SOURCE: “Performing Persecution,” in Malevolent Nature: Witch Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 193-207.

[In the following excerpt, Willis contends that Richard demonizes his mother and all women for his own defects as well as for his distance from the succession to the throne of England.]

Richard's Mothers

In the middle of Richard III, as Richard is consolidating his power en route to his short-lived kingship, he makes a blatantly fraudulant charge of witchcraft against Queen Elizabeth and Jane Shore:

Look how I am bewitched! Behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling withered up.
And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.

(3.4.68-72)

What has been suggested in the tetralogy's two earlier examples of witchcraft prosecution is now taken one step farther. Richard initiates a “witch-hunt” in the modern sense; his charges against Elizabeth and Jane Shore are a piece of machiavellian theater, a politically expedient way of staging Hastings's arrest and impending execution. As Shakespeare also makes clear, this witchcraft charge is embedded in Richard's history of relations with women. Elizabeth (Edward's widow) and Jane Shore (Edward's mistress) make an unlikely team; yet for Richard it makes perfect sense to link them. Both have made his rival Edward, first son and true likeness of the father, the object of their love; their alleged act of witchcraft, moreover, recalls Richard's account of the deforming effects of his mother's womb, articulated first in his soliloquy in the middle of 3 Henry VI

Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb;
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear whelp
That carries no impression like the dam.
And am I then a man to be beloved?

(3.2.153-63)

Richard's soliloquy has been lucidly analyzed by Janet Adelman as the fantasy of Shakespeare's “first fully developed male subject,” who defines his masculinity in terms of violent escape from a malevolent maternal matrix.¹ Richard blames his deformity on his mother's womb and attendent female presences; to redefine himself, he must hack his way out of the suffocating “thorny wood” that he associates with them. In Adelman's reading, moreover, the speech “localizes a whole range of anxieties about masculinity and female power” in the tetralogy as a whole. And so it does. Yet Shakespeare, I believe, points to more than the maternal body through Richard's richly imagined fantasy. The mother's womb is inevitably also home to the father's generative seed; the “thorny wood” through which Richard must hack his way to gain the crown is also associated with the family tree of the father's patrilineage. Witnessing Edward's proposal of marriage to Elizabeth, Richard starts off by envisioning the future in these terms:

Would [Edward] were wasted, marrow, bones, and all,
That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring
To cross me from the golden time I look for!
And yet, between my soul's desire and me—
The lustful Edward's title buried—
Is Clarence, Henry, and his son young Edward,
And all the unlooked-for issue of their bodies,
To take their rooms ere I can place myself.
A cold meditation for my purpose!

(125-33)

The father's first two sons, their sons, and their “unlooked-for issue” possess the womblike “room” of kingship now and into the future; the “hopeful branch” of this expanding family tree is the obstacle that returns to haunt Richard in the image of the “thorny wood” that separates him from the crown. By contrast with this flourishing forest of brothers' issue, Richard as “deformed” third son is but a “withered shrub,” a “blasted sapling withered up,” an unhealthy branch of the York patrilineage which deserves to be discarded and passed by.

Richard indeed directs his rage over these exclusions especially at the mother's womb and women who become associated with it. His deformity encodes the failure that supposedly causes it—the mother's failure to nurture her son properly. Love “foreswore” him; he is “like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear whelp / That carries no impression like the dam” (161-62), an “indigested lump” (2H6 5.1.157). But the plays place Richard's fantasies in a context that also brings out the father's role. Moreover, images of the mother's womb segue into images of the mother's voice—specifically the voice of the patrilineal mother, who articulates the values of the aristocratic honor culture. And having first rejected him in the womb, the mother and her proxies continue to reject him after birth. Richard's mother, we are later told, loved Edward and Clarence as “two mirrors” of her husband's “princely semblance,” but she rejected Richard as a “false glass” (R3 2.2.51-54). Other female voices do likewise: “The midwife wondered and the women cried / ‘O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!’ / And so I was, which plainly signified / That I should snarl and bite and play the dog” (3H6 5.6.74-77); Margaret calls him “a foul misshapen stigmatic / Marked by the destinies to be avoided, / As venom toads or lizards' dreadful stings” (3H6 2.2.136-38); Anne later calls him “devil,” “dreadful minister of hell,” “lump of foul deformity” (R3 1.2.45, 46, 57); the list could easily go on. Males, too, apply such language to Richard; yet it is clearly from women—and usually women positioned as mothers—from whom Richard has heard it first.

