ABSTRACT
Gower, the English captain, explains Pistol's offense and subsequent punishment: you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor. While English reports early on in the play would have us associate the Welsh with brutality and witchcraft, modern critics, in a more subtle vein, have persuasively demonstrates that Wales and the Welsh in these plays can be seen as feminizing, history-disrupting, marginalized snares and that the beguiled Mortimer, nestled in his singing lady's lap and effectively removed from the warring political realm in England, can be likened to the seductively dangerous and evocatively Celtic realm enacted in Spenser's Bower of Bliss. The episode also highlights one of the English state's principle appropriations of 'Welsh' history in establishing the primacy of the early 'British' church over Rome, an invaluable Welsh correction of a contentious English condition.
