SOURCE: Liebler, Naomi C., and Lisa Scancella Shea. “Shakespeare's Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled?” In Henry VI: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas A. Pendleton, pp. 79-96. New York: Routledge, 2001.

[In the following essay, Liebler and Shea trace the role of Margaret in the Henry VI plays and Richard III as it develops in accordance with four successive Jungian archetypes—Virgin, Wife, Mother, and Crone.]

As one of only two Shakespearean characters who survive through four plays,¹ Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's queen, is much underrated by critics who have written about the figures of the First Tetralogy. They variously describe her as “an archvillainess … epitomiz[ing] the worst qualities of her own sex” (Lee 216), “monstrous” (Howard and Rackin 96), and “conniving” (Bevington 57). Indeed, as Nina Levine has recently pointed out, York's characterization of her as “a tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide” has “come to dominate discussions of Margaret in the years since” (Women's Matters 68). Generally missing from discussions of Margaret is a recognition of her amazing endurance despite the pervasive corruption, duplicity, and political intrigue of which she is sometimes the agent and at other times the intended victim. In this regard she evolves into a most worthy opponent to the chameleon king, Richard III. She warms up for this, her apotheosis, by first taking on Suffolk in 1 Henry VI, Eleanor and Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, and York in 3 Henry VI, at each turn honing her confrontational skills, working toward her ultimate challenge to the king in Richard III. What is at stake in each of these contests is, above all other considerations, her personal and political autonomy—as a woman and a queen.² At each successive stage of her career she takes on one of the archetypal roles Jung was later to describe for the life cycle of a woman—Virgin, Wife, Mother, and the “Wise Old Woman” or Crone (Jung 5-21; 41-53). Margaret sustains a feminine autonomy by resisting patriarchal definitions of femininity; she will not be subjugated or silenced, or defined by those around her, despite their persistent attempts to do so.

In each play, Margaret shares a specific archetypal role with a parallel female representation: Joan la Pucelle, the maiden warrior in 1 Henry VI; Gloucester's ambitious wife, Eleanor Cobham, in 2 Henry VI; Lady Grey, later Queen Elizabeth and the mother of the heir to the throne, in 3 Henry VI; and the Duchess of York, the cursing crone in Richard III. Shakespeare draws each of these women as a complementary foil to Margaret, consistent with her successive archetypal stages. Three of these—the maid Joan, the wife Eleanor, and the mother Elizabeth—either lose or fail to gain the power they seek. Only the crone figures, Margaret and her counterpart, the Duchess of York, maintain their strength even when their political power has dissolved.

1 HENRY VI: A TALE OF TWO FRENCH MAIDS

In 1 Henry VI, Joan la Pucelle rises from the peasant ranks to fight by the Dauphin's side. Joan represents herself as divinely ordained, sent by heaven to save the French (1.2.51-54).³ Joan promises the Dauphin that she will “exceed her sex” (90) if she can become his “warlike mate” (92), but before she is allowed to join the ranks of his men, the Dauphin requires that Joan prove herself. He challenges Joan to single combat and finds himself sexually attracted to her when she defeats him:

Whoe'er helps thee, 'tis thou that must help me:
Impatiently I burn with thy desire;
My heart and hands thou hast at once subdued.
Excellent Pucelle, if thy name be so,
Let me thy servant and not sovereign be;
'Tis the French Dolphin sueth to thee thus.

(107-112)

Immediately, Joan exerts a form of sexual power. She reminds her suitor that she cannot give in to physical temptations until she has defeated France's enemy, but suggests that she will consider his offer at a later date:

I must not yield to any rites of love,
For my profession's sacred from above;
When I have chased all thy foes from hence,
Then will I think upon a recompense.

(113-116)

Joan uses the Dauphin's interest in her as a means of securing her position within his army; by making herself unavailable sexually, she hopes to ensure his continued interest.

Gabriele Jackson has argued that Joan's display of freedom as a warrior woman dictates that she must be “more completely feminized at the end of the play” (60). Moreover, since Joan was “subversively powerful,” she must be both “feminized and demonized” (64). Jackson's comments imply that Joan's prowess in battle is unfeminine, but in fact Joan draws her strength from her feminine roles, of which she has several. She is preeminently the archetypal Virgin, and the impression of a woman as a desirable maid has immense power as something irresistible and divine (Jung 10). But she is more than that. Lorraine Helms underscores Joan's sequence of roles as a series of theatrical masks, aptly suited to her treatment at various masculine hands in the play:

She is first a numinous presence whose powers of divination are revealed on stage. She is then a shrewdly pragmatic military leader, and those skills too are represented. Finally, she is a witch, resorting ignominously [sic] to feminine evasions and deceptions, enduring sexual humiliations. These discontinuous images suit a script in which all the dramatis personae are emphatically personae rather than persons. They insist that the player work through mask and gesture rather than motive and emotion.

(116)

In this regard, Joan appears to be a “shape-shifter” at need, prefiguring the several incarnations later required of Margaret.

