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.
The unfailing machine
This article explores how the pre-eminent public psychology of the French Revolution – sentimentalism – shaped the necessity, understanding and construction of its most iconic public machine. The guillotine provided a solution to the problem of public executions in an age of both sentiment and reason. It was designed to rationalize punishment and make it more humane; but it was also designed to guard against the psychological effects of older, more variable and unpredictable methods of public execution on a sentimental public. That public, contemporaries argued, required executions performed by an unfailing technology. Rather than focus on the role of the guillotine after 1793, the article explores how the implacable mechanical action that helped produce the Reign of Terror and multiply the cadavers of medical science was demanded by the guillotine’s origins as a sentimental machine.
International EMS systems: New South Wales, Australia.
Australia has an area of 7,692,024 km 2 and a population of 19,169,083. The state of New South Wales (NSW) has an area of 801,428 square kilometres and a population of 6,663,700 (June 2002). It contributes 10% of the land area of Australia and 34% of the population. The length of the coastline is 2007 km with an east-west distance of 1450 km (Fig. 1). Approximately 90% of the NSW population resides within 100 km of the coast. The population density is greatest in the Greater Metropolitan Region around Sydney, an area of 1580 square km, population of 4,154,722. Only 0.6% live in regions classified as remote or very remote (based upon distance to regional townships). The climate is generally mild, although temperature extremes range from � /20 8C (Charlotte’s Pass) to 50 8C (far Western NSW). The highest point is 2228 m at Mt. Kosciuszko. However, most of NSW is below 500 m in altitude.