Mothers, nurses, and wives, themselves inscribed within patrilineal discourse, in turn inscribe Richard, denigrating him as devil, monster, “foul misshapen stigmatic.” Women's voices encode hierarchies of difference sanctioned by the patrilineal order, privileging older sons over younger, “normal” bodies over deformed. It is a history shaped as much by Richard's fantasized constructions as by women's actual conduct; Richard scapegoats them for the oppressive, marginalizing effects of patrilineality and for a discourse about the abnormal body. Though the plays to an extent share in Richard's scapegoating they also expose its limits. Women are witches—and they are not; the plays invite sympathy with Richard's misogyny and also interrogate it.

Interestingly, and consistent with his treatment of women elsewhere, Richard does not pursue the witchcraft charges against Elizabeth and Jane Shore. Whereas he seeks to control, humiliate, and punish women, he seldom actually has them killed. His violence is directed instead at the male rivals they have preferred over him. The witchcraft charge makes Hastings (a supporter of the claims of Edward's young heir, son of Queen Elizabeth, grandson of Richard's own mother) another casualty of a fantasy of maternal betrayal in which mothers are punished through the murder of their sons and their sons’ supporters; the mothers themselves must be alive to suffer the knowledge of those deaths. The first such murder is that of Margaret's son, young Ned, before his mother's eyes; in that scene, all three of the York sons join together to stab him in turn. It is made clear that in so doing they are symbolically killing the mother in the son. In contrast to Richard, who “carries no impression like the dam,” Ned is the image of his mother in his valiant spirit and high-sounding words; Richard himself comments on those words in one of their early confrontations: “Whoever got thee, there thy mother stands; / For, well I wot, thou hast thy mother's tongue (3H6 2.2.133-34). And as the York brothers stab him in front of Margaret, Edward echoes Richard's sentiments, remarking with a rather childish nastiness, “Take that, thou likeness of this railer here” (5.5.38). Although Richard seems ready to kill Margaret at this point, he stops at the request of Edward (who “loves the breeder better than the male” [2.1.42]). In punishing the mother by means of the son, Richard also enacts the punishment of the mother in the son.

Richard's fantasy of a mother's deforming influence on sons is embedded in cultural beliefs that often did locate the cause of a child's deformity in the maternal body. As Janet Adelman notes, his fantasy “reiterates the belief that the mother could literally deform fetuses through her excessive imagination, her uncontrollable longings, her unnatural lusts.”² Richard's mother voices a related belief when she says she “sees her shame” in Richard; a child's deformity could be the consequence of a parent's shameful, sinful act, especially a mother’s. But “shame” here is a term that may tilt both ways: that is, it may imply that the mother is shamed by a deformity that comes from a different source. A few lines earlier in the same scene, his mother has said of Richard, “He is my son—ay, and therein my shame; / Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit” (2.2.29-30). Here, she is shamed by her son's deceitful and vicious actions but denies responsibility for them; the cause does not lie in her milk. Others in the plays also locate the cause of Richard's deformity elsewhere. Thus Margaret, in calling Richard a “foul misshapen stigmatic,” notes that he is not like either “sire or dam” and sees his deformity as “marked by the destinies to be avoided.” An ambiguous supernatural power has caused Richard's deformity, not his parents. Later Henry expands upon this view, describing the seeming omens that surrounded his birth:

The owl shrieked at thy birth—an evil sign;
The night crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees;
The raven rooked her on the chimney's top,
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain,
And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,
To signify thou cam’st to bite the world.

