Giddy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown: Apoplexy and Political Spectacle in 2 Henry IV Pauline Ellen Reid University of Denver
[email protected] In one of 2 Henry VI’s more notorious moments, Margaret of Anjou places a paper crown on the head of Richard, Duke of York, bidding him to ‘Stamp, rave, and fret, that I may sing and dance. / Thou wouldst be fee’d, I see, to make me sport: / York cannot speak unless he wear a crown’ (1.4.90-2).1 In this scene, Margaret forces York into the position of an early modern actor or itinerant beggar, paid to publicly imitate madness for an audience. Early modern surgeon Ambroise Paré includes a polemic against such criminal tactics in his tract, On Monsters and Marvels: Such as feigne themselves dumbe, draw backe and double their tongues in their mouths. Such as falling downe counterfeit the falling sickenesse… and shake their limbes and whole body. Lastly by putting sope into their mouths, they foame at the mouth like those that have the falling sickenesse.2 The ‘falling sickness’ in Paré’s text describes the conditions of both epilepsy and apoplexy. Paré’s observations reveal the falling sickness as a metatheatrical and political symbol in early modern culture. During Margaret’s confrontation with York, the actor, who solicits applause, performs a ruler, who performs a criminal beggar’s artificial performance of giddy madness, all while wearing a paper crown as a literal and symbolic ‘prop’. In Margaret’s mockery, and, arguably, across the history cycle, the dominant thematic concern rests not merely in the representational nature of power, or stagecraft as statecraft, but in the fissures within, and fragility of, that representation.