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“To Beare the Name of a Quéene”: Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and Lady Macbeth: Queenship and Motherhood

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Abstract

It is well known that William Shakespeare used historical source material to craft his characters. One of the most intriguing of these sources is Holinshed’s Chronicles, upon which Shakespeare drew for his depiction of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (2 Henry VI) and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth). With a focus on the themes of queenship and motherhood, this chapter uses the examples of Eleanor and Lady Macbeth to explore how Shakespeare adapted their representation in Holinshed’s Chronicles for the early modern stage. The chapter argues that Shakespeare’s depiction of Lady Macbeth was shaped by his earlier characterization of Eleanor. This approach brings the parallels between these two characters to the fore, providing insights into contemporary understandings of queenship and motherhood and revealing both as historically contingent. The intersection between these two states is highlighted in the plays when the absence of motherhood ultimately denies both Eleanor’s and Lady Macbeth’s claims to queenship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Aspects of this chapter are drawn from my Ph.D. thesis (Monash University) and I acknowledge the support of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. I thank Prof. Megan Cassidy-Welch for her comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

    Raphael Holinshed, The Description of Scotland, vol. 5 of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1965); Holinshed, vol. 3. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). The “mixed” authorship of the Henry VI plays has long been the subject of debate, see Knowles, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, 1–141, at 116–19: “collaborative composition between two authors cannot be ruled out.” Recent scholarship has taken this argument further. See Christopher D. Shea, “New Oxford Shakespeare Edition Credits Christopher Marlowe as a Co-Author,” New York Times, 2016. Acknowledging shared authorship, however, does not detract from the argument that Shakespeare’s depiction of Lady Macbeth was shaped by the earlier characterization of Eleanor. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, eds. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

  2. 2.

    Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester is hereafter referred to as “Gloucester.”

  3. 3.

    On queenship see, for example, John Carmi Parsons, ed., Medieval Queenship (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Joanna L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983). For recent commentary on the state of the field, see: Lois L. Honeycutt, “Queenship Studies Comes of Age,” Medieval Feminist Forum 51 (2016): 9–16. For recent work on royal mothers, see: Royal Mothers and Their Ruling Children: Wielding Political Authority from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era, eds. Elena Woodacre and Carey Fleiner, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Virtuous or Villainess? The Image of the Royal Mother from the Early Medieval to the Early Modern Eras, eds. Carey Fleiner and Elena Woodacre, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

  4. 4.

    On queenship and motherhood, see Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 7: “royal maternity was the matrix of future kings,” and “the main purpose of a queen was to provide an heir” (8). Earenfight also acknowledges queenship could be performed without an heir. See also Theresa Earenfight, “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe,” Gender & History 19 (2007): 1–21. For an English context, see Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 29. Drawing attention to the childless marriage of the literary Arthur and Guinevere, Laynesmith argues that “kings needed queens for something more than just childbearing.” The literary example of Arthur and Guinevere is an important reminder that sometimes succession was not straightforward, not only because a royal couple might not produce an heir, but also because a number of scenarios could also result in “unexpected heirs.” For recent work on this theme, see Unexpected Heirs in Early Modern Europe: Potential Kings and Queens, ed. Valerie Schutte, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). I am grateful to Valerie Schutte for sharing with me the introduction of this work prior to publication.

  5. 5.

    Knowles, “Introduction,” 121. Shakespeare’s first folio (F), assembled in 1623 by John Heminge and Henry Condell is accepted by Shakespearean editors as the control text for the play, while the earlier version (Q) was printed in 1594 (106–7).

  6. 6.

    On performance see Clark and Mason, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare, Macbeth, eds. Clark and Mason, 1–124, at 97–8.

  7. 7.

    On the history plays, see Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A feminist account of Shakespeare’s English histories (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. chs 3 and 6.

  8. 8.

    Knowles, “Introduction,” 30.

  9. 9.

    On Lady Macbeth and Margaret of Anjou, see, for example, M.L. Stapleton, “‘I of Old Contemptes Complayne’: Margaret of Anjou and English Seneca,” Comparative Literature Studies 43 (2006): 100–33, at 109–10. On Eleanor and Margaret of Anjou, see, for example, Kavita Mudan Finn, “Tragedy, Transgression, and Women’s Voices: The Cases of Eleanor Cobham and Margaret of Anjou,” Viator 47 (2016): 277–303. As part of an analysis of Eleanor and Margaret, Mudan Finn remarks upon Margaret as “the powerful queen […] whose influence can be seen in later characters from Lady Macbeth to Cleopatra” (301).

  10. 10.