(5.6.44-54)

Again both mother and father, the “goodly tree,” are exonerated; the mother, in fact, is figured as a victim of this ominous supernatural event, confronted after an especially painful birth with a child who is “less than a mother's hope.” Exactly what sort of supernatural power is inscribing Richard's deformity Henry does not make clear (Richard terms it “the heavens” shortly thereafter). By the end of Richard III, of course, this power is more clearly aligned with divine providence, Richard's deformity signifying that he is God's scourge. Ultimately, however, the plays leave the source of Richard's deformity—physical and mental—undecidable; multiple explanations are offered, but the question of origins is left tantalizingly unresolved. Mothers may—or may not—be to blame.

The plays more clearly endorse Richard's sense of rejection and locate its source in women's stigmatizing speech. Richard from the moment of his birth seems to have been surrounded by women telling him his deformity marks him as someone “less than a mother's hope”; mother, midwife, and female servants, moreover, are the first to articulate the various theories explaining Richard's deformity as ominous supernatural sign. Early modern mothers often interpreted abnormalities in their newborn infants in similar fashion—sometimes with dire consequences. Infanticide was one result of the belief that a deformed child was a changeling, a devil, a monstrous prodigy.³ A deformed child allowed to survive might also be subjected to particularly abusive treatment by parents seeking to “beat the devil out of him.”⁴ Since mothers in a patrilineal culture were under pressure to produce male heirs, they had a special investment in their sons, and their own status and access to power would depend in particular on bearing a son who was the father's likeness and accepted as his heir. The mother who bore a deformed child was at the very least faced with “less than a mother's hope”; she was herself likely to be stigmatized in some way by husband and neighbors whether or not she was openly blamed for the child's deformity. Shakespeare situates the beginning of Richard's sociopathic career in this problematic relation between patrilineal mother and deformed child. And yet, while the plays arouse sympathy for Richard's sense of rejection, they also toy with the idea that “mother” may be right. Is Richard a “devil,” possessed of an innate aggressiveness that causes his mother to reject him, a “grievous burden” to her at birth and “tetchy and wayward” in his infancy, as she herself later describes him? (4.4.168-69). Or is it her stigmatizing, marginalizing discourse and her rejecting behavior that help to nurture a retaliatory violence in Richard? The plays provide evidence for both views, inviting the audience to see that both mother and son are implicated in the son's construction of identity but allowing no fixed conclusion.

Richard appropriates the mother's discourse and attempts to turn it against her. If mothers insist that his deformity means that he will “snarl and bite and play the dog,” he will do so but on his own terms, transforming their power relations. If he is a “devil,” she will be a “witch”—a powerless one, subordinated to his will. Her words become mere words, with no power to injure, deform, or render impotent. Thus, Margaret the “railer,” having lost crown, husband, son, and all the powers that went with them, returns in Richard III to be harassed by Richard as a “foul wrinkled witch” and “hateful withered hag” with only “frantic curses” for weapons (1.3.164, 215, 247). Richard literally turns the curse she utters about him back against her by interrupting her with her own name, making her assume the position of the “elvish-marked, abortive rooting hog,” the “loathed issue,” the “rag of honor” he is meant to be (228, 232, 233). “Thus have you breathed your curse against yourself,” comments Elizabeth dryly to Margaret afterwards (240). And for much of the play, Richard's skill with words, theatrical dissembling, and spectacle allow him to overcome all his opponents; like Iago, he works “by wit, and not by witchcraft” to gain the upper hand. Margaret, Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Lady Anne—we see them almost entirely as vulnerable, weak, and powerless, in transit to and from the Tower, bemoaning the loss of the husbands, brothers, and (especially) children they are utterly unable to protect. Neither “mother” nor “witch” can match this son's diabolic wit; both terms are evacuated of power.

Yet before the end of the play, the mother's discourse recovers some of its sting. After Margaret leaves the stage in act 1, scene 3, Buckingham admits, “My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses” (304). And as one by one the predictions her curses contain begin to come true, the witchlike attributes of Margaret and the other mothers in the play begin to acquire a new potency. If at first the play seems to substitute mother-hunting for witch-hunting, inviting the audience to take pleasure in Richard's triumphs over women while recognizing his misogyny, by the play's end not only do mothers reclaim some of their lost witchlike powers, but those powers also take on an oddly positive value. In act 4, scene 4, Margaret passes on her power to curse to her old enemies, Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York, and witch tropes underlie the scene in a variety of ways. Margaret begins by taking malevolent pleasure in the suffering of the female rivals who have injured her in the past and, like an aristocratic version of the typical village witch, utters a curse on a rival's child—the “hellhound” and “carnal cur” that has crept from the Duchess of York's womb (4.4.47-58). Again like the typical witch, she expresses her curse as a prayer to an “upright, just, and true-disposing God” (55). It is a curse that we know will very quickly be answered, will indeed “light” upon her enemy, as her earlier curses have already done.

