Abstract
Critics of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy have argued that it sidelines women to a degree extreme even for the Shakespearean stage. This chapter contends that Shakespeare uses this absence to underscore moments of crisis. In part, these crises are dynastic—the Queen’s helplessness in Richard II, combined with the sexual undertones of her language, emphasizes that she and her husband are a dynastic cul-de-sac. Shakespeare excises a historical queen, Joan of Navarre, from the Henry IV plays, rendering the Lancastrian court a wholly male—and thus sterile—space. Finally, Princess Katherine’s appearances in Henry V also feature reminders of her son’s disastrous reign, undercutting the play’s triumphant ending. But the invisibility of queenship is purposeful, as it highlights how avenues for female political power are closed off, to the detriment of everyone involved.
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Notes
- 1.
The play usually known as Thomas of Woodstock is untitled in the sole surviving manuscript (British Library, Egerton MS 1994, fols. 161–85). It is occasionally referred to by the alternative title of Richard II, Part One, which suggests a connection to Shakespeare’s play that has yet to be convincingly demonstrated. The date of the play is also uncertain; this chapter proceeds on the assumption that Thomas of Woodstock was likely written during the 1590s, when the vogue for English history plays was at its height. Older scholarship tends to assume that it predates Shakespeare’s Richard II; more recent work by Macdonald P. Jackson and others argues that the play, like its manuscript, is Jacobean. See Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 17–65. The play’s exact date, and whether it was composed before or after Richard II, has little effect on our treatment of it here.
- 2.
Thomas of Woodstock, eds. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1.3.58–63.
- 3.
John Stowe, The Annales of England, faithfully collected out of the most autenticall Authors, Records, and other Monu-ments of Antiquitie, from the furst inhabitacion vntill this present yeere 1592 (London: Ralfe Newbery, 1592), 461. The play’s interrogation of politics through the lens of fashion is discussed in Karen Newman, “Satirical Economies and Suitable Style: The Anonymous Woodstock and Shakespeare’s Richard II,” in Essaying Shakespeare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 123–35 and in Lea Luecking Frost, “The Historiography of Texts and Textiles in Thomas of Woodstock,” English Literary Renaissance 45.1 (2015): 120–45.
- 4.
Frost, “Texts and Textiles,” 141.
- 5.
Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), 105.
- 6.
Strohm, Hochon, 111.
- 7.
Woodstock, 1.1.184–87.
- 8.
Woodstock, 2.3.43–45.
- 9.
Woodstock, 4.2.58, 61–2.
- 10.
The Duchess of Gloucester also offers good advice that her husband ignores; indeed, much of the play’s conflict might have been avoided had men simply listened to their wives.
- 11.
Woodstock, 3.1.64–65.
- 12.
Woodstock, 3.1.94–97.
- 13.
Woodstock, 4.1.110ff.
- 14.
Woodstock, 1.3.37–48.
- 15.
Frost, “Texts and Textiles,” 142.
- 16.
Woodstock, 4.3.151–51.
- 17.
Woodstock, 4.3.175.
- 18.
Paul Strohm writes about Joan’s role at court and in Lancastrian imagemaking in England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chapter 6. Henry IV’s first wife and Henry V’s mother, Mary de Bohun, died in 1394.
- 19.
Phyllis Rackin and Jean Howard, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 137.
- 20.
James Scott-Warren discusses the textual history of this claim in “Was Elizabeth I Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambard’s ‘Conversation,’” Review of English Studies 64.264 (2013): 208–230.
- 21.
Steven Mullaney, “‘Do you see this?’ The Politics of Attention in Shakespearean Tragedy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, eds. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 161.
- 22.
On Queen Margaret’s use of feminine qualities to enact kingship, see Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), chapter 2.
- 23.
Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 106.
- 24.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Charles Forker, Arden 3rd Series (London: Thomson, 2002), 3.1.11–15.
- 25.
Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 158.
- 26.
