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Summary
Joan and several of her soldiers gather outside the gates of Rouen disguised as peasants. She tells them to wander the city quietly and look for ways to attack the city in force. Charles and his lords Alençon, René, and the Bastard of Orléans wait outside the city. Charles wonders how they will know when to attack, when Joan appears with a torch on the city walls. The lords immediately launch their forces. Meanwhile, Talbot discovers the attack in progress and curses Joan, the sorceress whom he blames for his forces’ weakened state.
Burgundy and Talbot are within Rouen, along with Bedford, who is ill and propped up in a chair. Meanwhile, the French lords are assembled outside the city. Joan and Charles taunt the English, and Talbot curses Joan. Talbot asks the French if they will dare to meet in the field to fight an honest battle. Joan says no, but Talbot says he wasn’t talking to her—just to the “real” soldiers, meaning the other French lords. However, they refuse as well. Before Joan and the other Frenchmen depart, Talbot scorns them for refusing to fight like gentlemen.
Talbot is angered that they reproach his fame. He swears by the king and by his father that he will get the town back or die trying. Bedford echoes his sentiments, and when Talbot asks Burgundy to move the aging man to a safer place, Bedford insists on remaining near his men. As the lords exit, and Sir John Fastolf runs across the stage, fleeing from what he believes to be a certain defeat for the English. Meanwhile, offstage, the British troops chase away Joan and her French forces. Bedford, satisfied by the temporary victory, dies.
Analysis
In these action-filled scenes, we see a contrast between an old mode of warfare, epitomized by Talbot and his men, and a new version, represented by Joan. Joan sneaks into Rouen to find its weakest point before leading the French forces in an assault on the city. Yet such tactics would seem dishonorable to Talbot, who prefers a fair fight. He even asks the French if they would be willing to meet in a field for an old-style battle, but they refuse. Under Joan, sneak attacks will become the French’s primary tactic, while Talbot continues to function under a code in which a soldier values honor above all else—even respecting the honor of his enemy. Bedford, too, is a warrior of the old style; citing the example of the legendary Uther Pendragon (King Arthur’s father), he declares he’d rather lead his men from a chair than not be at the battle at all.
Shakespeare often contrasts old heroes with the new upstarts, and while he portrays the heroes of the past as deserving of respect, he also shows them to be inflexible and out of date. Talbot’s chivalry has carried him far, but with the French army now employing Joan’s unconventional methods, he will prove unable to adapt, and he will lose. The final scene in this section of the play offers two key moments that foreshadow Talbot’s loss. First is the flight of the cowardly Sir John Fastolf, who runs across the stage declaring a victory for France. This declaration is premature, since Rouen has not yet fallen—and as we see but a moment later, the French forces are pushed into retreat. Even so, his flight from the scene of battle is conspicuous, especially since Falstof’s previous desertion is what led Talbot to be captured by the French. The second key moment is more a matter of pathos than of direct foreshadowing. When he sees the French retreat, the dying Bedford reads this as a turning point in the battle. Extrapolating an English victory from this moment, he dies in peace. Yet we know that this very minor victory is likely to be fleeting, and that Bedford’s sense of peace is therefore illusory.