Margaret is still very much her clan-centered, vengeful self, the “Amazonian trull” triumphing in her enemies' woes, articulating the revenge code of the feudal honor culture without modification. For her, divine justice does not temper or in any way transform revenge, it is identical with it. Yet because Richard (who “preys on the issue of his mother's body”) has alienated his own mother (and sister-in-law), Margaret's curses also provide the possibility of a bond between these old clan enemies. “Sorrow admits society” as the women's reproaches of each other give way to shared grief and anger at Richard, and Elizabeth requests that Margaret teach her how to curse. It is the Duchess of York, however, who makes best use of Margaret's teaching, becoming another witchlike, child-killing mother in cursing her own son. “Go with me,” she invites Elizabeth, “and in the breath of bitter words let's smother / My damned son that thy two sweet sons smothered” (132-34). Her curse will not only “light,” its phrasing will also seem to conjure up the supernatural, ghost-filled dream that Richard has the night before his final battle:

Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more
Than all the complete armor that thou wear’st!
My prayers on the adverse party fight,
And there the little souls of Edward's children
Whisper the spirits of thine enemies
And promise them success and victory!

(188-94)

Richard's dream contains exactly such a scene with the ghosts of Edward's children; subtly, his mother's witchlike curse recalls the powers attributed to the real witch Margery Jourdain, glimpsed in 2 Henry VI raising spirits to prophesy the future. Richard dies on the battlefield, undermined by the feelings aroused by that dream as much as overwhelmed by his enemies, “providentially” murdered not only by Henry of Richmond but also by his own mother's voice, unnerved not only by his prophetic dream of defeat but also by a sudden eruption of conscience which suggests his internalization of maternal rejection is finally complete. “There is no creature loves me, / And if I die no soul will pity me. / And wherefore should they, since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself?” (5.3.200-203). Maternal rejection has been, as it were, internalized by Richard; mother speaks in his rejection of himself.

There is room here to stage these scenes so that these women's words do seem to have a “real” magical power; in some productions, Margaret in particular has been presented in such a way as to suggest she has some genuinely witchy features. But Margaret has described herself as a “prophetess” (1.3.301); “witch” is Richard's term for her. And Elizabeth and the duchess construct their own curses as mere words, “windy” words, “Poor breathing orators of miseries.” They nevertheless have value for the women: “Let them have scope! Though what they will impart / Help nothing else, yet do they ease the heart” (4.4.127-31). And as it turns out, even mere words have power—the power to injure Richard and to deceive him, among other things. Richard can hardly bear to hear these women's “bitter words”; like a child, he tries to drown out their voices with drumbeats: “Strike alarum, drums! / Let not the heavens hear these telltale women / Rail on the Lord's anointed. Strike, I say!” (149-51). It is his mother in particular he does not want to hear, agreeing finally to listen to her only after she promises never to speak to him again. Those words—the words of her curse—seem to have a power over his soul as deadly as any literal witch's curse.

Elizabeth, least witchy of the three women in that she has least “spirit to curse” (197), nevertheless also has a witchlike ability to deceive and to manipulate the emotions. As Richard seeks to win her consent in arranging a marriage to her daughter (also named Elizabeth), attempting to repeat his victory over Anne at the beginning of the play in another conquest of a “shallow, changing woman” (4.4.431), he meets instead an adversary well able to match his wit and confound his meaning. At last, dissembling her submission, she wins time to arrange her daughter's marriage to his rival, Richmond. Before doing so, however, she forces him to acknowledge his impotence as a lover and his dependence on a mother's power: “Myself myself confound!…/ Therefore, dear Mother—I must call you so—/ Be the attorney of my love to her. / Plead what I will be, not what I have been” (399, 412-14). Desperate for this marriage to secure his title and power, he is again in a position where his need for a mother's favor makes him vulnerable to rejection.

