Rice University Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Rice University
Gender, Genre, and Elizabeth's Princely Surrogates in "Henry IV" and "Henry V"
Author(s): MEGHAN C. ANDREWS
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 54, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama
(SPRING 2014), pp. 375-399
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24511208
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SEL 54,2 (Spring 2014): 375-399 375
ISSN 0039-3657
© 2014 Rice University
Gender, Genre, and

Princely Surrog
in Henry IV and H
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 mothef
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.
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 Dreanis 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
centuiy—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 inquiiy. 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 the

nuanced interpretation of g
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 apociyphal "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 Heniy 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 other power as a

object worthy of masculine appropriation opens more space for
feminine agency in the cultural imaginaiy 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
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, Maiy
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 Heniy 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 Dream19 This maternal
figuration, moreover, was not limited to literaiy 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
Maiy," the last reinforcing the culture's perception of Elizabeth
as a maternal figure even if sh

Hal's seemingly offhand com
into a prominent strain of
association of the monarch
connecting his father with t
In a much broader way, 1
Elizabeth through the King'
period, masculine and femin
biological essentials but sta
the possibility of effeminac
into the female," was a majo
to perform their masculin
overlapping registers, rangin
sexual to the linguistic to th
however, Hemy fails to perf
and so an early modern aud
as an effeminate man. We h
tion of Henry as his mothe
Shakespeare begins 1 Henry
physiologically, evident in H
My blood hath been too co
I will from henceforth rathe

Mighty and to be fear'd, th
Which hath been smooth a
And therefore lost that titl
Which the proud soul ne'er
(I.iii. 1—9; emph
The early modern humoral

as the cold and wet sex, me
his cold wetness, Henry des
temporaries would have conn
recall Katherina's descriptio
smooth," with "soft conditio
inferiority to men.24 Falstaff
[Hal] did naturally inherit o
in possession of womanish h
speech also feminizes him in
does, by connecting him to
variation of Henry's "I will f
voiced no less than five time
Second, each time referring to Richard's lack of masculine a

thority.26 The phrase takes on particularly gendered connotation
when, after Henry chastises Hal for his "wanton and effeminate
behavior, Hal claims that he will " [b]e more myself' in the futur
(JH4, 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 permeabl
and leaky, as "a particular kind of uncontrol" of the body was
depicted as "a function of gender."28 Men, on the contrary, wer
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 fa

made to the narrative provi
of England, Scotland, and Ir
his source focus the action
aggregate effect presents H
is more honored in the breach them the audience's observance—
and perhaps the other characters' observance as well. Hotspur's
attack on the effeminate Court popinjay he characterizes as
"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 numbe
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 atTilbuiy—"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
Heniy with Elizabeth. Without offering one-to-one, à clef corre
spondences, I 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 Heniy'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 Heniy's death, thus seems to separate the mater
nal from the Henriad and Hal himself. 2 Henry IVs 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 IVs 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 maybe (V. epilogue. 17).
With these scenes emphasizing Elizabeth's presence bracketing
2 Henry IV, the play's own attempts to buiy 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

"the warlike Harry, like him
sentiment it conveys—that H
masculine norms and rule—li
before him (I.prologue.5; em
tion is prophetic, as Hal wil
throughout his titular play.
Several critics have demon
with establishing Hal's masc
tries to repress: the female
His claim to the throne of F
but the characters in the pla
late this genealogical fact.
sively recounted: all through
of the English is ... insisted up
the dangers of any reliance
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 Vs 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 Vs 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-centuiy 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 théorie,"
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 Vs
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

"wanton and effeminate" day
is nothing if not another ta
foot in its feminized, fertile w
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.
Ill
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 Vas A Midsumme
Night's Dream-style wish fulfillment (H5, V.chorus.30 and 32). A
the time the play was written, Elizabeth's popularity was perhap
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 Vnaturally 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 o
power to the male subject," while Eggert argues that as part of it
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 Henr
Vs 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 "no
only ... an end but also ... a source of cultural production," w
might wonder what work was being done by these represent
tions of the queen.58
First, these depictions complicate our understanding of the
Henriad as a narrative of the repression of Elizabeth. Critics ten
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

temporality.59 We see this
Henry IV, from Heniy IV to
in Henry VI to Richard III. S
is, I suggest, Elizabeth's ap
deeply embedded desire for
repressed because, conscious
actually her country's unack
retain her presence, each ki
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,
tunneled 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 histoiy 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
histoiy 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 mechani
at work only in Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, with James's str
on maternal bounty and generosity part of his kingly person
not in Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays.63 Yet we can see it in
Henriad, albeit motivated by a different pressure: not the creat
of a monarch's image but the neutralizing of it. This dynamic m
even have served a larger compensatoiy function. Coppélia Ka
has argued that early modern England's patriarchal society w
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 su

jects, who felt that her mere presence on the throne feminized
her subjects. Certainly the young militant nobles of her Court fel
emasculated by her avoidance of military entanglements, often
blaming her gender for this perceived weakness.66 Seeing a kin
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 Vby 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 thoug