In Act 5, Joan is defrocked, stripped of her aura of “divinity,” literally demonized when, just before she is captured by the English, she is seen conjuring devils in an attempt to turn the course of the battle in favor of the French (5.3.1-29). At this point Shakespeare introduces Margaret to take up the role of Maid of France, the role Joan vacates in the next scene by claiming, to save herself from execution, that she is pregnant, thereby negating her virginal representation.

Margaret first appears on stage as Joan is led off as captive to the Duke of York. Like Joan, Margaret is held prisoner by an Englishman, here the Earl of Suffolk (5.3.45). Like the Dauphin before Joan, Suffolk is smitten with his prisoner, wanting her for himself even though he is married, and plans to bring Margaret to England as Henry's bride so that he can make her his mistress. The only potential impediment to Suffolk's plan is Margaret's lack of dowry: the king, her father, is penniless (5.3.93-99), but Suffolk is determined to marry Margaret to Henry, despite Margaret's own diffidence in claiming that she is “not worthy to be Henry's wife” (122). Finally Margaret yields: “And if my father please, I am content” (127). Suffolk negotiates what might be called Margaret's “purchase” by returning to her father Maine and Anjou, won during the preceding generation by Henry V. Once Suffolk and Reignier agree upon the exchange that will make Margaret England's queen, she sends her future husband “Such commendations as becomes a maid, / A virgin, and his servant” (177-178), but favors Suffolk with a kiss, a gesture which she claims is a “peevish token” (186).

Although Margaret may be read as the object of commerce between men, she uses that commerce to her advantage in her first scenes and throughout the tetralogy. Margaret understands her own economic worth, or lack thereof, but she also understands the strength of her position in the negotiation with Suffolk. Margaret catches Suffolk's slip when he makes his suit on Henry's behalf:

SUFFOLK.
I'll undertake to make thee Henry's queen,
To put a golden scepter in thy hand
And set a precious crown upon thy head,
If thou wilt condescend to be my—
MARGARET.
What?
SUFFOLK.
His love.

(5.3.117-121; emphasis added)

Although Suffolk never directly proposes that Margaret become his mistress, she subtly acknowledges his attraction to her when he kisses her: “That for thyself” (5.3.185). Suffolk's infatuation recalls that of the Dauphin for Joan: as Joan used her sexual appeal to ensure her place in the French army, Margaret uses hers to ensure her marriage to the king. She is first led on stage as England's prisoner, but by the end of the scene she is its next queen.

Suffolk is able to convince Henry that Margaret is a worthy match by extolling her noneconomic values and thus persuades him to breach his promise of marriage to the daughter of the wealthy Earl of Armagnac:

Whom should we match with Henry, being a king,
But Margaret, that is daughter to a king?
Her peerless feature, joined with her birth,
Approves her fit for none but for a king.
Her valiant courage and undaunted spirit,
More in woman than commonly is seen,
Will answer our hope in issue of a king;
For Henry, son unto a conqueror,
Is likely to beget more conquerors,
If with a lady of so high resolve
As is fair Margaret he be linked in love.

(5.5.66-76)

Suffolk's description of Margaret is telling: lacking the conventional dowry, she has instead other important qualifications: beauty, royal birth, and the potential to breed warriors who will inherit both Henry V's “conquering” capabilities and Margaret's own “high resolve.” Here Margaret's role as the high-spirited maid is critical. The unspoiled virgin holds the promise of motherhood, and Margaret, the maiden princess, has the potential to be the mother of the next great king. Ironically, the same “high resolve” that recommends her to Henry is the stubborn spirit he will come to regret.

2 HENRY VI: ENGLAND'S COSTLY QUEEN

Gloucester and Exeter display their concern over the proposed marriage even before they meet Margaret in Part 1, and try to dissuade the King from marrying this dowryless bride, but Suffolk prevails, and Henry agrees to return Anjou and Maine to King Reignier. With this proclamation, Margaret is transformed from a bride who brings neither money nor land to England to one who costs the country dearly. The declaration so upsets Gloucester that he drops the document: “Pardon me, gracious lord; / But some sudden qualm hath struck me at the heart, / And dimmed mine eyes that I can read no further” (1.1.53-55). Gloucester expresses his outrage to the court:

O peers of England, shameful is this league!
Fatal this marriage, canceling your fame,
Blotting your names from books of memory,
Razing the characters of your renown,
Defacing monuments of conquered France,
Undoing all, as all had never been.

(98-103)

Margaret has cost them their honor. Henry's failure to maintain the position his father won in France is blamed on his bride, and Margaret is immediately positioned as a potential scapegoat for all of Henry's subsequent difficulties.

