Margaret E. Owens, University of Toronto

The spectacle of the severed head is so common a feature of Elizabethan 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 HI, 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 Barnavelt.¹ The reasons for the prevalence of the severed head in the history play are not difficult to determine. 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 consolidated through...