Thus, mothers reclaim control of the discourse that Richard appropriated from them; they define him as “carnal cur,” “devil,” and “rag of honor” and call down a punishment that even he must concede is deserved. They do not speak or act alone, of course, but are part of a larger process in which witch's curse and godly prayer, conjuration and prophecy, revenge and divine justice (not to mention house of York and house of Lancaster) become inseparably intertwined in opposing Richard and bringing about his fall. Margaret's curse ends in a prayer for Richard's death: “Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray, / That I may live and say, ‘The dog is dead!’” (77-78); Richard's mother's curse ends, “Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end” (195). The language of both mothers is echoed in Richmond's declaration of victory: “The day is ours; the bloody dog is dead” (5.5.2). Through Richmond, maternal authority is reunited with patrilineal right, the mother's voice absorbed into the male warrior's reassertion of control.

To an extent, then, Shakespeare at the end of this sequence opens up a space for the mother as white witch, who heals with her destructive violence. In the interests of constructing a national family, even participating in the murder of one's own son can be a good thing. Margaret, Elizabeth and the Duchess of York—a coven of cursing mothers—in helping to destroy Richard, aid Richmond, a son whose own mother loves and blesses him (see 5.3.82-83), and though they still play a largely marginalized and subordinate role in the male-centered political and military world, they are allowed some scope for action within it. They survive in part because they are on the margins of that world, becoming witnesses of the costs when masculinist honor violence has crippled it. Of all the supernatural powers attributed to the witch, Shakespeare seems to take most seriously the witch's power as diviner or prophetess (especially in Macbeth). Mothers see what men in the thick of action choose to ignore; they have a prophetic insight that may depend in part on a perspective they can have only because they are liminally positioned on the margins. More broadly, Shakespeare relates the witch's power to the de facto power of aristocratic mothers at court, whose special perspective and positioning allows them to exert influence from behind the scenes, enacted through patronage, intrigue, or as matchmaking “attorneys.” At best ambivalent about this power throughout most of the tetralogy, Shakespeare here at the end recuperates a witchlike maternal malevolence to a surprising degree: Richard yields to the power of mothers as well as to Richmond's advancing army.⁵

Yet a number of things render this recuperation problematic, most of them related to the “problem” of the ending itself. As readers and audiences have often complained, Richmond is an unsatisfying hero, no match for the hero-villain Richard. The order he stands for is largely undefined. And though by now we are tired of Richard's act, though clearly his multiplying villainies have earned him his end, the vitality and interest of the play—indeed of the tetralogy as a whole—has been generated by its upstarts. Joan, York, Margaret, Suffolk, Cade, Richard—all suffer some form of exclusion. Though their resistance to exclusion is always represented as transgressive, their outraged dignity is allowed a voice, and the wounds to their self-esteem act as challenges, prompting them to dazzling displays of ingenuity, wit, and Machiavellian stratagems. In Richard's first soliloquy, his long meditation on the “torment” of his separation from the crown gives way to exuberant boasting: “I can add colors to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages. / … Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? / Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down” (3H6 3.3.191-92, 194-95). The individualist ambitions that drive Richard (and other upstarts) find expression through theater: the desire to achieve honor, glory, higher class standing, the “Elysium” of the crown is indistinguishable from the desire to be on center stage, as it were, to be recognized and admired by an audience. Audiences, actors, and playwrights necessarily have an investment in their enterprise by virtue of the theatrical medium itself. Shakespeare locates within the feudal culture a theatrical imperative. Joan's desire for glory, York's ambition to be king, and especially Richard's quest for the “Elysium” of the crown, all seem to reflect a yearning to be the object of a gaze that reproduces the mother's seemingly unconditional worship of “his majesty the baby,” to recreate through the theatricality of power the illusion of being the mother's phallus. The inability of these upstarts to modify their aims, to take into account the needs of others or their own occasional empathic impulses, leads finally to the failure of their projects; their destructive trajectory ends also in self-destruction, and the audience is ultimately distanced from them.

