The Problematics Of Subversion In William Shakespeare’s First Historical Tetralogy

The dissertation is to investigate the problematics of subversion in William Shakespeare’s First Historical Tetralogy（1-3 Parts of Henry VI and Richard III）from the critical perspective of New Historicism.Although the term“subversion”,as the key word of New Historicism,has been frequently adopted in previous critical practices of Shakespeare’s history plays,few have ever chosen to address this specific subject in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy from so many different angles in such a systematic way.In this dissertation,an effective approach of New Historicism would be applied so as to allow the social and historical factors other than literary texts into the practices of literary criticism.The tetralogy would be analyzed from such angles as the social psychology,politics,religion,law,diplomacy,gender,class,and ethics,etc.,with the traditional boundaries between disparate play-texts utterly collapsed and dissolved.The focus has been laid on the exploration of the subversive elements in the tetralogy,that is,those elements that run counter to the then dominant ideologies,and by rending the logical consistencies hidden between the lines,the dissertation seeks to analyze and interpret their subversive significances in combination with specific historical contexts.The dissertation is organized around the following four different representations of subversion:Chapter One,“The Subversion of Sovereign Authority in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Plays”,started with Elizabethan fears that the imminent death of the old virgin Queen might throw the Kingdom into a political crisis of interregnum.Through revealing how these sentiments were projected upon King Henry VI’s conspicuous absence in his father,King Henry V’s state funeral ritual,this chapter further argued that King Henry VI and King James I faced a similar challenge in that both their sovereign authorities suffered a similar threat of the popular nostalgia for the deceased Monarchs.The rest of the chapter,then,traced the disintegrating process of King Henry VI’s sovereign authority from three separate aspects:the unrestrained partisan politics,the corrupted legal trials,and the perverted diplomatic transactions.Of them,the factional infighting between Winchester and Gloucester in the plays highlighted the contemporary social and religious trends—the then social concerns about the Religious Reformation—in Shakespeare’s characterization of Winchester as a stereotype of the illegitimate bastardy and the corrupt Catholic clergy.In 2 Henry VI,a series of trial scenes were presented as pivotal political events which served as an accurate barometer of the order or disorder in the body politic,and the disintegration of the judicial system paralleled the political disintegration of Henry VI’s sovereign authority.In terms of orthodox western politics,the sovereign authority and the diplomatic representation should be mutually constitutive.However,there is no simple correspondence between theories and practices.Remote from their home authority and dangerously autonomous,the ambassadors and viceroys always ended up being perceived as potentially subversive characters.Chapter Two,“Gendered Subversion in Shakespeare’s 1^st Historical Tetralogy”,examined women’s roles as both the offender and the defender of the“natural”patriarchal order and stability.The duo of Joan la Pucelle and Margaret of Anjou embodied the typical threat of gendered subversion women were supposed to pose to men.However,even as the Henry VI plays utilized the tropes of archetypal witchcraft and Amazonomachy,they subtly undermined them,allowing these unruly women both to challenge and participate in the masculinist genre（the history play）from which they were traditionally excluded.In Richard III,the masculine authority was finally restored,but the patriarchal model based on masculine authority was still called into question by casting the conqueror as a deformed,usurping misogynist.Ultimately,Richmond’s triumph over King Richard at the Battle of Bosworth seemed to imply a way out of the ideological dilemma of patriarchy,with the conqueror being redefined as one who protected rather than persecuted women:a chivalrous hero saved his damsel in distress from the violation by an incestuous,murderous monster.The danger posed by female aggression was finally neutralized,however,by a dramatic sleight of hand:all the women magically disappeared from the stage of Richard III.Such a plot device seemed to evade rather than resolve the ideological crisis of patriarchy.Chapter Three,“The Subversion of Hierarchy in Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry VI Plays”,analyzed Shakespeare’s representation of class conflicts,class struggles,and Jack Cade’s Uprising in Henry VI Plays.In Medieval and Early Modern England,human relations were rigidly defined in terms of a cosmology based on a hierarchical Chain of Being.By inverting the relations between the Chain of Being and the social structure,Shakespeare’s history plays challenged the doctrine of the idealized world order,presenting disorder instead as the center and the context for the historical events.Historical scenes like the Yorkist rebellion against King Henry VI,Peter Thump the apprentice’s betraying and killing of his master Thomas Horner,the pirates’lynching of Suffolk,and ultimately Jack Cade’s Proto-Communist Uprising all seemed to testify that the supposed correspondence between the Sacred Chain of Being and the established institution of hierarchy was nothing but a hollow sham,secular and artificial,rather than ordained by God.Chapter Four,“The Ethical Subversion in 3 Henry VI and Richard III”,evaluated the significances of both the physical and the moral deformities of King Richard III.Richard’s physical deformity functioned as a visible marker of his moral corruption,yet through his theatric performance,Richard managed to circumvent the visual knowledge so that his victims repeatedly overlooked the physiognomic significances of his deformity.In blinding others to what his deformity really signified,Richard ultimately suggested that the outward appearances both might and might not reveal the internal truth,and that the dramatic illusions he created could be powerful enough to disguise even the most obvious signs of treacheries and deceptions.Built upon the assumptions of Early Modern Religious ethics,the dissertation discerned an increasing emphasis laid on the autonomy of the conscience as accusing an individual in the light of God’s Last Judgment.The latter section of this chapter further analyzed Richard’s fixation with the pangs of his guilt-ridden soul,demonstrating that as the play progressed,his fate was increasingly determined by what he believed.In dramatizing the subversive agency of the soul,Richard III also revised a central concern of the history plays:it transformed their representations of the illusion of appearances,through the self-deception of sins,into a tragedy of defying the fate.Finally,after all these in-depth analyses of the literary texts and the historical contexts of Shakespeare’s First Historical Tetralogy,the dissertation reached a general conclusion from the critical perspective of New Historicism.William Shakespeare,as one of the greatest playwrights in world history,could not have stayed indifferent to the problematics of“subversion”pervading both the dramatic actions of his own plays and the historical circumstances of his own era.Shakespeare’s history plays,while“faithfully”reproducing the“historical facts”presented in his chronicle sources,profoundly mirrors the contradictions and crises across the various levels of the then late Elizabethan society.This dissertation has attempted to address how the deep-seated reciprocity or mutual interaction between the literature and the history is finally achieved through the dramatic representation of the different forms of“subversion”in Shakespeare’s First Historical Tetralogy.And the problematics of“subversion”is,in fact,one of the core issues concerning the entire historical course of humanity.