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992), 19. The passages that follow treat femininity and queerness as qualities that are in some way symbolically equivalent. This is not, of course, an unproblematic gesture; however, both are defined as outside the (masculine, heterosexual) norm. See Lea Luecking Frost, “‘A Kyng That Ruled All By Lust’: Richard II in Elizabethan Literature,” Literature Compass 9/2 (2012): 184–85 for more discussion of Richard II’s status as “rhetorical transvestite.” Many modern productions of the play have emphasized this quality by presenting androgynous or feminized Richards, or even by cross-casting the role. Notable recent examples of androgynous Richards include the 2007 and 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company productions, the former directed by Michael Boyd and starring Jonathan Slinger, and the latter directed by Gregory Doran and starring David Tennant; productions that used cross-casting include the 1995 National Theatre production, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw, and the 2009 Sydney Theatre Company Wars of the Roses, directed by Benedict Andrews, in which Cate Blanchett played Richard II.
- 27.
Meredith Skura, “Marlowe’s Edward II: Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Shakespeare Studies 50 (1997): 41–55. Skura argues that “Shakespeare’s Richard seems to leave behind the erotic violence in Edward’s love for Gaveston or Edward’s death, but he may have simply sublimated it instead” (55).
- 28.
It is common in performance for the Queen to appear alongside Richard in Act 1, scene 3 and sometimes Act 1, scene 1, but the stage directions in the early printed texts do not mention her in either scene. In Q1, after Lord Marshal’s exchange with Aumerle (1.3.1–6), “the King enters with his nobles,” while F calls for Richard to enter with “Gaunt, Bushy, Bagot, Greene, & others”—which could include the Queen, but given her rank, it seems likely that the directions would specify.
- 29.
Will Fisher concisely outlines the sodomitical dimension of sterile breeding in “Queer Money,” English Literary History 66.1 (Spring 1999): 1–23.
- 30.
This spelling, used in Forker’s Arden edition, follows both the 1597 Q1 and the text of the First Folio, although many editors render the phrase “at some thing it grieves,” to make the sense (and the stresses) clearer. While none of the play’s editors thus far have remarked on this, it also makes more explicit the availability of sexual innuendo.
- 31.
See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 259, and Frankie Rubenstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984). The best-known example is probably the exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia before the play-within-a-play (Ham. 3.2.116–21).
- 32.
Frost, “A Kyng,” 187.
- 33.
Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 119.
- 34.
Goldberg, Sodometries, 19. Rackin and Howard (142) have commented on the fact that the Lancastrian faction, both in this play and the rest of the tetralogy, is devoid of any female presence.
- 35.
Forker, 275 (2.2.12n).
- 36.
At 3.2.145ff. (“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs…”), 3.3.153–69 (“And my large kingdom for a little grave”), and 4.1.219 (“And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit”).
- 37.
It is worth noting that Richard’s counterpart in the 1595 edition of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars (Book III, stanzas 64–69 [sig. P4r-v]), in a passage that seems to have suggested this speech, imagines the narrative of his life as a kind of de casibus story, thus placing it within a more politically oriented genre. Richard’s charging the Queen with telling his story is Shakespeare’s invention; Daniel’s version muses on his literary afterlife while alone in prison.
- 38.
Harry Berger, Jr., Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27.
- 39.
Lisa Hopkins, “The King’s Melting Body: Richard II,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 396.
- 40.
See Frost, “A Kyng,” 185–88. Rackin and Howard (147) discuss at some length the ways Richard is feminized in the text of the play, although they reach different conclusions.
- 41.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works, eds. Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 326. For Elizabeth’s self-representation, particularly in the visual arts, see Montrose and Anna Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). More generally, see Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 42.
Quoted in Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth, 193.
- 43.
Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth, 206.
- 44.
The ioyfull receyuing of the Queenes most excellent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (London, 1578), sigs. E2-E3v.
- 45.
The authors are indebted to Elizabeth Human for her help in developing this reading of the Norwich pageants.
- 46.
See Frost, “A Kyng,” 188.
- 47.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden 3rd Series (London: Thomson, 2002). 1.1.43–46. While language strikingly similar to this—“the vilanie vsed by the Welsh women towards the dead carcasses was such as honest eares would be ashamed to heare”—appears on p. 1118 in the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle and at the same chronological point in the 1587 edition (p. 520), one of the later edition’s compilers, Abraham Fleming, goes into more lurid detail about another battle eight pages later (p. 528), specifying that the bodies were indeed castrated.
