My titles are never as cool as Pax's.....

So a bunch of people have already done some great comments on the lectures tonight (props to Caitlin for using the fewest words and still beating us all) but I'll throw in a few thoughts anyway. When Doug was talking about the way we treat the dead, and how Henry VI went from a lunatic in life to a saintly healer in death, I was thinking about the power of words. We've talked about this a lot in class, with varying viewpoints from varying different theorists. I kind of want to reach back to Sidney and his discussions on poetry being superior to history because history is "tied not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth and not to the general reason of things" whereas poetry transcends these bounds (262). In this case (and many other "in loving memory" cases), the history loses these factual boundaries and becomes a sort of poetry - a story evolving from fact into something more universal. The only problem is that its original foundation in a once living person remains, and the history and the poetry become blurred until neither one are really doing any good. Hence the history of a person becomes a canvas on which people project their needs and desires, and all facts about the person's life are ignored and/or obliterated. But back to the power of words. It wasn't as if all of a sudden all the people in England had an innate idea that the dear dead Henry was actually a saint. No, what happened was that someone got the idea and started spreading it, and Henry became immortalized in words in a way he never actually presented himself physically. These words, these dialogues, these stories - they all create the memory of Henry by completely overshadowing reality. Every lasting memory that has ever existed has been because of the words used to describe that person after their death. Amazing how all of those silly little consonants and vowels can take a life and turn it into nearly the opposite of what it was. And alas, that's exactly what happened to Henry, and his true life gets lost under the "poetic" stories of later years.
In something of a turn of focus but still with the same main theme, I'd like to bring in Pam's argument here. Pam talked about the significance of autographs, the written word, and its power of establishing identity. It was almost something of an "I write, therefore I am" idea. Each time a person writes their signature, they are reaffirming their own identity and existence. But, just as with the words that are used to blur reality and fantasy as seen with Henry VI, these signatures themselves create something of a doctored reality. The writer of the autograph would have to be someone famous for their signature to be of any real value, and therefore the life they presented would be something tailored to be suitable for the public eye. Thus these signatures are merely the written emblem of that carefully constructed public image, not necessarily reality. And as Pam said, not all of the autograph collections came from people acquiring autographs through a direct correspondence with the person whose autograph they wanted. Rather these autographs could be traded for others and even purchased. Thus instead of affirming identity, the words (aka the autograph) become more valuable than the individual behind them, and the autograph collector uses them to create the illusion of importance by displaying the signatures of a person he or she may never have spoken to in their lives.
Words. Here we see what they can really do: Create fictions and improved realities, capable of rewriting histories even in favor of an insane king. Kind of creepy.