The savvy Margaret, however, aims to establish herself firmly in her new position. She expresses her displeasure at Henry's reliance on Gloucester: “Am I a queen in title and in style, / And must be made subject to a duke?” (1.3.50-51). She is most disturbed by “proud” (78) Eleanor Cobham, Gloucester's wife, whose elaborate dress (in direct violation of the Elizabethan sumptuary laws) and haughty bearing cause strangers to think she is the queen (77-81). Eleanor's appearance and conduct threaten Margaret's authority: Eleanor “displays her lack of respect for the queen, and signals the power of her own husband, by boasting about the lavishness of her own dress, and wearing it ostentatiously” (Jardine 141). Margaret's complaint reveals the underlying source of her anger with Eleanor: “And in her heart she scorns our poverty” (83). Margaret is keenly aware of the opposition facing her in Henry's court; those who disapproved of her marriage to Henry may challenge both her and her husband.

Margaret recognizes that she must remove those who pose a threat to her or her husband, but she cannot do it alone. She must develop a network of supporters, the “net-like organization” Foucault would later describe as the means by which power is “employed and exercised. … And not only do individuals circulate between its threads. … [T]hey are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power” (98).

Margaret recruits Suffolk as the first in her cadre of loyal supporters. Complaining about Gloucester's influence over her husband, Margaret shares with Suffolk her disappointment in Henry:

I tell thee, Pole, when in the city Tours
Thou ran'st a tilt in honor of my love
And stol'st away the ladies' hearts of France,
I thought King Henry had resembled thee
In courage, courtship, and proportion. …

(1.3.52-56)

As she did during the wooing scene in 1 Henry VI, Margaret here flatters her admirer in order to secure his support, and Suffolk commits himself to making the queen happy: “Madam, be patient: as I was cause / Your Highness came to England, so will I / In England work your Grace's full content” (67-69). He assures Margaret that he has already taken steps towards removing both Gloucester and his troublesome wife (90-102).

While Gloucester's care is for his country and his king, Eleanor's thoughts are more subversive. She attempts to goad her husband into vying for the throne, but Gloucester bids his wife to “Banish the canker of ambitious thoughts” (1.2.18). Disregarding his pleas, Eleanor goes on to share her dreams of glory:

Methought I sat in seat of majesty
In the cathedral church of Westminster,
And in that chair where kings and queens were crowned;
Where Henry and Dame Margaret kneeled to me,
And on my head did set the diadem.

(36-40)

The horrified Gloucester reminds her that she should be satisfied with and proud of her place as the Lord Protector's wife. Once she is alone, however, Eleanor expresses her desire to the audience, prefiguring, as Nina Levine has noted (“The Case of Eleanor Cobham” 111), the later gender-challenging manipulations of Lady Macbeth:

Follow I must; I cannot go before,
While Gloucester bears this base and humble mind.
Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood,
I would remove these tedious stumbling-blocks
And smooth my way upon their headless necks;
And, being a woman, I will not be slack
To play my part in Fortune's pageant.

(61-67)

Eleanor is thus established as both a threat to the present monarchy and a woman whose ambition will ruin both herself and her husband. Unlike Margaret, she cannot find, even in her husband, the network of support her “part in Fortune's pageant” requires, and instead seeks guidance from the spirits. Like Joan in 1 Henry VI, Eleanor turns to sorcery and witchcraft and is brought down by her involvement in the black arts.

Suffolk and the Cardinal suborn Hum, a priest, to “undermine the Duchess” (1.2.98) so that she can be caught at her conjuring and convicted of treason. By discrediting Eleanor, they can inculpate Gloucester and remove him from his office. Eleanor wants to see her husband become king, and in this unstable court Gloucester's adversaries use his wife's desires against him. The duchess is “the victim of what we might call political entrapment: her ambitions are exploited and even manipulated by her husband's enemies to further their own power over the Lancastrian state” (Levine, “The Case of Eleanor Cobham” 105). When Eleanor is captured, Margaret remarks pointedly: “Gloucester, see here the tainture of thy nest. / And look thyself be faultless, thou wert best” (2.1.187-188). After banishing Eleanor, Henry requests that Gloucester relinquish his position as Lord Protector, and Margaret proclaims her approval: “Why, now is Henry King, and Margaret Queen” (2.2.39-40).

Although Shakespeare draws Eleanor and Margaret as contemporaries, the historical Duchess of Gloucester was actually tried and convicted of treason in 1441, four years before Margaret came to England as Henry's bride (Hosley 169, 171; see also Levine, “Eleanor Cobham” 106, Lee 184). By extending Eleanor's “life” Shakespeare underscores Margaret's and Eleanor's comparable roles as wives. Instead of presenting conventionally subordinate women, Shakespeare adduces in both cases a paradigm of marital relationships that Jung would later describe as one in which one party is the container, the other the contained. Whereas the one who is contained lives entirely within the confines of the marriage and clings to it, the container seeks its own complexity in another and may break down into unfaithfulness (47-48).⁴ In 2 Henry VI, both Eleanor and Margaret are the more complex partners in their respective marriages. Never merely ornamental or dutiful wives, these women are the driving forces behind their husbands for better or for worse. Jung writes that in choosing a husband, “a woman can often pick on a man of real significance who is not recognized by the mass, and can actually help him to achieve his true destiny with her moral support. … But more often it turns out to be an illusion with destructive consequences, a failure because his faith was not sufficiently strong” (51). Both wives illustrate this archetypal pattern. Each woman wants more for her husband than he wants for himself; Eleanor dreams of the crown, while Margaret urges Henry to reclaim his monarchy, to assert the authority that is his birthright as well as his obligation. Eleanor's “unfaithfulness” leads her to seek her own complexity in the demonic arts; Margaret's drives her into an intimate alliance with Suffolk and leads her to conspire against Gloucester, her husband's uncle.

