faith in their final moments, Joan is blocked from accessing the powerful combination of suffering and witnessing that male characters draw on in other parts of the cycle; the play is interested in staging her degradation, not her martyrdom.  

But where does that leave Joan: what is a martyr without the performance of martyrdom? Tricomi is puzzled by the contradictions between the Pucelle of Acts 1-4 and the Pucelle of Act 5; in an attempt to resolve this tension, he compares both unfavorably to that model of womanhood, the ever-patient Anne Askew. Such analyses elide the differences between theatrical representations and written martyrologies and attempt to impose a stable notion of identity on both. Following Bloom, Bosman and West, my essay tests out the claim that Joan’s flickering subjectivity “is productive rather than reflective or derivative” and that her absent martyrdom contributes to this productivity (169). At the same time, I will attempt to both honor and complicate Tricomi’s initial insight by suggesting some of the ways in which Askew’s hypervisibility (in Foxe’s text, especially) sheds light on the suppressed spectacle of Joan’s death.

Selected works cited:

Bloom, Gina, Anston Bosman, and William N. West. “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality, Or, How Performance Is History.” Theatre Journal 65, no. 2 (May 2013): 165–82.

Coles, Kimberly Anne. “The Death of the Author (and the Appropriation of the Text): The Case of Anne Askew’s Examination.” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 99, no. 4 (May 2002): 515–39.

Mazzola, Elizabeth. “Expert Witnesses and Secrete Subjects: Anne Askew’s Examinations and Renaissance Self-Incrimination.” In Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, edited by Carole Levin and Patricia Ann Sullivan, 157–72. SUNY Series in Speech Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Tricomi, Albert H. “Joan La Pucelle and the Inverted Saints Play in 1 Henry VI.” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 25, no. 2 (2001): 5–31.