Yet while displaying both the attractions and the limits of feudal individualism, the plays grope toward but fail to offer a satisfying alternative. Richmond is too much like the pious, one-dimensional king Richard pretends to be before the Commons in act 3, scene 4. His “God is on our side” rhetoric, moreover, has been emptied out and exposed as subject to manipulation. His new order is an order without theater or wit. Presenting him only on the battlefield, the play takes us back to the narrowly militarist world of Talbot. And Richard's mockery of him may raise doubts about his status even as a warrior. Richmond is “a paltry fellow, / Long kept in Brittany at our mother's cost … / A milksop, one that never in his life / Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow” (5.3.323-26). Shakespeare's historical “error” here seems entirely appropriate; of course Richard would imagine his own mother has been providing support for his rival.⁶ Yet the play, in emphasizing Richmond as mother's darling—blessed by his own mother, aided by Queen Elizabeth in marrying her daughter, patronized by Richard's mother—may recall the specter of the mother-dominated male from earlier plays, as if the alternative to Richard could only be another Henry VI. Richmond is linked to the “effeminate” French, his army a “scum of Bretons,” “overweening rags of France … whom our fathers / Have in their own land beaten, bobbed, and thumped” (317, 328, 333-34). As far as we see or hear, he has no father—only a host of mothers, who support him in an invasion of England from France.

Richmond's final speech is emblematic of the problem:

England hath long been mad, and scarred herself;
The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire.
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division.
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with treason wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen!

(5.5.23-41)

Here, Richmond's gender-coded imagery condenses a pattern that has become familiar: male treason originates in a self-destructive female matrix; brothers, fathers, and sons, divided against one another, enact the “mad” female will of an “England” who scars her own body—much like the mother's womb that produces a son who preys on its own issue. Similarly, mothers throughout the plays have supported and encouraged the factiousness of sons, lovers, and male kin; they have thus brought on, to an extent, their own suffering and wounds. This madness is brought to a conclusion by the marriage of Elizabeth and Richmond, “true succeeders of each royal house”: a patrilineal “line” is securely reestablished with a new father at its head, enabled by the transmissibility of the royal succession through the female as well as the male; Elizabeth, daughter of a royal father and now sole heir, as mother will pass on the Yorkist paternal inheritance, as Richmond will the Lancastrian one: in a sense, only by feminizing one of the warring fathers—by reducing the York patrilineage to its female members—can homosocial peace be attained. The powers of aristocratic women as heirs and as mothers proves necessary to this restored male order, and the return of a nurturant, “good” mother to England—“smooth-faced peace,” who will bring “smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days”—is made possible only by acknowledging a limited agency for women within that order.⁷

The problem here—and elsewhere in this ending—is that this construction of “England” excises the role of the father and of a patriarchal symbolic in the production of civil war disorder: the father exists only as another son, another extension of a “mad” maternal body. In ascribing a primarily female origin to male treason, the play leaves the door open not only to idealizing the mother (in the form of white witches, supportive mothers, or peace's smiling plenitude) but also to scapegoating the mother-as-witch, toward which the tetralogy has tended in its earlier scenes; it replays maternal complicity in a patriarchal order as matriarchy. Mothers in these plays are indeed complicit in the male order, but they are not its main authors; scapegoating the mother becomes a refuge from the anxieties aroused by more directly confronting the father's excesses and vulnerabilities and by facing the weaknesses in a sociopolitical order organized around patrilineality, patriarchy, and primogeniture. In blaming his mother's womb and speech for his deformity and his exclusion from patrilineal power, Richard need not face the fact that his mother's preferences also enact his (loved) father's will. In affirming mothers and accepting their help, Richmond no less than Richard avoids confronting problems in his paternal inheritance. The potential for disorder within order, foregrounded in the Henry VI plays, remains: patrilineality may still bring to the throne a geek, a monster, a tyrant, a “weak king”; its ambiguities may still produce crises of legitimacy; its exclusionary hierarchies may still breed envy, faction, and individualist ambition.

