[In the following essay delivered as a paper at the 1992 Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Levine contends that Shakespeare 's treatment of women in Richard III reflects a contemporary political concern of Shakespeare's era: the end of the Tudor line due to the failure of Queen Elizabeth I to marry and produce a male heir.]

Shakespeare concludes his first tetralogy of English history plays with a fitting tribute to the Tudors. At the close of Richard III the victorious Richmond promises to heal the nation's wounds with his marriage to Elizabeth of York and solemnly prays that his heirs will "Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac'd peace, / With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days" (V.v.33-34).¹ On the Elizabethan stage, of course, Richmond's epilogue neatly connects the past with the present age, inviting the audience to see the reign of their own queen as fulfilling her grandfather's prayer. Not included in this scene of celebration, however, is Elizabeth I's grandmother, Richmond's bride. In fact, contrary to the prophecy uttered at the beginning of the tetralogy—that there would be "none but women left to wail the dead" (I Henry VI, I.i.51)—at the close we witness the complete absence of women from the stage, an absence made conspicuous by the fact that they have dominated the state and stage throughout much of the tetralogy. From Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the wailing mothers of Richard III, women have been aggressive participants in the struggle for control of the English state. That Shakespeare at the close of the tetralogy chooses to exclude the women and locate the glorious beginnings of the Tudor reign exclusively in the male figure of Richmond raises questions, of course, about the political resonance of this tribute. Though I do not propose any definitive answer to these questions, I would like to suggest some possibilities. One way of understanding the absence of women at the play's close is to examine their presence elsewhere in the play. At the same time, it may also be worthwhile to consider the representation of women in Richard III alongside contemporary references to women in power.

It has become commonplace to regard the women of Richard III, most of whom are queens, as victims.² Bereft of their husbands and children, these women clearly document the loss that will be restored by the fruitful marriage promised at the play's close. One might argue, then, that the lamenting queens of Richard III serve as a foil to set off the images of Tudor fertility displayed in Richmond's closing prayer. I would like to suggest, however, that they also present an unsettling image of queenship and the succession that not only contrasts with Richmond's vision of the future but also evokes what is perhaps a more accurate and timely image of the Tudor state. For the recurrent figure in Richard III of a queen whose womb is a "bed of death" (IV.i.53) bears an uncanny resemblance to the mortal, aging body of Elizabeth I, who, well past childbearing age in the early 1590s, had failed to provide England with an heir to insure the kind of prosperity promised by Richmond. The play's unsettling representation of the female body as the source of the destruction as well as the preservation of patriarchal lineage may take its pattern from contemporary insecurity about female rule in general and the succession in particular.

The locus classicus of sixteenth-century attacks on the female Tudor body politic is John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, written in opposition to the Catholic reign of Mary Tudor but published in 1558, the year Elizabeth I came to power. Unashamedly misogynistic, Knox declares that female rule is contrary to the laws of God and nature and represents "the subversion of good Order, of all equitie and justice."³ Of particular interest in this investigation is a less familiar passage in which Knox imagines a deformed and monstrous female body politic:

For who wolde not judge that bodie to be a monstre, where there was no head eminent above the rest, but that the eyes were in the handes, the tonge and mouth beneth in the bellie, and the eares in the feet?. . . . And no lesse monstruous is the bodie of the Common welth where a Woman beareth empire.⁴

Knox's grotesque placement of the queen's tongue and mouth in the "bellie"—a term that suggests both stomach and womb—anxiously equates a woman's sexual and verbal power and connects them both with an image of gross appetite. Knox thus renders suspect the one legitimate site of a woman's power in the patriarchy—the queen's womb.

Like Knox, Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester also draws on traditional anxieties about female power, defining female sexuality as a threat to the legitimacy and stability of the monarchy. In the play's opening scene, for example, Richard represents the female body as powerfully erotic, capable of seducing and thereby subverting masculine authority. He complains that the once valiant warrior has become effeminate:

And now, in stead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
  He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
  To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

(I.i.10-13)

Rather than translating his aggressive horsemanship into the bedroom, the warrior is himself seduced and dominated, made "to strut before a wanton ambling nymph" (17). The political sub-text for this passage, as Richard soon makes clear, is Edward IV's amorous affairs, his ill-advised marriage to Lady Grey and his liaison with Jane Shore. Richard shrewdly links Jane Shore's promiscuity, as well as the king's, with a similar contamination in the state. After Edward's death, Richard intensifies his attack by insinuating that the heirs to the throne are bastards. Richard's most outrageous attempt to steal the succession from his nephews, however, is to declare Edward himself a bastard, a charge that requires Richard to impugn the virtue of his own mother (III.v.86-90). Richard, by the way, insists on tracing his own lineage directly from his father, circumventing his mother altogether (III.vii.12-14).