    See, for example, Lawrence Manley, “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 “Henry VI” and The First Part of the Contention,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 253–87. On Eleanor: “Even in 2 Henry VIher ruthless ambition and consultations with witches make her more a Lady Macbeth than a proto-protestant saint” (266) and, where Manley draws attention to the “pathos” of Eleanor’s fall, as depicted by her penitential walk, remarking: “That pathos certainly resonates in “Shakespeare’s later depiction of Lady Macbeth, whose sleepwalking in her nightgown with a taper in her hand marks her as a penitent witch in her own mind,” (277) citing Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 86–7. See, too, Marion A. Taylor, “Lord Cobham and Shakespeare’s Duchess of Gloucester,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin 9 (1934): 150–6. On Eleanor’s depiction in the Mirror for Magistrates: “Like Lady Macbeth, she attempts to incite her husband to seize the throne” (150).

  11. 11.

    On Lady Macbeth see, for example, Gloria Olchowy, “Murder as Birth in Macbeth,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 197–209; Sid Ray, “Finding Gruoch: The Hidden Genealogy of Lady Macbeth in Text and Cinematic Performance,” in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings, eds. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland & Co., 2009), 116–32. On Eleanor see: Nina S. Levine, “The Case of Eleanor Cobham: Authorizing History in 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 104–21; Taylor, “Lord Cobham and Shakespeare’s Duchess of Gloucester.”

  12. 12.

    Without, of course, arguing that Eleanor was the sole influence. See, for example, Clark and Mason, “Introduction,” 1–124, at 91–2.

  13. 13.

    On Shakespeare and his sources for 2 Henry VI, see Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, Appendix 5: Sources; Levine, “The Case of Eleanor Cobham,” 109–110. Levine convincingly suggests that John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1576) was a source for Shakespeare’s Eleanor. On Shakespeare’s sources for Macbeth, see Clark and Mason, “Introduction,” 82–97; Margaret Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” Studia Neophilologica 68 (1996): 39–47, at 39.

  14. 14.

    For 2 Henry VI, see Knowles, “Introduction,” 43: “Shakespeare’s primary sources for the English histories, Hall and Holinshed”; For Macbeth, see Clark and Mason, “Introduction,” 82: “main narrative source […] was Holinshed’s Chronicles.”

  15. 15.

    Annabel M. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Patterson acknowledges that “very little” is known about Raphael Holinshed, “except that he was university-educated, probably at Cambridge, and had taken clerical orders” (8).

  16. 16.

    Levine, “The Case of Eleanor Cobham,” 108.

  17. 17.

    Edward Hall, Chronicle: Containing the History of England, During the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth, in Which Are Particularly Described the Manners and Customs of Those Periods (London: J. Johnson, 1809), 202; Friedrich W.D. Brie, ed., The Brut or the Chronicles of England, EETS, 2 vols (New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971), 2, Preface, viii; 478–82.

  18. 18.

    Dauvit Broun, “Macbeth,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004–16). Available Online: [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17356, accessed Feb 24, 2017.

  19. 19.

    Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, “General Introduction,” in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, eds. Driver and Ray, 7–16, at 12.

  20. 20.

    Ray, “Finding Gruoch.”

  21. 21.

    Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” 39.

  22. 22.

    Olga L. Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 107.

  23. 23.

    For an account of these events, albeit with a focus on Gloucester, see Kenneth H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), 164–206, passim.

  24. 24.

    For details on the children see Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 335–36. Vickers remarks that Eleanor “may well have been the mother” of these two children. I am not aware of evidence that sustains this suggestion.

  25. 25.

    Brie, ed., The Brut, 2: 480.

  26. 26.

    For the most thorough modern account of Eleanor’s trial and punishment, to which I am indebted, see Ralph A. Griffiths, “The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,” in King and Country: England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), 233–52. Originally published in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 51 (1969): 381–99. All references are to the 1991 publication.

  27. 27.

    Holinshed, 3: 199–203.

  28. 28.

    Holinshed, 3: 203.

  29. 29.

    Lily B. Campbell, “Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and Elianor Cobham His Wife in the Mirror for Magistrates,” The Huntington Library Bulletin, 5 (1934): 119–55, at 143.

  30. 30.

    Kavita Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627, Queenship and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 108.

  31. 31.

    Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 120.

  32. 32.

    Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 120.

  33. 33.

    Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 123. On Eleanor and Shore’s wife: “Both women are implicated sexually as well as politically, thus cleaving to the importance of the moral framework we see at work in the 1587 edition of Holinshed.”

  34. 34.

    Holinshed, 3: 203.

  35. 35.

    Holinshed, 3: 203; 204.

  36. 36.

    Holinshed, 3: 204.

  37. 37.

    Holinshed, 3: 199–203.

  38. 38.

