SOURCE: Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard. “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc.” English Literary Renaissance 18, no. 1 (winter 1988): 40-65.

In the following excerpt, Jackson concentrates on the symbolic power of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part 1 and maintains that this character would have elicited Elizabethan associations with Amazons, warrior-women, and witches.

Glory is like a circle in the water,(1) Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. With Henry's death the English circle ends; Dispersed are the glories it included. 

1 Henry VI, 1.2.133-37²

This wonderfully evocative description of the everything that is nothing, an exact emblem of the rise and disintegration, in Shakespeare's first tetralogy, of one new center of power after another, is assigned to Joan of Arc, the character whom most critics agree in calling a coarse caricature, an exemplar of authorial chauvinism both national and sexual, or at...