An alternative male subjectivity is only gestured toward, not reached. Richmond embodies a hope more than an actual reconfiguration of identity. It is through the mothers themselves rather than “son” Richmond that Shakespeare comes closest to imagining a positive alternative to Richard—an alternative that draws upon Richard's strengths as well as punishes his villainies, that uses those strengths in the service of new affiliative bonds. The women appropriate his dissembling, his wit, his skill with words, and turn it against him, matching him pun for pun, confounding his meaning as he has confounded theirs, duping him with seeming submission to his construction of them as fickle and changeable. Insofar as we glimpse an alternative to the individualist and clan-centered ties that have driven honor violence throughout the plays, it is in the precarious bond established between old enemies—in Lancastrian Margaret teaching Yorkist mothers how to curse. In the end, of course, this bond does little more than enable the reinstatement of the rule of another patrilineal father, the hegemony of a new Tudor clan. The plays do not subvert patriarchy or abandon their androcentric focus; yet as sons attempt to differentiate themselves from as well as sustain a connection to a problematic inheritance from the father, the plays do, I believe, open up a larger space within patriarchy for acknowledging an inheritance from the mother and for valorizing female solidarity and self-assertion, even when these take violent form.

The trope of witch as malevolent mother, for Shakespeare, marks the problem of maternal power within patriarchy and also the problem that is patriarchy. Maternal authority, predating the encounter with the father, reasserts itself as an ambivalently desired, subversive alternative when the father, subject to death, limits, vulnerabilities, shows himself to be inadequate to the son's idealizing yearnings. But rather than fully break with this ideal (and thus with the hope of inheriting the father's greater authority), sons choose to blame only the mother for the deforming effects of patrilineality and other problematic aspects of the father's order. In the end, chastened mothers may recuperate some of their power, becoming “white” witches, but only, it would seem, by consenting to make the son into an idealized father, first in a new patrilineal “line” that disavows any frailties.

At the same time, Shakespeare decenters the persecutory impulse his culture directed against both witches and mothers. The witch trope marks the problematic intersection of the “real” and the “imaginary”; it doubly calls attention to the mother as a locus of threat and to a potential in the male for persecutory fantasy. In these plays, a literal witchcraft is exposed as part deception and theater, then superseded by the figurative witchcraft of mothers. As witch-hunting segues into mother-hunting, the persecutory impulse becomes subject to a more skeptical critique. The audience is invited to take pleasure in Richard's denigrations of women and his punishment of them, yet also to see there is something excessive about his persecutory aim. The tetralogy, while never quite freeing itself from Richard's core fantasy, does not fully endorse it either. For Shakespeare, witchcraft accusation points “in” to the self as well as “out” to an other, making the woman accused an unstable locus where it is never clear who really is to blame.

Notes

1. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 2-3.

2. Ibid., p. 6.

3. Just before she delivers her final curse to Richard, the Duchess of York recalls her lost opportunity of infanticide (abortion, actually), combining a murderous will with beliefs about the deforming power of the womb as she describes herself to her son as “she that might have intercepted thee, / By strangling thee in her accursed womb, / From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done!” (4.4.137-39).

4. See Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, pp. 149-50.

5. Not all critics would agree. Janet Adelman, for one, sees a dramatic structure “that moves women from positions of power and authority to positions of utter powerlessness, and finally moves them off the stage altogether” (Suffocating Mothers, p. 9). Marilyn Williamson, for another, also sees the women as powerless, though an illusory power imputed to them functions to mask the historical process by which men produce civil war, as when Margaret's prophecies produce a false sense that she is responsible for their destinies. “When Men Are Rul’d by Women,” pp. 56-57.

6. Actually, the error is Holinshed’s; the second edition of his Chronicles contained a misprint, substituting “mother’s” for “brother’s”; Richmond had been supported by Richard's brother-in-law, the duke of Burgundy. See Bevington's footnote, Bantam edition.

7. An agency for mothers, but perhaps not for daughters; Elizabeth seems to protect her daughter's right to reject an unwelcome suitor, as Richard is likely to be; yet the audience never sees her daughter give that consent. The daughter has no voice of her own and is treated as an extension of the mother whose name she shares.

