A Few Bullet Points

A few bullet points on Henry VI, Part 1:

• Why is it that when a powerful woman shows up in this play (Joan of Arc), she is automatically taken to be a scurrilous witch, but when a powerful man shows up (Talbot), he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread? Seem rather unfair, doesn’t it? Perhaps the fact the she’s also French has something to do with it (everything to do with it?)
• Speaking of witches, there’s lots of supernatural stuff going on here which I find entertaining and a good foil to the heavy, plodding (at times) plot. It works to juxtapose theses elements.
• There is something else going on here in this play, something political. Some of the commentary I have been reading suggests that by showing a destabilized, chaotic, pre-Tudor world, Shakespeare was trying to make his own monarch at the time (the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I) look good by comparison. I can believe this.
• Here’s a vivid image, one of many, given to us in this play:

“O, were mine eyeballs into bullets turn’d; That I in rage might shoot them at your faces.”

Nice, right? Conjure up that one in the mind…really captures the anger, eh?

• Shakespeare creates one heck of a cliffhanger here in the closing lines, spoken in true hand-wringing, evil-glaring fashion by the Earl of Suffolk:

“Margaret shall now be Queen, and rule the King;
But I will rule both her, the King, and Realm.”

TA DUM! (ominous music). Trouble’s a-comin.’