SOURCE: MacKenzie, Clayton G. “Emblems of an English Eden.” In Emblems of Mortality: Iconographic Experiments in Shakespeare's Theatre, pp. 15-38. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000.

In the following excerpt, MacKenzie discusses different icons of life-in-death in Shakespeare's English history plays that support the themes of renewal and heroic succession. He calls particular attention to the phoenix allusions and the idea of England as a new Troy in the Henry VI trilogy and to symbols of the nation as a new Eden in the second tetralogy.

The sixteenth century made much of the idea of “life in death,” one of its most popular visual metaphors being the phoenix, an exotic self-procreating bird which, as Pliny claimed, lived in Arabian spice trees.¹ Paradin's emblem in Les Devises Heroiques (1551) reveals the bird emerging from the ashes of its own fiery death.² Nicholas Reusner's Emblemata Nicolai Revsneri (1581), offering a similar image...