Fun With Images

Title page from "The Ouer-throw of an Irish rebell," 1608.

A response to Adam's encouraging us to "spread our wings." Instead, I'll let some heads roll...

Last week Matteo shared his favorite scene-concluding couplet in "The White Devil":

FRANCISCO: Like the wild Irish, I'll ne'er think thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head. (4.1.134-5)


Patricia Palmer close reads exactly this couplet to begin her article, "'An headlesse Ladie' and 'a horse loade of heades': Writing the Beheading" (Renaissance Quarterly 60 [Spring 2007]: 25-57). Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and artists represented Irish "savagery" by capturing their propensity for beheading English enemies. And yes, they would run around the field of battle playing soccer with those heads. Yet the English, as Palmer points out, engaged in the same practice (beheading Irish enemies, not so much with the soccer). Instead, we get things like the above illustration. She puts pressure on beheadings "as a site of cultural confrontation and of unexpected assertions of humanity" (25). It's a good read if you're interested in relations with Ireland or the emerging field of decapitation studies.