‘To Pluck Bright Honour from the Pale-Faced Moon’: Gender and Honour in the Castlehaven Story

Abstract

For Hotspur, honour was a thing self-evident—easy to recognise and to defend. As his name suggests, the younger Percy equated honour with battle, with the supposed clarities of spilt blood and martial conquest. We can all agree, I think, that honour was a touchstone for both the fictional and the authentic Percies, as well as for most other early modern people. However, from the distance of three centuries (as well, of course, as from the perspective of other characters inHenry IV) the concept seems considerably more complicated than Hotspur's claims imply.