Margaret confers with her potential networkers: Suffolk, the Cardinal, and York; together they resolve that Gloucester must be killed. Margaret intends to solidify her husband's authority, and Suffolk intends to please Margaret. He enlists the Cardinal's support even though he does not completely trust him (1.3.95-100). York, who has his own plans to pursue the crown, happily signs on to assist the queen in dispatching Gloucester. York is under suspicion of treason due to the allegations of a servant; his participation in the plot against Gloucester serves as a mask of loyalty to his king even as he plans his rebellion against Henry. While the group succeeds in destroying Gloucester, his murder leads to the dissolution of Margaret's power network. Suffolk is accused of involvement in the murder, and despite Margaret's pleas, Henry banishes her most trusted ally (3.2.287-299). The Cardinal, overcome by madness, dies in his bed (3.3.1-33), while York gathers his army in Ireland to march against Henry and declare himself the rightful ruler of England (3.1.349-354).

The queen, still determined to protect her husband's claim to the crown but left without her male allies, assumes control of her situation; no longer subtly attempting to sway her husband, she directs Henry specifically as York's army threatens to overpower their own:

QUEEN.
Away, my lord! You are slow; for shame, away!
KING.
Can we outrun the heavens? Good Margaret, stay.
QUEEN.
What are you made of? You'll nor fight nor fly:
Now is it manhood, wisdom, and defense,
To give the enemy way, and to secure us
By what we can, which can no more but fly.
If you be ta'en, we then should see the bottom
Of all our fortunes: but if we should haply scape—
As well we may, if not through your neglect—
We shall to London get, where you are loved
And where this breach now in our fortunes made
May readily be stopped.

(5.2.72-83)

With this directive, Margaret begins to shift from her position as the strong woman behind Henry into a new role as the warrior standing in front of the Lancastrian throne, guarding it against challengers. The historical Henry was thought to be mentally ill (Hall, in Bullough 123), but Shakespeare eliminates this detail, making Henry's passivity a simple mark of character weakness and drawing the queen, by contrast, as an aggressive defender of the Lancastrian right, a woman who fulfills the political role that her husband abdicates not out of necessity (as Hall suggests) but by choice. With this move, Shakespeare ends Part 2 with a clear signal of what we may expect to see in Margaret's effective “reign” in Part 3.

3 HENRY VI: MOTHER MARGARET, “SHE-WOLF OF FRANCE”

Margaret is not present in Parliament when York and his followers challenge Henry's title in the opening act of 3 Henry VI. In an aside to the audience, the king expresses his lack of confidence in his own right to rule:

KING Henry.
Henry the Fourth by conquest got the crown.
YORK.
'Twas by rebellion against his king.
KING Henry.
[Aside] I know not what to say; my title's weak—

(1.1.132-34)

In an effort to protect himself, Henry strikes a bargain with York that will destroy not only his reign but also his relationship with his wife:

KING Henry.
My Lord of Warwick, hear but one word:
Let me for this my lifetime reign as king.
YORK.
Confirm the crown to me and to mine heirs,
And thou shalt reign in quiet while thou liv'st.
KING Henry.
I am content. Richard Plantagenet,
Enjoy the kingdom after my decease.

(169-175)

With these lines, Henry disinherits his son, Prince Edward, and irreparably damages his own rule. When Margaret is notified of her husband's promise to York, she descends angrily upon him:

Thou hast undone thyself, thy son, and me. …
Had I been there, which am a silly woman,
The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr'st thy life before thine honor:
And seeing thou dost, I here divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed,
Until that act of parliament be repealed
Whereby my son is disinherited.
The Northern lords, that have forsworn thy colors,
Will follow mine, if once they see them spread;
And spread they shall be, to thy foul disgrace
And utter ruin of the house of York.
Thus do I leave thee. Come, son, let's away.
Our army is ready; come, we'll after them.

(1.1.232, 243-256)

With this, Margaret is no longer a wife protecting her husband but a mother vehemently defending her son's right to succeed to the English throne. Henry has given away everything that she sought to preserve for him, and Margaret's declaration of divorce reinforces the idea that she now perceives herself as queen, not as the king's wife. Margaret does not wait for York to exercise his claim; she plans a siege against him. Underestimating the queen as an opponent, the Yorkists head into battle, and the man who will later become Richard III mocks, “A woman's general. What should we fear?” (1.3.68).

Indeed, Margaret gives York and his supporters much to fear. In battle Margaret takes on the characteristics of the “loving and terrible mother” archetype, capable of maternal sympathy, wisdom, and authority but also harboring a dark side that devours and terrifies (Jung 110). The mother who gives life can also destroy life: Mother Margaret's destructive energy is directed against those who threaten her son's right to succeed to the throne.