This strategy of presenting the royal body and the women associated with it as sexually corrupt gains a certain topicality if we recall the propaganda generated against female rule in sixteenth-century England. In impugning his mother's virtue, Richard draws upon the one anxiety inherent in a patriarchal society where political and social order depend upon the purity of the queen's body to insure the succession. When the queen is not merely a consort but a queen regnant, as in the case of the Tudor queens, and when she, like Elizabeth I, also fails to marry and produce an heir, traditional anxieties about the queen's body and the succession naturally increase, as the seditious rumors that circulated during Elizabeth's reign dramatically demonstrate. Elizabeth, of course, worked to allay her nation's fears, cultivating an elaborate mythology of virginity and presenting herself as a kind of divinely sanctioned virgin-mother of England.⁵ Yet while the queen presented her body politic as well as her own natural body as inviolable and sacred, court records indicate that others inverted the royal images to represent the queen's body as promiscuous and corrupt. In one notorious case, for example, the queen was accused of having had four children by Robert Dudley. Persistent rumors detailing the queen's promiscuity and illegitimate children, not unlike those spread by Richard in his brother's court, continued well past the queen's child-bearing years, fueled in the last decade of her reign by renewed anxieties about her failure to name a successor.⁶

Although the charges of bastardy and corruption in the body politic raised in Richard III have a topical resonance, Shakespeare to some extent contains the play's potential for sedition by placing these slanders in the mouth of Richard, whose unbounded designs on the throne render all his accusations suspect. The play not only fails to authorize Richard's charges but in fact demonstrates their ineffectiveness in stirring up rebellion. That Richard's misogynistic opposition to the monarchy takes on an Elizabethan cast may even work to reinforce the legitimacy of Elizabeth's monarchy: if we associate Richard, even minimally, with opposition to the queen, then his defeat by Richmond in Act V becomes a triumph not only for the Tudor dynasty but, more specifically, for Elizabeth I as well. Yet while the play may discredit the spokesman of its decidedly misogynistic discourse, does it discredit the discourse itself? The degree to which the play authorizes this discourse, I suggest, depends only in part upon the credibility of Richard's voice; it also depends upon the play's representation of women. Without validating the particulars of Richard's accusations, the play may indeed lend a certain authority to his misogyny by presenting the women not simply as victims but as morally culpable as well. From the compliant Lady Anne to the murderous Margaret and the inscrutable Elizabeth, the women of Richard III are, at best, highly ambivalent figures who slide with unsettling ease between opposing moral stereotypes, between victim and aggressor, nurturer and murderer. For the remainder of this paper, I would like to consider the possibility that the representation of women in Richard III to some extent validates Richard's misogyny and so works against the vision of a prosperous and fertile Tudor dynasty presented at the play's close.

The patriarchal representation of the queen as a fertile mother insuring the patrilineal succession exists in Richard III as an ideal only, against which we may measure the characters' perversion of queenship and motherhood. The most outrageous violator of the ideal, of course, is Richard himself. He attempts to rise to power by seizing control of Queen Elizabeth's body and her issue, with the charges of bastardy, the murder of her sons, and finally with his proposal of an incestuous union with her daughter, Elizabeth of York. Yet however much Richard is responsible for perverting the maternal role, there is also the sense that the women themselves are responsible. "O my accursed womb, the bed of death!" (IV.i.53), the Duchess of York wails when she learns that Richard is about to be crowned king of England, locating the source of the nation's evil in her own body. Like the cry of the Duchess, the queen's warning to her son—"Thy mother's name is ominous to children" (40)—has a disconcerting ambivalence as well. These women, their children and husbands murdered by Richard, are victims, to be sure, but they may also share in his guilt.⁷ Richard himself blames his monstrousness on women when he displays his deformed body to the court as proof of the evil practice of women who, he claims, "have prevail'd / Upon my body with their hellish charms" (HI.iv.61-62). The play makes clear that Richard has been deformed from birth, but though that fact may exonerate Queen Elizabeth and Jane Shore from charges of witch-craft, it may also be used to implicate his mother in his monstrousness. Indeed, the avenging Margaret traces the origin of Richard's evil to his mother's womb:

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death:
That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes . . .
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.