    Holinshed, 3: 204.

  39. 39.

    Holinshed, 3: 271.

  40. 40.

    Holinshed, 3: 272.

  41. 41.

    Holinshed, 3: 204.

  42. 42.

    Mudan Finn, “Tragedy, Transgression, and Women’s Voices,” 300–1. Mudan Finn also refers to this dream as part of her discussion of Shakespeare bringing Margaret and Eleanor “into direct contact with one another” (300).

  43. 43.

    For example, Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 75: “Significantly, the person crowned in the dream is Eleanor alone.” On the queen’s coronation, see Joanna L. Laynesmith, “Fertility Rite or Authority Ritual? The Queen’s Coronation in England, 1445–87,” in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 52–68.

  44. 44.

    On Elizabeth see, for example, Judith Richards, Elizabeth I (Abingdon, Oxon.; New York: Routledge, 2012); Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, 2013 edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994; 2013).

  45. 45.

    Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, Cf. Q1: Appendix 2.

  46. 46.

    See, too, Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 77: “As the king has been rendered effeminate by his strong-willed queen, - so Gloucester has been fatally undermined by the actions of his ambitious wife.”

  47. 47.

    Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, 5.3.

  48. 48.

    On Margaret see, for example, Helen Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2003).

  49. 49.

    On the parallels between the representations of these women, see Mudan Finn, “Tragedy, Transgression, and Women’s Voices,” 298–303.

  50. 50.

    However, on Shakespeare’s representation of Margaret’s dangerous sexuality, see Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 72–4.

  51. 51.

    Shakespeare, 2 King Henry VI, Part 2, 1.1.

  52. 52.

    Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, Appendix 5, 441.

  53. 53.

    Cf. Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 67. On the connection between Henry VI’s failures as a monarch to his failures of masculinity. Howard and Rackin consider Gloucester as coming “closest to setting the play’s standard for proper English manhood.”

  54. 54.

    Alison Findlay, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, Continuum Shakespeare Dictionary Series (London: Continuum, 2010), 123.

  55. 55.

    Alex Woolf, “Macbeth,” 402, in Michael Lynch, ed. The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Gruoch was the daughter of Boite, who was “… probably the son of Cinaed mac Duib, king of Alba 997–1005).”

  56. 56.

    Broun, “Macbeth,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  57. 57.

    Broun, “Macbeth,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  58. 58.

    Holinshed, 5: 264: “after Malcolme succéeded his nephue Duncane.”

  59. 59.

    Holinshed, 5: 264–6.

  60. 60.

    Holinshed, 5: 269.

  61. 61.

    Holinshed, 5: 268.

  62. 62.

    Holinshed, 5: 269.

  63. 63.

    Holinshed, 5: 271–2. Beginning with an account of Banquo’s son, Fleance, who enters into a “familiar acquaintance” with the daughter of the prince of Wales, resulting in the birth of a son.

  64. 64.

    Holinshed, 5: 273.

  65. 65.

    Holinshed, 5: 273.

  66. 66.

    Holinshed, 5: 274.

  67. 67.

    Holinshed, 5: 277.

  68. 68.

    Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” 46, citing Elizabeth’s recorded words ‘on hearing of the birth of Mary Stuart’s son, James (Memoirs of Sir James Melville, 1583).

  69. 69.

    Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” 46.

  70. 70.

    Clark and Mason, “Introduction,” 13.

  71. 71.

    On this see, for example, Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” 42–3.

  72. 72.

    Shakespeare, Macbeth.

  73. 73.

    As understood within the context of Anna of Denmark’s queenship. Elizabeth I, as the previous queen, was a more complicated example. See, Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King.

  74. 74.

    Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre,” 39: “all the notable male characters—with the exception of Macbeth himself—are fathers with sons who take an active part in the play.”

  75. 75.

    Shakespeare, Macbeth.

  76. 76.

    Cf. Omberg, “Macbeth’s Barren Sceptre.” Omberg’s focus is on Macbeth, not Lady Macbeth.

  77. 77.

    As a comparison, albeit for an earlier period, see Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 1: “given the central role of women in families, the female contribution to knowledge about the past must, potentially at least, have been a significant one.”

  78. 78.

    Ray, “Finding Gruoch,” 117.

  79. 79.

    Cf. Janet Adelman, “‘Born of Woman’ Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), 105–34, at 106: “The play will finally reimagine autonomous male identity, but only through the ruthless excision of all female presence, its own peculiar satisfaction of the witches’ prophecy.”

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    Sally Fisher

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    Valerie Schutte

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Fisher, S. (2018). “To Beare the Name of a Quéene”: Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and Lady Macbeth: Queenship and Motherhood. In: Finn, K., Schutte, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_7

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