The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam by Jerry Brotton

Author:Jerry Brotton [Brotton, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

8

Mahomet’s Dove

In his diary entries for the Rose Theatre’s spring season in 1592, Philip Henslowe noted that Marlowe’s Jew of Malta was a popular hit, performed on at least ten occasions, but its success was soon eclipsed by a new play called Henry VI. Henslowe recorded that the play’s first performance took place on March 3, 1592, and during the rest of the season it was performed on fifteen occasions, often on alternate days with The Jew of Malta.1 Today few people read Shakespeare’s earliest forays into English history, but during the first half of his career the three parts of Henry VI, written in rapid succession in the early 1590s, were enormously popular with audiences, offering a distinctive new style that challenged Marlowe’s theatrical supremacy.

Shakespeare did not try to compete with Marlowe by imitating his “high astounding terms” and exotic settings. Instead he looked closer to home, to the Plantagenets, the flawed line of medieval kings who preceded the Tudors. London’s commercial theater had never been secure enough to put recent English history onstage, let alone to humanize it by considering the vulnerabilities and frailties of weak kings and transforming them into tragic figures. Marlowe emphasized his characters’ relentless will to power. Shakespeare, by contrast, succeeded in making historic failures into figures of empathy, insight and pathos.

The first act of Henry VI, Part 1 opens much as Tamburlaine ends, with the death of a fabled warrior—in this case, Henry V—with no obvious successor strong enough to fulfill his legacy.2 What follows is a catalog of woe, as the infant king and his advisers prove powerless to prevent civil strife and the loss of French territories so valiantly conquered by his father. Central to the play are its portrayal of the French mystic and warrior Jeanne La Pucelle, known in Britain as Joan of Arc, and the death of the famous English warrior John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in a scene said to have caused the shedding of “the tears of ten thousand spectators” when the play was first performed.3

In Act I, scene 2, the French dauphin Charles tries to raise the siege of Orleans but is beaten back by the English. He is then introduced to Joan, who,

by a vision sent to her from heaven,

Ordained is to raise this tedious siege

And drive the English forth the bounds of France.4

Marlowe’s ghost was never far from Shakespeare’s early plays, and Joan describes herself as “by birth a shepherd’s daughter,” who is “black and swart.”5 Challenged to single combat to prove her worth, she wins, whereupon the heir to the French throne boldly chooses to make her the leader of the French army. Looking on this self-confessed visionary, Charles exclaims:

Was Mahomet inspirèd with a dove?

Thou with an eagle art inspirèd then.

Helen, the mother of great Constantine,

Nor yet Saint Philip’s daughter’s, were like thee.

Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth,

How may I reverently worship thee enough?6

The dauphin struggles to understand Joan’s strength and capabilities before he alights on an analogy that

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