"An headlesse Ladie" and "a horses loade of heades": writing the beheading

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2007 by Patricia Palmer

1. INTRODUCTION

In 1612, five years after the Flight of the Earls signalled the symbolic end of the Gaelic order, John Webster wrote The White Devil. (1) The savagery of the Irish wars had already been winnowed down in English recollection to Irish savagery. Cold-bloodedly plotting to avenge his sister Isabella, Francisco, Duke of Florence, links atrocities of decapitation to Irishness twice in fifty-five lines. His ally, the malign Cardinal, provides him with a "black book ... to point me out a list of murderers." This book, he mordantly recognizes, has been compiled by an underling who "intends, / As th'Irish rebels wont were to sell heads, / So to make prize of these." (2) Steeled to set in motion his own lurid revenge, he triumphantly concludes, "Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter. / Like the wild Irish I'll ne'er think thee dead, / Till I can play at football with thy head." (3) Webster scholars have obligingly fanned out in search of real-life parallels. The New Mermaid's editor, Christina Luckyj, thoughtfully explains that "The Irish were notoriously cruel and bloodthirsty." (4) R. W. Dent, followed by David Gunby, cites Thomas Gainsford (writing four years after Webster): "[the Irish] are desperate in reuenge, and their kerne thinke no man dead, vntill his head be off." (5) Dent helpfully directs us to F. P. Magoun's History of Football from the Beginnings to 1871. Magoun's instances, however--the Green Knight's head being kicked about in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the head of an abbott's murdered servant kicked around a fourteenth-century Cheshire monastery "by feet, in the manner of a ball," a Shrove Tuesday ritual in Kingston-upon-Thames--seem wide of the mark as glosses on the practices of the "wild Irish." (6) Indeed, in a pattern that threatens to become circular, Magoun's only Irish instance comes from Webster.

We need to go to Ireland, it seems, to see precisely what kind of terrible games were being played out in the desolate landscape of the Elizabethan conquest. Webster, and all of London, would have heard about Sir John Chichester's gruesome end. Chichester, the Governor of Carrickfergus, turned a parley into an ambush and paid for his unchivalrous sally with his head. The head was sent "to [Hugh O'Neill] the Earl of Tyrone by four horsemen" and, rumour had it, "was made a football by the rude galloglass of the army." (7) But far from being the exclusive sport of the wild Irish, this was a game which all sides played. The Old English citizens of Limerick, backing O'Neill in his rebellion, "vaunt[ed] that they assaulted the Constable of the castle ... and cut off his head, and brought the same into the Island, and played at football with it." (8) In Ulster a New English Captain, Humphrey Willis, and his soldiers "cut off the head of the son of Edmund MacHugh McGuire and hurled it from place to place as a football." (9) This triangulation suggests that the neat demarcation of savagery performed by Webster's comparatives ("as th'Irish rebels," "like the wild Irish") hides a more complex story.

Webster's clutch of Irish allusions fits with the dark undertow of pan-European misery that darkens his play: 40,000 shaven-headed Polish beggars, Dutch gallows-birds swung to the drop from their fellows' shoulders, Russian debtors with punitively smashed shins. (10) But as Ann Rosalind Jones argues, the images of the wild Irish provide a barbaric counterpoint to supersubtle Italian decadence, leaving the English as the implicit golden mean between these polarized variants of European depravity. (11) But the simplicities of that polarity are challenged, paradoxically, by poles: the poles that stake out the landscape of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, each with its severed head.

Far from being a story of polarities (civil Englishmen versus Irish headhunters), late sixteenth-century Ireland is marked by intersections. In the extremities of a war of attrition, carefully drawn lines between civility and savagery dissolve: the real bleeds into the imagined, and aestheticized violence offers no respite from slaughter. (12) The lethal intimacy of close combat reduces the distinction between beheader and beheaded to one of hazard. (13) Equally, acts of beheading intersect with beheadings as art. Revealingly, Magoun's list glides effortlessly from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's Wirral of romance to a real Cheshire monastery. The line between fact and fiction, between violent act and violent aesthetic, blurs. In fact, Sir Gawain exemplifies the kind of intersections that lie at the heart of this paper. At one level--linguistically and geographically--the poem is archetypally north-of-England. But tucked into its very plotline--the beheading challenge--is a ninth-century Irish tale, the Fled Bricrenn. (14) An English beheading tale folds over into an Irish one. And, as we shall see, artful fictions of beheadings intersect with all-too-real decapitations.

2. A PARITY OF ATROCITIES?

He made for the field of slaughter. He came upon a half-headed man who had half a corpse on his back.