(IV.iv.47-49, 54)

More recent critics than Margaret have also implicated the Duchess of York in her son's evil. Coppèlla Kahn writes, for example, that the play "strongly suggests the importance of the mother, rather than the father, in the formation of masculine identity—but negatively, by showing how alienation from the mother helps turn a physical monster into a moral one."⁸

As a way of righting the monstrousness they have engendered, the women actively seek control through destruction, the only choice left them. They play's most overt display of this perversion of maternal power occurs when the women come together in IV.iv to lament their losses and, led by Margaret, turn their cries of grief into vengeful curses. The Duchess of York here regains some control over the monstrous issue of her womb by uniting the women in a collective curse of her son. Yet however heroic the Duchess may be as she attempts to restore the moral balance overturned by her son's birth, the figure of a deathbringing mother is nonetheless anxiety producing. Even in these dire circumstances, she evokes an image of unnatural female independence suggestive of Amazonian mothers who control the issue of their wombs by murdering or maiming their sons at birth.

Epitomizing the figure of the Amazon-mother, of course, is the ghostly Queen Margaret who looms over the action of Richard III. Margaret is in some respects a sympathetic figure: she has returned to her enemies' court to avenge the cruel murder of her husband and young son. Rather than restoring order, however, Margaret's desire for vengeance exceeds all bounds, particularly when she demands the death of the king's children (I.iii.200). Underscoring the barbarism of Margaret's call for justice, the play links her chilling cry for the death of the prince with an image of infanticide dramatized in the Henry VI plays. But in referring to the horrific scene from 3 Henry VI in which Clifford stabs the young Rutland, Shakespeare makes an important alteration in Richard III recasting Margaret and not Clifford as the schoolboy's murderer. Margaret's infanticide, her murder of that "peevish brat" (192) as she unremorsefully continues to call him, indeed reverberates through Richard III. It has become the original crime, the first cause, which has given rise to the chain of vengeance documented over the course of the two plays. Grotesquely inverting her role as queen and mother, Margaret's unspeakable act of infanticide, the play suggests, provides the mirror and the motive for all the atrocities that follow.

The play's ambivalent images of the female body as the site of both birth and death have a counterpart in the Elizabethan discourse of sedition. Elizabeth I herself appropriated the figure of motherhood early in her reign as a means of countering demands for her to marry.⁹ The queen's subjects, as we have seen, gave Elizabeth's paradoxical representations of herself as an unmarried mother a grotesque literalness with their rumors of illegitimate births. Often combined with these tales of the queen's children, however, were rumors that the queen had murdered them. The accounts are lurid: two peasants in Essex in the early 1590s, for example, alleged that Leicester burned the children alive, stuffing them up a chimney;¹⁰ another accusation recounts how the queen gave birth to a daughter and then ordered the child to be cast into a fire and the midwife who delivered her poisoned.¹¹ More official voices than these also emphasized the discrepancy between expectations and the reality of Elizabeth's rule. A draft of a bold speech Peter Wentworth had prepared to read before the Parliament in 1592 depicts the queen as a nursing mother who uses her power not to sustain but to destroy the life of her nation:

O England England how great ar thy sines towardes thy mercifull god, that he hath so alienated the harte of her that he hath sett over thee to be thy nource, that she should withold nourishing milk from thee, and force thee to drinke thyne one distiuction.¹²

I would like to return now to the conclusion of Richard III, this time by way of Henry V. Shakespeare concludes each of his English tetralogies with the promise of a dynastic marriage. The union between Henry V and Katherine of France celebrated at the close of the second tetralogy is represented on the stage by a kiss; and though the epilogue of the play soon undermines the optimism of the royal marriage by looking ahead to the disastrous reign of Henry VI, the concluding image of the royal couple gloriously figures Henry's conquest of France. By contrast, the union between Richmond and Elizabeth at the close of Richard III is only announced. "We will unite the White Rose and the Red" (V.v.19), Richmond promises, his ambiguous pronoun referring either to himself and Elizabeth or, as is more likely, his new authority as king. Elizabeth does not appear on stage at all, either in this scene or elsewhere in the play. The exclusion of women from the conclusion of Richard III is also in direct contrast to other Elizabethan dramatizations of Richard III. In the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III (1594), considered by many to be a source for Shakespeare's play, women are essential to the conclusion.¹³ Here the queen mother ceremoniously hands her daughter to Richmond and then, after a review of the Tudor dynasty, concludes the play with a lengthy compliment to Elizabeth I.¹⁴ Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius (1579), though it does not include any women in its brief conclusion, does at least, in its closing lines, pay tribute specifically to "the mighty Princess Elizabeth, a daughter worthy of [her] father . . . may he protect her life by shielding [her]."¹⁵

