Abstract
In February 2011, Red Bull Theater, a New York based company with a particular interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, included a staged reading of a new adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI as part of their work-in-progress series, In the Raw. This adaptation, titled Margaret: A Tyger’s Heart, systematically trimmed down Shakespeare’s sprawling trilogy to focus on the rise and fall of Margaret of Anjou. As the only woman in the cast, Margaret was both visually and narratively isolated from the rest of the characters, a point furthered by the use of fragments from her two major speeches in Richard III, spoken by her and by other (male) members of the cast to her, as framing devices. By taking these words—primarily curses and choric reminders of events from the three Henry VI plays—from their original context and applying them instead to Margaret herself, A Tyger’s Heart transformed her into the tragic heroine of a tetralogy without a real protagonist, a shift in focus that director and adaptor Michael Sexton deliberately aimed to create.1 He pinpointed in his program notes and in conversations afterward the many different generic registers in which Margaret operates while still maintaining a cohesive character arc through four entire plays—the most for any character in the Shakespearean canon, male or female.
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Notes
Phyllis Rackin and Jean E. Howard, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 21–27.
The other full-length study of women in the histories is Nina S. Levine, Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998),
but the histories sometimes appear in larger studies of women in Shakespeare such as Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981);
and Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1996).
For criticism of Margaret herself, see David Bevington, “The Domineering Female in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 51–58;
Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 51–95;
Kathryn Schwarz, “Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare’s Chronicle Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 140–67; and “A Tragedy of Good Intentions: Maternal Agency in 3 Henry VI and King John,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 225–54.
Marilyn L. Williamson, “When men are rul’d by women: Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 41–59 focuses on Margaret and Joan, but includes brief discussions of other women in the tetralogy. For a wider-ranging discussion of the relationship between women in the history plays and representations of masculinity,
see Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 47–81.
See Madonne M. Miner, “‘Neithermother,wife,norEngland’sQueen’: The Roles of Women in Richard III,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 35–55;
Harold F. Brooks, “Richard III, Unhistorical Amplifications: The Women’s Scenes and Seneca,” Modern Language Review 75 (1980), 721–37;
also Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materialising the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 20–69, uses Richard’s relationships with women as a springboard for a psychoanalytic approach to his character.
Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) revives the theory that the Henry VI plays were conceived and written as a series and makes a fairly convincing case, but the evidence is ultimately too scant to underpin his conclusion.
Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (London: Macmillan, 2000), 16.
Marilyn L. Williamson, 43–44, discusses how Shakespeare’s Margaret and Joan relate to the biographies of women in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and Heywood’s Gynaikeion. See also David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)
and Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 44–99 for some analysis of genre in the first tetralogy, although both studies focus primarily on male characters.
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37.
Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 96.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Thomson, 2001), 4.4.68. 10. Cox and Rasmussen, 48, n. 2. Dash, 155–207, provides a basic analysis across the tetralogy, but she is more concerned with defending Margaret’s actions against other critics. Nicholas Grene purports to analyze Henry and Margaret as sustained characters but he draws as much on performance history as he does on the text itself (108–20).
Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea, “Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled,” in Henry VI: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas A. Pendleton (London: Routledge, 2001), 79–96, make a number of valid points, but the authors’ reliance on an archetypal reading misses a number of the nuances of the plays, particularly in terms of cause and effect and the relationship between Margaret’s language and her character.
Phyllis Rackin, “Anti-Historians: Women’s Roles in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 329–44, makes a similar argument, but while we both argue that women subvert patriarchal historiography, her emphasis on physical presence as the antithesis of historical record takes her in a different direction.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part I, ed. Edward Burns (London: Thomson, 2000), 1.1.69.
Tilde Sankovitch, “Lombarda’s Reluctant Mirror: Speculum of Another Poet,” The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. William D. Paden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 184.
Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61.
Barbara Kreps, “Bad Memories of Margaret?: Memorial Reconstruction versus Revision in The First Part of the Contention and 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 175–80.
See also Steven Urkowitz, “Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts,” Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 292–304, for Margaret in the context of other Shakespearean heroines.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Thomson, 2001), 1.3.51–55.
Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 23.
3H6, 1.1.243. Kathryn Schwarz, “Vexed Relations: Family, State, and the Uses of Women in 3 Henry VI,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 2, The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 353.
3H6, 1.1.235, 222. Kristin M. Smith, “Martial Maids and Murdering Mothers: Women, Witchcraft and Motherly Transgression in Henry VI and Richard III,” Shakespeare Yearbook, 3 (2007), 143–60, uses that line to link Margaret to Joan in a fellowship of witches, but her insistence upon Shakespeare’s wholehearted espousal of Tudor teleology leaves her conclusion in question.
W. F. Bolton, Shakespeare’s English: Language in the History Plays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 127. Bolton dismantles York’s speech into its constituent parts and aligns them with various rhetorical terms discussed in late-sixteenth-century texts such as Peacham and Puttenham.
Queen Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah Marcus, Janelle, Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326.
William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Anthony Hammond (London: Thomson, 2003), 1.1.34–35, 62.
Marguerite Waller, “Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A ‘Deconstructive,’ ‘Feminist’ Rereading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 159–74, calls it an “anti-seduction” (161). Nina S. Levine (104–7) focuses on Richard’s contradictory combination of misogyny and reliance on women.
Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 94.
R3, 4.4.125. Bloom, 93. Carolyn Sale, “Review: Voice in Motion by Gina Bloom,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 242–54: “It could be argued that the play shows these two female characters jointly marshalling, with their words, a material force that exerts such pressure on Richard that while the women may not smother him they do dispirit him. Bloom’s conclusion about Margaret [sic] … thus seems too tame.” (246).
Carol Banks, “Warlike women: ‘reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes?,’” in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-histories, ed. Demont Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 179.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson, 2002), 5.1.44, 3.2.156.
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© 2012 Kavita Mudan Finn
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Finn, K.M. (2012). “A queen in jest”: Queenship and Historical Subversion in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy. In: The Last Plantagenet Consorts. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392991_7
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