In 1.4, the queen's forces bring York to his knees in battle. Margaret revels in telling York that his youngest son, Rutland, has been slain. She offers him a napkin soaked in the boy's blood to dry his tears. In a perversion of the coronation ceremony, Margaret sets a paper crown on York's head, creating a profane antiritual (Liebler 41). She taunts him, “Ay, marry, sir, now looks he like a king! / Ay, this is he that took King Henry's chair / And this is he was his adopted heir” (1.4.96-98); York retaliates by attacking Margaret's femininity (Dash 183). Now that he has been subdued by the same power that he supported in 2 Henry VI, York here tries to injure Margaret with insults:

How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph like an Amazonian trull. …
Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible;
Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.

(113-114, 141-142)

Jung noted that all people comprise both masculine and feminine yet do not understand the unconscious element that is opposite to their exterior genders. Man is “compensated” within by a feminine element that he cannot comprehend: the unknown is feared; therefore woman is man's “greatest danger” (170). This “renders men incapable of perceiving the humanness of women” (Wehr 110). York cannot reconcile Margaret's actions with his definitions of appropriate feminine behavior. He attempts to paint Margaret as an animal, a “she-wolf of France” (1.4.111), “inhuman” (134), having a “tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide” (137).⁵ Northumberland feels sympathy for the weeping York, but the queen is relentless: “Think but upon the wrong he did us all, / And that will quickly dry thy melting tears” (173-174). The resolve of the “terrible mother” is firm; the wrong done to her child outweighs any possible element of remorse in her punishment of her enemies.

This mock coronation of York and his subsequent reaction evoke images of the shaming rituals designed to punish unruly women, such as the cucking stools on which convicted scolds were placed to be dunked repeatedly under water. “Because scolds were seen as threats to male authority, their carnivalesque punishments of mocking enthronement partake of the inverted structure of ‘world-upside-down’ rites” (Boose 190). Margaret is a woman “out of her place” who is allowed only what Natalie Zemon Davis calls a “temporary period of dominion” (135).⁶

Whereas York accuses Margaret of unruly and unseemly behavior for a woman, it is he who is humiliated. Margaret uses the image of “unruly woman” to her advantage: rather than allowing York to undermine her control of the situation, Margaret projects the qualities of a weak woman onto York, who is reduced to tears and cries for vengeance (1.4.147-179). York's attempts to attack Margaret by challenging her femininity are futile; he is silenced, killed by Clifford, and stabbed by the queen, who orders that his head be set upon the gates of York (179-180).

Henry is shaken by the incident, crying “Withhold revenge, dear God! 'Tis not my fault, / Nor wittingly have I infringed my vow” (2.2.7-8). Henry's emotional reaction to York's death shows a second inversion of male and female stereotypes: he is wailing and lamenting, and Margaret has assumed complete control of the army. This is reinforced later in the same scene when Clifford says to his king; “I would your Highness would depart the field. / The Queen hath best success when you are absent” (73-74). Henry is feminized to the point where he is dismissed from the field, and Margaret is the “manly woman” who appears in the historical sources (Bullough 176), the mother who assumes the traditionally masculine roles of soldier and ruler.

Margaret is an effective leader for the Lancastrian forces because she shares their conviction that York is a usurper. Foucault's comments on the “theory of right” help us to better understand Margaret's forceful defense of her son: “The essential role of the theory of right, from medieval times onward, was to fix the legitimacy of power; that is the major problem around which the whole theory of right and sovereignty is organised” (95). The queen draws her power from her conceptions of the truth, and her strength serves to reinforce that truth. Foucault sees this as a triangle of “power, truth, [and] right. … We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (93). The issue of rightful succession dominates the First Tetralogy, and the ambiguity of “right” allows for the continual shifting of power and the subsequent waves of repression and rebellion. “Right” is determined situationally: alliances are made and broken, and loyalties are fragile. In this unstable environment, Margaret's intentions are to uphold the order which she believes is the true monarchy, not specifically to subvert the patriarchal authority except insofar as that authority is perceived to be “wrong,” that is, illegitimate.

Despite her best efforts, however, Margaret loses the battle for the throne. After York is killed, his claim is taken up by his eldest son, Edward. In his quest for power Edward targets Margaret, again raising the issues of her poverty and the loss of France:

A wisp of straw were worth a thousand crowns,
To make this shameless callet know herself.
Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou,
Although thy husband may be Menelaus;
And ne'er was Agamemnon's brother wronged
By that false woman as this King by thee.
His father reveled in the heart of France,
And tamed the King, and made the Dolphin stoop;
And had he matched according to his state,
He might have kept that glory to this day;
But when he took a beggar to his bed,
And graced thy poor sire with his bridal-day,
Even then that sunshine brewed a show'r for him,
That washed his father's fortunes forth of France.
For what hath broached this tumult but thy pride?
Hadst thou been meek, our title still had slept;
And we, in pity of the gentle King,
Had slipped our claim until another age.

