SOURCE: “Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 140-67.

In the excerpt below, Schwarz studies the complex portrayal of women in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3, focusing on the depiction of Joan as an outsider and as a contradictory embodiment of extremes. Schwarz also analyzes the portrayal of Margaret as both a conventional object of desire and a disruptive role-player.

To Be

Henry VI, Part 1 defines Joan with relentless thoroughness as an outsider. Opposed to an English male aristocratic ideal, she is a woman, a peasant, a virgin, a whore, a saint, a witch, an Amazon, and French. Her threatened invasion, while it challenges English idealizations of heroic significance and physical space, could consolidate those ideals; if the English, at the end of 1 Henry VI, return to a smaller England, they bring with them a clarified sense of what Englishness...