Abstract
In early modern England, state beheadings were carefully codified, reserved for the nobility and those convicted of treason. The highest and lowest in society were sentenced to beheading: those who headed the nation and those who threatened the head of the nation. Beheading was both a confirmation and an inscription of power: the publicly-staged state-mandated beheading inscribed the state’s power on the subject’s body, reducing the individual to a legible, mastered sign. The decapitated head was intended to be a stable, monosemantic inscription of state power.Shakespeare, however, often resisted the idea of the decapitated head as a permanent, definitive inscription of state authority. This article will examine decapitations in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 (1591), exploring how these plays undermine the state’s attempt to inscribe a stable, single meaning on the decapitated head. The plays do this in two ways: firstly, by challenging the state’s monopoly on according hierarchised punishment, by staging illicit beheadings; secondly, by according an agency and an influence to the decapitated head itself on the stage. The recognition of how these staged beheadings undermine the state’s inscription of power might guide us towards seeing the genre’s recurrently subversive response to the state’s claim to authority.
Highlights
Shakespeare, often resisted the idea of the decapitated head as a permanent, definitive inscription of state authority
This article will examine decapitations in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 (1591), exploring how these plays undermine the state’s attempt to inscribe a stable, single meaning on the decapitated head. The plays do this in two ways: firstly, by challenging the state’s monopoly on according hierarchised punishment, by staging illicit beheadings; secondly, by according an agency and an influence to the decapitated head itself on the stage
In early modern England, state beheadings were carefully codified, reserved for the nobility and those convicted of treason
Summary
State-ordered beheadings in early modern England were ‘great public scaffold dramas’ in Regina James‘s words (2005: 41), publicised in advance and performed in front of crowds, with the decapitated head erected in central public places such as London Bridge, Lambeth Palace and Parliament House to ensure the continuance of a public message of state power Underlying these spectacular decapitations, was the careful codification of who could be beheaded within the hierarchy of contemporary state-decreed punishments. The state‘s attempt to inscribe a single, stable meaning upon the decapitated head fails; the contemporary spectator confers their own interpretation upon the head Such undermining of intended meaning is a risk in any public execution, as the hagiographic reclamation of the more frequently burned martyr attests, the dual inscription of the decapitation as both punishment and recognition of nobility renders it vulnerable to such destabilisation
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