- 48.
For the male gaze, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–44. In R2 5.2.14–15, York describes Henry’s victorious entrance into London in similar terms, with subjects who “darted their desiring eyes / Upon his visage.” See also Frost, “A Kyng,” 186–87.
- 49.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 2.3.39–41.
- 50.
For a useful overview of the divergences between the extant texts of Henry V, see T.W. Craik’s introduction to the Arden 3rd edition, 11–32.
- 51.
Diana Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 217. The 2015–16 Royal Shakespeare Company production (dir. Gregory Doran) added emphasis to Queen Isabel’s role as mediator by conflating her role with Burgundy’s and casting a well-known actress (Jane Lapotaire) in the part. The 2008–9 cycle directed by Michael Boyd did not reassign any lines, but gave Queen Isabel’s role to Katy Stephens, who later played both Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou, thus linking the three women by implication.
- 52.
William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T.W. Craik, Arden 3rd Series (London: Routledge, 1995), 5.2.12–20.
- 53.
For Isabeau’s reputation, see Rachel C. Gibbons, “Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France: The Creation of an Historical Villainess,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 6 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1996): 51–73; Tracy Adams, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), xiii–xxvi.
- 54.
It is difficult not to notice the profusion of balls in Henry V, given the play’s focus on masculinity and manhood; indeed, it may seem inversely proportional to the number of women in the play. See Rebecca Ann Bach, “Tennis Balls: Henry V and Testicular Masculinity, or, According to the OED, Shakespeare Doesn’t Have Any Balls,” Renaissance Drama 30 (2001): 3–23. Henderson also points out a pun in “basilisk,” which in the sixteenth century, doubled as a slang term for a large cannon—a weapon Henry uses to great effect throughout the play.
- 55.
According to Holinshed, “The sayde Ladie Katherine was brought by the Queene hir mother, onelye to the intent that the King of Englande beholding hir excellent beautie, shoulde beee so enflamed and rapt in hir loue, that hee to obteyne hir to his wife, shoulde the sooner agree to a gentle peace and louing concorde” (1199).
- 56.
Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 88.
- 57.
Anon., The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players (London: Thomas Creede, 1598), sig. F4r. [For line numbers, see Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 4, Later English History Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 337–43, ll. 1384–88.]
- 58.
Famous Victories, sig. G2r [Bullough, ll. 1536–37].
- 59.
Famous Victories, sig. G2r [Bullough, ll. 1538–39].
- 60.
Henderson, Collaborations, 231.
- 61.
It is possible that Shakespeare avoided making this explicit because the Dauphin in Henry V is unnamed and possibly a composite character: the future Charles VII (who appears in Henry VI, Part 1) did not inherit the title until 1417. His brother Louis of Guyenne was the Dauphin in 1415, though he was not present at Agincourt and died in December of that year. Craik (336, 5.0.35–42n.) discusses the omission as it pertains to the Act 5 Prologue, and the absence of the Dauphin in the stage directions for Act 5, scene 2, at some length (although some productions have him onstage silently, or have him killed during the battle).
- 62.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, eds. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Thomson, 2001), 1.1.247–48.
- 63.
Henderson, Collaborations, 236, n. 73.
- 64.
Richard Dutton, “‘Methinks the Truth Should Live From Age to Age’: The Dating and Contexts of ‘Henry V’,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68.1/2 (2005): 198.
- 65.
Kavita Mudan Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography 1440–1627 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102.
- 66.
Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1550), t.p. The frontispiece to the 1592 edition of John Stowe’s Annales of England (London: Ralfe Newbery, 1592) uses a similar, if less visually arresting design, although Stowe’s text is far less important as a potential Shakespeare source. The only women included are Margaret Beaufort; Anne Mortimer (erroneously shown as Richard of York’s wife, rather than his mother); Blanche of Lancaster, the mother of Henry IV; and Philippa, countess of Ulster, whose status as granddaughter of Edward III makes her the source of the Mortimers’ claim to the throne. Once again, women become visible only through association with contested claims.
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Finn, K.M., Frost, L.L. (2018). “Nothing Hath Begot My Something Grief”: Invisible Queenship in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy. 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_13
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