Criticism, June 22nd, 1996
The severed heads in 'Henry VI, Part 2' stand for the inability of the state to contain the revolutionary ideas the heads once held. Gloucester's dream of heads mounted on broken sticks presaged his downfall, which became the signal for civil war. Decapitation represented surgical removal of a threatening growth on the Body Politic, but the proliferating heads on stage create a symbol for the overthrow of natural order.
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 p...
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