Shakespeare's principal source for the first tetralogy, Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), also makes much of the royal marriage, as we might expect. Hall in fact opens his chronicle with a preview of its resolution, offering a lengthy paean to the sacrament of marriage in general and to the union of Richmond and Elizabeth in particular, a union to be fulfilled, he writes, in the peaceable rule of Henry VIII. To be sure, Hall's elaborate praise of marriage might not have translated well onto the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare's revision of his source suggests something other than deference to his queen, however; for by minimizing the marriage and focusing instead on the heroic male warrior, Shakespeare refashions Hall's account of Tudor history into a nationalistic myth that is exclusively male. In place of Hall's compliment to Henry VIII, Shakespeare offers no parallel compliment to his own monarch. Elizabeth of York, upon whose fertility the Tudor succession depends, appears in the conclusion to Richard III only through the agency of Richmond's voice, which names her but once. The unruly women who have dominated the tetralogy are gone, and in their place is a queen whose presence is evoked only by her absence.

On the Shakespearean stage the Tudor reign begins in Richmond alone. In many ways, of course, Shakespeare's emphasis on Richmond is more accurate than the scene of Tudor origins staged in either the True Tragedy or Richardus Tertius: the historical Richmond based his title on his victory at Bosworth, not on his marriage to Elizabeth of York.¹⁶ It might be argued, then, that the absence of women from the conclusion of Richard III simply mirrors official Tudor history. But when we consider the absence of women in terms of their unsettling presence elsewhere in the play, we generate a far different version of Tudor history. By excluding the women, and Lady Elizabeth in particular, Shakespeare fails to represent on stage an alternative or corrective to the play's ambivalent female figures. Like the rumors that surfaced again and again during Elizabeth I's reign that her brother Edward VI was still alive, Shakespeare's representation of the origins of the Tudor dynasty evokes both the nation's yearning for a male monarch as well as the fear that the queen's womb does, after all, bring death.¹⁷ In the last decade of her reign, Elizabeth I endangered the Tudor state not only because she was a woman but also because she had failed to provide what her father and grandfather had obsessively attended to, the perpetuation of the Tudor line. The prosperous and fertile future of the Tudor patriarchy celebrated at the close of the tetralogy would be contested by history itself, as Shakespeare's audience already knew.

Notes

¹ All quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² See, for example, Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Madonne Miner, "Neither Mother, Wife, nor England's Queen': 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 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); and Irene G. Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

³ John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (1855; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1966), 4: 373.

⁴ Knox, p. 391.

⁵ See Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

⁶ Carol Levin, "Queens and Claimants: Political Insecurity in Sixteenth-Century England," in Gender, Ideology, and Action: Historical Perspectives on Women's Public Lives, ed. Janet Sharistanian (Westport: Green-wood Press, 1986), pp. 55-61.

⁷ Miner and Dash tend to regard the women as victims of both Richard's savagery and the patriarchal culture. Many more studies, however, point to the women's culpability; see for example, Richard P. Wheeler, "History, Character and Conscience in Richard III" Comparative Drama 5 (1971-2): 301-21, and 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).

⁸ Coppélia Kahn, Man 's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); pp. 63-4; see also Michael Neill, "Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III" Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 99-129.

⁹ Allison Heisch, "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy," Feminist Review 4 (1980): 50.

¹⁰ Joel Samaha, "Gleanings from Local Criminal-Court Records: Sedition Amongst the 'Inarticulate' in Elizabethan Essex," The Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 69.

¹¹ Levin, p. 59.

¹² J. E. Neale, "Peter Wentworth," English Historical Review 39 (1924): 196-97.

¹³ Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), III: 238.

¹⁴The True Tragedy of Richard the Third 1594. Malone Society Reprints, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).

¹⁵ Robert J. Lordi, Thomas Legge 's 'Richardus Tertius ': A Critical Edition with a Translation (New York: Garland, 1979).

¹⁶ Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460-1571 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 35.

¹⁷ For a discussion of the rumors about Edward VI, see Levin, pp. 41-66.