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.
Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories
This book is a critical inquiry into Shakespeare's English history plays of the 1590s which poses radical questions about the relationship between dramatic "making" and historic "knowing." What happens, the author asks, when a powerful imagination that transforms everything it touches into present action grapples with the stuff of history? What becomes of the history, and what happens to the drama? What are the history plays? The author seeks to answer these and other fundamental questions.
Industrial Relations in 1988
Undoubtedly, the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983 marked a turning point in Australian industrial relations. To a large extent industrial turbulence receded, helped along by global econ omic instability and the influence ofthe Prices and Incomes Accord between the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU). Arguably, the apparent success of the Accord owed something to a widespread concern within unions that the election of a Liberal-National Party government at the federal level would have resulted in a major pro gram of economic regulation, especially in relation to the institutions ofthe labour market. During 1988, despite an increasingly buoyant economy, the continuing influence of these economic and political conditions ensured that the level of industrial disputation remained subdued by historical stan dards, though those opposed to the nascent corporate state or centralised wage fixing may have been heartened by signs that wage restraint was fraying at the...