ABSTRACT
T use in the histories is high, higher on average than in the other genres (see Table 1.1). The early histories in particular show a high percentage of T use (58 per cent in 2 Henry VI, 61 per cent in 3 Henry VI and 55 per cent in 1 Henry VI). Since all three plays exhibit this high use, questions of authorship do not seem to be an issue, nor is the use a function of date of composition alone: of the plays written in the same period, Titus Andronicus has 58 per cent Ts, but The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew have a much lower incidence. The high incidence of T in the history plays as a whole is not, in fact, surprising: men, consistently more frequent T users than women, dominate them; the conflicts in the plays are frequently expressed in head-to-head confrontations between members of the same, status-conscious, social group, who will use T both to express anger and to assert superior social or moral status. Grief and lamentation, which also feature heavily, attract T too. It is also possible that Shakespeare felt that the older T was appropriately archaic for the plays’ historical settings. In addition, there is a surprising finding: T use is very high among the dominant women in the plays. We have already seen, in Goneril and Regan, for example, how transgressive women are marked out by their inappropriate T use; in the Histories, this becomes a much stronger pattern, in the speech of Queen Margaret and Joan La Pucelle in particular, but also in that of more conventional women like Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth, driven beyond the bounds of conventional propriety. It is the pronoun exchanges between men and women that I shall focus on in particular in this chapter.