(2.2.144-162)

Edward attacks Margaret not only because she represents the Lancastrian faction but because she is outspoken. Edward blames Margaret for the wars, citing her pride: had she only been “meek,” that is to say, submissive as befits a king's wife, there would not have been any conflict.

When his forces overcome the queen's, Edward's first priority is to marry so that he can father an heir for his newly won throne. Like Henry's, Edward's marriage is controversial: his marriage to the widowed Lady Grey, who becomes the Queen Elizabeth of Richard III, brings no wealth to England. It also costs Edward the loyalty of Warwick, who has traveled to France to propose to the French king's sister-in-law on Edward's behalf, and the support of the French king, who takes up Margaret's cause after hearing of Edward's marriage to Elizabeth.

By Act 4 of 3 Henry VI Elizabeth is pregnant with Edward's heir, providing a parallel for Margaret as queen and mother of the successor in the play. Unlike Margaret, Elizabeth is not a woman of action. She protects her offspring not by fight but by flight. When Margaret's army, supported by French troops, captures Edward, Elizabeth is driven by fear rather than anger:

And I the rather wean me from despair
For love of Edward's offspring in my womb.
This is it that makes me bridle passion
And bear with mildness my misfortune's cross.
Ay, ay, for this I draw in many a tear
And stop the rising of blood-sucking sighs,
Lest with my sighs or tears I blast or drown
King Edward's fruit, true heir to England's crown. …
Come, therefore, let us fly while we may fly.
If Warwick take us we are sure to die.

(4.4.17-24, 34-35)

She will protect her unborn child, but Elizabeth is passive where Margaret is aggressive: this mild woman presents the audience with a second and radically contrasting image of motherhood in the play.

Margaret and her son continue their fight until they are captured. Margaret is forced to witness the murder of her son, without whom she loses her role as mother. Distraught, she cries out, “O, kill me too!” (5.5.41), and Richard offers to oblige her; only Edward's directions prevent him. She is denied her death, and her father pays ransom to England for her return to France (5.7.37-40). Margaret is a prisoner of England, as she was when she was introduced in 1 Henry VI, and only now are her captors compensated: the costly queen finally brings a ransom payment to England. Edward believes that Margaret's expulsion from England will heal society:

Away with her, and waft her hence to France!
And now what rests but that we spend the time
With stately triumphs, mirthful comic shows,
Such as befits the pleasure of the court?
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy!
For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.

(5.3.41-46)

Edward and his followers assume that they will hear no more of the “defeated” and “disempowered” (Howard and Rackin 98-99) former queen, but in her final line of the play Margaret, anticipating her role in Richard III, curses her captors: “So come to you and yours, as to this prince!” (5.5.82). In Nicole Loraux's articulate formulation, “whether triumphant or heartbroken queens, they are always wounded in their motherhood. From that moment when mothers obtain only the horrified sight of the child's corpse to compensate for their loss, mourning that has already been transformed into wrath becomes vengeance in deeds. And mothers kill” (49). Margaret does not go quietly from the stage; the queen is not silenced. “Defeated” she may be, but not “disempowered”; her damning prophecy comes true in the next play.

RICHARD III: MARGARET'S LAST LAUGH

Margaret makes an ahistorical return in Richard III, appearing in Edward IV's court as the king lies ill: in fact, she died in France in 1482, the year before Edward IV's death (Bullough 241). Indeed, as Alexander Leggatt notes, “She is there, in defiance of both history and probability, to do a job for the playwright” (43). Shakespeare draws the former queen as a crone: done now with her earlier roles as virgin, wife, and mother, Margaret lives to embody the wisdom of the old woman; as Richard puts it near the end of 3 Henry VI, she “live[s] to fill the world with words” (5.5.44). Having outlived her childbearing years, the crone is beyond her familial responsibilities and therefore cannot be made subject to male domination. The crone is not desexualized; rather, she remains female but surpasses—is no longer limited to or by—her domestic and reproductive roles. Like Macbeth's Weird Sisters, she is ambiguously gendered; neither masculine nor entirely feminine, she is freed from the constraints of behaviors designated for either sex and thus, as Jung contended, allows a focus on the social task (12), or in this case, the dramatic task. Margaret's curses are now her only weapon, but her words are what Richard fears and loathes most. Calling for the destruction and death of those who killed her husband and son, she foretells the bloodshed that Richard will inflict upon England. Margaret's position as the crone allows her to instigate the sacrifice which her expulsion from England could not satisfy.