suck."70 These monarchs occ
continuum—Heniy VI, a gent
avoids the public sphere, is e
wife, while the self-indulgent
identification with his spouse
but Shakespeare's deploymen
consistent throughout his c
study. Imagining gender ide
us to pay greater attention no
each figure but also to inve
ways, in which each figure
fies in a way unique to its p
may suggest that Elizabeth
to envision political leaders
masculine traits; as the mas
can be in some ways a celebr
To restrict ourselves to th
bethan paradigm in dialogue
the decade for Shakespeare
are absent from Shakespea
to the end of the decade, an
almost uniformly comedies
Marcus has suggested that t
and Viola might well be reac
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 ... rewritfing] 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 histoiy—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 fantasi
in Shakespeare's writing? Leonard Tennenhouse has suggeste
that comedies and histories were specifically Elizabethan genre
because in both, the monarch is the sole figure able to unite orde
and disorder to effectively rule. He also argues that in the com
edies, part of the strategy included using the figure of the unrul
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 th
romantic comedies and the second tetralogy are devoid of actua
mothers—revealing a desire not to associate Elizabeth with any
older and now-infertile maternal presences—and instead includ
fantasies of a reborn Elizabeth. Probing the similarities betwee
the genres also allows us to reevaluate Henry Vs turn to roman
tic comedy in its last act. Instead of a puzzling or inappropriat
end to the play, we might view it as fitting in that it unites tw
Shakespearean genres that share a similar goal, turning Hal int
a romantic hero akin to Rosalind as a romantic heroine, complet
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 ha
argued for As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, an
as one might also argue for The Taming of the Shrew), we migh
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 ear

whether we agree with Mar
comedies—the fact that the
popular genre suggests that
deal to tell us not only about
also about the cultural fan
Perhaps it should not surp
a fantasy of a renewed Eli
through Falstaff and his co
to The Merry Wives of Wind
believes it was written before
that The Merry Wives of Win
requested by Elizabeth hersel
Shakespeare play in which th
women most dominant, and
dressed adult male character
clad in the apparel of Mothe
Given these factors, and des
eyes of Shakespeare scholars
Windsor is not the poor rel
tetralogy after all. The Merr
derstand the Henriad's psyc
any of Shakespeare's other w
NOTES
I would like to thank Douglas Bruster, Wayne Rebhorn, and Elizabeth

Scala for their generous and generative feedback on multiple version
this essay. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers at SEL for their ve
helpful suggestions.
1 Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender a
Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 61-94; and
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Riverside Shakespeare,
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 Lite
ary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: Univ. o
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 2. For examples of Eggert's point, see L
S. Marcus, who reads The First Part of Henry the Sixth s Joan as a distor
reflection of Elizabeth (Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Di
tents [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988], pp. 51-105); and Mau
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 ot

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,

31-56; or, in a recent treatment that speaks to that reading's longevity,
Tom MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spen
Shakespeare, Donne, andJonson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010
pp. 147-54.
10 In the early days of her rule, Elizabeth was often urged to marry in o
to reproduce and thereby provide a clear heir for the throne. For exam
"The Commons' Petition to the Queen at Whitehall," 28 January 1563: "T
forasmuch as your majesty's person should come to most undoubted
best heirs of your crown, such as in time to come we would most comf
ably see and our posterity shall most joyfully obey, it may please your
excellent majesty for our sakes, for our preservation and comforts, and
our most humble suit, to take yourself some honorable husband who
shall please you to join to you in marriage" (in Elizabeth I: Collected Wor
ed. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose [Chicago: Univ. of Chicag
Press, 2000], p. 76). Similarly, having sex to reproduce while he is still yo
is one rationale Venus offers Adonis for why he should accept her advan
(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

from these editions and will appea
and act, scene, and line number.
is 1H4, 2 Henry TV is 2H4, and He
13 Valerie Traub, Desire and An
spearean Drama (London: Routle
and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a
English Histories (London: Rout
14Thomas Lambard, "That which
Queen Elizabeth, in her Privie Ch
43° Reg. sui, towards William Lam
sions of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jo
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, Il.i. 198-9, ll.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.
36Leonel 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 similar

lems and those represented in th
the Well-Appointed King': Imag
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, Ill.i. 17-25, IH.iii. 12-4, 19-21, 33-5.
44Sinfield and Dollimore, p. 130.
45Sinfield 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
Sexualittes, 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 Vas a Royal Entry," SEL47,
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 ('Th
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 [Burlingto
VT: Ashgate, 2007], pp. 39-50, 40-4).
55 Eggert, p. 76; Rebecca Ann Bach, Tennis Balls: Henry Vand 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, ElizabethI(London: Longman, 1988), pp. 160-5.
57Traub, 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" (Peny, "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.
Kathiyn 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 stoiytelling
('"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 Kathiyn 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 I 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.
ForTimon, 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 ofElizabethan England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995),
p. 202. For similar readings, see, for example, Stephen Cohen, "(Postmodern
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, andlreland, 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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Gender, Genre, and

In his seminal article "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of

Meghan C. Andrews is a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at

identifies one of its weaknesses: it assumes that a literary repre

works, not least because the

dered power structures. This acknowledgment other power as a

One avenue through which Elizabeth enters the Henriad is, on

as a maternal figure even if sh

My blood hath been too co

I will from henceforth rathe

The early modern humoral

Second, each time referring to Richard's lack of masculine a

also notable that Henry's fa

situation in 1 Henry IV with their own. While critics have dis

If 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV encode Elizabethan society's

passion.43 Yet the prologue

self-conscious about the issue, as "the shift of style between six

prowess, Hal is still playing

Henry V has almost universally been read as a play that es

body"; and Peter Erickson argues that in the play, Shakespeare

Julia Kristeva has identified

Furthermore, in their attempts to appropriate her power,

mothers; for the mid-career Henriad, we can see an alternate

also have allayed some of the concerns of Elizabeth's male su

There are further implications for our understanding of Shake

privilege, relishes the thoug

more constitutive of the ear

I would like to thank Douglas Bruster, Wayne Rebhorn, and Elizabeth

Univ. of California Press, 1991], p. 86). In addition, Helen Morris, among ot

9 For the reading of Elizabeth in Venus, see Erickson, Rewriting,

Henry V. Subsequent references to

Throughout this essay, feminine or feminized will be used as a less strong

Cobb also investigates the similar

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