The Many-Headed Monster in Henry VI, Part 2
The spectacle of the severed head is so common a feature of Eliza bethan and Jacobean history plays that it invites identification as the emblem (or perhaps fetish) that most prominently characterizes the genre. Visual representations of severed heads occur in a broad range of history plays, including Thomas Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War, George Peele's Edward I, William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Richard III, and Macbeth, George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey, Thomas Dekker's Sir Thomas Wyatt, and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Sir John van Olden BarnaveltThe reasons for the preval ence of the severed head in the history play are not difficult to deter mine. The display of the head serves as a striking, unmistakable image signifying not only the defeat and demise of the victim, but, more crucially, the loss or transfer of political power which is consoli dated through this act of violence.2 The political symbolism of the image is clearly evident in the closing scene of Marlowe's Edward II in which the newly crowned Edward III orders that Mortimer's head be placed on top of the murdered king's hearse. The resulting cere monial tableau not only symbolizes the avengement of murder but also encapsulates the transit of power through the course of the play, from Edward II to Mortimer and finally back to Edward's dynastic line.
Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI
As we all know, history is made by the questions we ask--or more by those we don't ask. Our conclusions derive as much from the ideological assumptions that we bring to a problem as from the 'facts of the case'. This is demonstrated by examining a little noticed line in a well known play, Hamlet. When the prince is handling the first skull thrown up from Ophelia's grave he comments: This might be my Lord Such-a-one ...now my Lady Worm's, chopless, and knocked about with a sexton's spade. Here's fine revolution, and we had the trick to see't (V.1.70-6). Ideology, it emerges, informs even the most 'neutral' of scholarly activities, the editor's investigation of lexical history. The most recent editor, Philip Edwards.s does not gloss 'revolution'; Harold Jenkins offers "as of the wheel of Fortune or the whirligig of time".3 Now it is true that the word 'revolution' derives from the observation of celestial rotation, but its immediate and particular context, embedded in imagery that reminds us that man himself as well as death can be a great leveller, makes us aware that the modem meaning, the overthrow of an order or regime by those previously subject to it (OED, 7), may be appropriate here. (Significantly, perhaps, the first recorded use in OED of the word with this meaning dates from 1600, about a year before Hamlet was written.) That is one point of reference. Ideology affects theatre too. In the 1982 BBC television version of 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher who demolishes the pretensions to authority of Jack Cade, was placed immediately before the camera, his opinions thereby foregrounded and valorised. Jack Cade became thereby a comic figure. It will be the point of this paper that what Cade proclaims constitutes a cause, and a cause that emerges from class oppression.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of