The English community is fractured by civil war. To heal the break, England must sacrifice a member of the community who is different and dispensable enough to be eliminated without threatening the integrity of the society; Margaret the French-English-queen-crone becomes the “monstrous double” (Girard 164, 254), a sacrificial surrogate whose elimination will restore England's peace. Margaret was driven out of England by the Yorkists in a futile attempt to “purify” their society, but in fact the “sacrifice” proves ineffective; as a French woman, she was never truly a part of English society. Richard III must be offered instead as the pharmakos, both cause and cure for societal ills. Richard is wholly English, but his physical deformities (1.1.14-27) qualify him as the “other,” the true “monstrous double.”⁷ In ancient sacrificial rituals, “[t]he purpose of the Crone's curse was to doom the sacrificial victim inevitably, so no guilt would accrue to those who actually shed his lifeblood. He was already ‘dead’ once the Mother pronounced his fate, so killing him was not real killing” (Walker 26). With her curses Margaret absolves the English of the guilt that would lie upon their heads for killing their king. The crone nominates the scapegoat, both identifying and cursing the victim, Richard III. Richard is ultimately defeated by Henry of Richmond, who becomes Henry VII, the redeemer of the English crown and founder of the Tudor dynasty. Margaret's curse on Richard is instrumental in removing the taint of national guilt from the deposition and killing of the king.

Words are useful to Margaret not only as weapons against others but as armor, a means of protecting herself once her political power has dissolved. Margaret relies on self-definition to maintain her strength: significantly, in Richard III Margaret continues to refer to herself as queen even though her husband is dead and Edward is king: “A little joy enjoys the queen thereof; / For I am she, and altogether joyless” (1.3.154-155). When Margaret makes her presence known, she reiterates this position, understanding the shock her presence causes: “Which of you trembles not that looks on me? / If not, that I am queen, you bow like subjects, / Yet that, by you deposed, you quake like rebels” (159-161). Margaret's insistence on retaining the title of queen after her husband and son have been killed is telling. Her power is in her autonomy, her persuasive insistence on self-definition: whereas Margaret dissociates herself distinctly from the deceased Henry, Elizabeth relies wholly on Edward to validate her position. Where Margaret is strong, Elizabeth is weak. Elizabeth understands her precarious situation when Edward is on his deathbed; upon his demise, she fears that only the succession of her children will make her valuable:

QUEEN Elizabeth.
If he were dead, what would betide on me?
GREY.
No other harm but loss of such a lord.
QUEEN Elizabeth.
The loss of such a lord includes all harms.
GREY.
The heavens have blessed you with a goodly son
To be your comforter when he is gone.
QUEEN Elizabeth.
Ah, he is young, and his minority
Is put unto the trust of Richard Gloucester,
A man that loves not me, nor none of you.

(1.3.6-13)

Elizabeth knows that if her son does not succeed to the throne, she will be cast out, if not executed. Aware of Margaret's power and her own misery, Elizabeth fears the fate with which the older woman curses her: “Die neither mother, wife, nor England's Queen!” (1.3.208).

Indeed, Richard does destroy Elizabeth's family, leaving her one of three women in the tetralogy who have suffered the loss of husband and child or children at his hand: Margaret, Elizabeth, and the old Duchess of York, Richard's own mother. The trio recount their losses in a scene which has been called a moment of female bonding (Miner 47-48), or, as Loraux puts it, the “scene of mothers” (2). This moment, however, passes quickly. As she had done in regard to her dead husband, the always singular Margaret dissociates herself from these women too; rather, this is her final triumph. When, in her sorrow, Elizabeth begs Margaret to teach her how to curse, the crone replies:

Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were
And he that slew them fouler than he is.
Bett'ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse;
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.

(4.4.118-123)

“Mourning leads to cursing; this is the lesson given to the gentle Elizabeth” (Loraux 5), but the lesson is lost on her. She is powerless because she cannot speak; she calls her own words “dull” (124); she cannot “fill the world” with them. The elderly duchess, however, can, and curses Richard after her meeting with the former queen: “Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end; / Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend” (195-96). Loraux notes that the duchess, among the three women, bears the greatest sorrow “because she hates her son. She hates him because he killed her other two sons [sic], and for her, as for Margaret, there is hate in mourning. … The mother's last word is to curse her son for all time” (5-6).⁸ Learning from Margaret, moving beyond her function as Richard's mother, she becomes a crone-in-training; she takes on Margaret's position.

Margaret revels in the unhappiness of those who hurt her as she has done throughout the action of the plays, gaining some degree of satisfaction in seeing her displacers displaced. Margaret reminds the duchess that it is her son who has destroyed them: “From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept / A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death” (4.4.47-48). Her words for Elizabeth are even less sympathetic:

Thou didst usurp my place, and dost thou not
Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow?
Now thy proud neck bears half my burdened yoke,
From which even here I slip my wearied head
And leave the burden of it all on thee.
Farewell, York's wife, and queen of sad mischance!
These English woes shall make me smile in France.

(109-115)

For Margaret, the misfortunes of Elizabeth and the duchess are justice. Elizabeth is now the displaced queen, the Duchess of York is the cursing crone, and Margaret is satisfied. Her job is done. Although her death is never depicted or announced, the old queen does not appear on stage again after this scene. Her dramatic function has been performed; the words have been spoken, Richard is doomed, and the portraits of the weak and the strong have been drawn.

