Shakespeare's plays Critical Essay | Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in
Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays

Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University

The quene perswaded and encoraged by these meanes, toke upon her and her husbande, the high power and aucthoritie ouer the people and subiectes. And although she ioyned her husbande with hir in name, for a countenaunce, yet she did all, she saied all, and she bare the whole swynge, as the strong oxe doth, when he is yoked in the plough with a pore silly asse.

A domestick fury makes ill harmony in any family.¹

Critically speaking, Shakespeare's Henry VI plays are always going to pieces. If the project of carving up these plays and giving only the best parts to Shakespeare has passed out of fashion, it has been replaced by various discussions of the plays as self-fragmenting—artifacts mirroring the disrupted state they describe. In this sense the logic of the plays might best be described in terms of repetition rather than...
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