In each of the four plays Margaret fulfills a Jungian archetypal image, and as she moves through her roles she becomes an incrementally more complex character. Each play highlights one of these feminine roles for Margaret, and the specific archetype is sustained throughout the play: in 1 Henry VI, Joan leaves the role of French maiden as Margaret appears. In 2 Henry VI, Margaret must eliminate the wife who precedes her in power, Eleanor Cobham. As Margaret watches her son die in 3 Henry VI, Edward reminds the audience that his wife Elizabeth is giving birth. Finally, once Margaret has performed the function of the crone in Richard III, she instructs the old Duchess of York in cursing and strides out of the play. The other female figures in the tetralogy reinforce Margaret's difference and her strength, showing how she overcomes adversity and asserts her unique power by refusing to submit to grief, transforming it instead to an active and effective wrath. Loraux's powerfully provocative conclusion to her brief chapter on Richard III is worth quoting here, for both its astonishing insight and its graceful articulation: the play, she says, “is about power and its monstrosity. … But it is also about mothers, mourning, and hatred, which awakens a Greek echo. With, nonetheless, its characteristically Shakespearean dimension: that the relationship of the wives and mothers to their husbands and sons is a relationship to power itself” (6). By performing archetypal feminine roles, the dramatic figure of Margaret—neither submissive nor necessarily subversive—directs our attention to the power inherent in those roles. Instead of exemplifying the gender-violating accommodations in which a queen may rule only by adopting—in the words of his Tudor monarch before her troops at Tilbury in 1588—“the heart and stomach of a king,” Shakespeare's Queen Margaret demonstrates a specifically feminine capacity for effective leadership and formidable political force by performing the full range of incarnations available to a woman.

Notes

1. The other, equally long-lived, is Mistress Quickly from the Second Tetralogy. Shakespeare stretches the historical record in order to include Margaret in Richard III, whose opening scene is set in 1483; Margaret actually died in 1482 (Bullough 241).

2. Levine notes that “The plays may criticize Margaret's misrule, but in doing so on the basis of policy rather than biology, they effect a subtle but provocative shift that allows for an alternative discourse of power, one based not on expectations about gender but on an appeal to the nation's welfare” (Women's Matters 70); in fact she continues that critical practice when she argues that Shakespeare “freely extends the play's critique of the queen to censure aggressive women in general” (79-80). Levine's project is grounded primarily in identifying the ways in which “Elizabethans, including the queen herself, would not automatically have dismissed an association between Elizabeth and Margaret, nor would they have seen the Lancastrian queen simply as a darker inversion of their own” (75), and sees Margaret's representation throughout the tetralogy as predominantly misogynistic. We are arguing here that an “alternative discourse of power” is central and critical to understanding Margaret's multifaceted representation, and further, that Shakespeare, though not necessarily his masculine characters in these plays, valorizes rather than demonizes her “aggressive” qualities as regal manifestations of autonomy.

3. Citations from the plays in this essay follow the Signet editions, New York: New American Library: 1 Henry VI ed. Lawrence V. Ryan, 1967; 2 Henry VI ed. Arthur Freeman, 1967; 3 Henry VI ed. Milton Crane, 1968; Richard III ed. Mark Eccles, 1964.

4. Howard and Rackin place great emphasis on Margaret's infidelity to Henry: “In Shakespeare's play, Margaret's adulterous association with Suffolk is not just a rumor or a surmise, as it was when mentioned in his historical sources; rather, the two lovers appear frequently on stage together, and when Suffolk is banished, their farewell is an impassioned aria punctuated with kisses and tears” (72). Although the text of the play suggests an adulterous liaison, for the purpose of this paper we concentrate on Margaret's relationship with Suffolk as a political alliance and not a love affair.

5. Shakespearean critics have also called Margaret inhuman: Riggs refers to Margaret's “grotesque display of ‘courage’” as “an inexplicable deviation from nature, a relinquishment of human identity” (133).

6. Davis here notes that this image of the unruly woman is a comic treatment; however, here we see that the concept is effective as a noncomic, dramatic image of feminine power.

7. Shakespeare emphasizes Richard's physical deformities in 2 Henry VI, when Clifford calls him a “heap of wrath, foul indigested lump, / As crooked in thy manners as thy shape!” (5.1.157-158), and twice again in 3 Henry VI: Margaret refers to Richard as York's “valiant crookback prodigy” (1.4.75) and Richard speaks of himself as “crook'd” in both body and mind (5.6.79). Richard's “difference” is reinforced by his account of his own birth and disfigurement (5.6.70-83), and of his uniqueness: “I am myself alone” (5.6.83). Shakespeare's words recall Hall, who describes Richard as “litle of stature, eivill featured of limnes, croke backed … hard favoured of visage … malicious, wrothfull and envious” (Bullough 253).

8. To be precise, Loraux mistakes Richard as the killer of Rutland, who was actually killed by Clifford, or of Edward IV, who dies of natural causes. But her point is no less valid for this elision of Richard's culpability, focusing as it does on the Duchess's maternal rage provoked by Richard's horrific violation of fraternal bonds.

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