Works Cited

Witchcraft—Primary Sources

Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, part III. Ed. Robert Pitcairn. Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1829-33.

The Apprehension and confession of three notorious Witches, Arreigned and by Justice condemned and executed at Chelms-forde. London, 1589.

Bodin, Jean. De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. Paris, 1580.

Bower, Edmond. Dr. Lamb Revived; or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham a Servant of His. London, 1653.

Calendar of Scottish Papers. Vol 5. 6, 10 (1589-93). Ed. William K. Boyd and Henry W. Meikle. Edinburgh, 1936.

Dasent, John R., ed. Acts of the Privy Council. New series. 25 vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1897.

A detection of damnable drifts, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisforde in Essex. London, 1579.

The examination and confession of certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex. London, 1566.

The examination of John Walsh … upon certayne Interrogatories touchyng Wytchcrafte and Sorcerye. London, 1566.

Gifford, George. A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes. 1593. Ed. Beatrice White. London: Oxford University Press, 1931.

———. A Discourse of the subtill Practises of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers. 1587.

———Foure Sermons. London, 1598.

Goodcole, Henry. The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, late of Edmonton. London, 1621.

Gowries Conspiracie: A Discourse of the unnaturall and vyle Conspiracie, attempted against the Kings Maiesties Person at Sanct-Ionstown. 1600. Rpt. in A Selection from the Harleian Miscellany, 190-98. London: C. and G. Kearsley, 1798.

Guazzo, Francesco. Compendium Maleficarum. Milan, 1608.

James I. Daemonologie. London, 1597. Rpt. in Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos, ed. G. B. Harrison. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966.

Knox, John. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Rpt. in The Political Writings of John Knox. Ed. Marvin A. Breslow. Washington, D. C.: Folger Books, 1985.

Kramer, Heinrich, and Jacob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Cologne, 1486.

Marston, John. The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba. In Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

Middleton, Thomas. The Witch. In Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys, arraigned, convicted, and executed at the last Assizes at Huntington, for the bewitching of the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton Esquire, and divers other persons. London, 1593.

Newes from Scotland. London, 1591. Rpt. in Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos, ed. G. B. Harrison. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966.

Perkins, William. A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft. Cambridge, 1608.

A Rehearsall both straung and true, of hainous and horrible actes committed by Elizabeth Stile, Alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, Mother Margaret, Fower notorious Witches, apprehended at winsore in the Countie of Barks. London, 1579.

Rowley, William, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford. The Witch of Edmonton. 1621. In Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. 1584. Ed. Hugh Ross Williamson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.

Strype, John. The Life of Sir Thomas Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820.

W. W. A true and iust Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S. Oses in the countie of Essex: whereof some were executed, and other some entreated according to the determination of Lawe. 1582. Facsimile. Ed. Anthony Harris. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1981.

The Witches of Northamptonshire … Who were all executed at Northampton. London, 1612.

The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower. London, 1619.

Witchcraft—Secondary Sources

Anderson, Alan, and Raymond Gordon. “The Uniqueness of English Witchcraft: A Matter of Numbers?” British Journal of Sociology 30 (September 1979): 359-61.

———. “Witchcraft and the Status of Women—the Case of England.” British Journal of Sociology 29 (June 1978): 171-84.

Anglo, Sydney, ed. The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.

Balfe, Judith H. “Comments on Garrett's ‘Women and Witches.’” Signs 4 (Autumn 1978): 201-2.

Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. “On Studying Witchcraft as Women's History: A Historiography of the European Witch Persecutions.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (1988): 17-18.

Beckwith, Sarah. “The Power of Devils and the Hearts of Men: Notes towards a Drama of Witchcraft.” In Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum, ed. Lesley Aers and Nigel Wheale, 143-61. London: Routledge, 1991.

Biggins, Dennis. “Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Violence in Macbeth.” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 255-77.

Bovenschen, Silvia. “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch, and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature.” New German Critique 15 (Fall 1978): 83-119.

Clark, Stuart. “Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft.” Past and Present 87 (May 1980): 98-127.

———. “King James's Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship.” In The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo, 156-81. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.

Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-ethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Pp. 178-222.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Dolan, Frances E. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York: Feminist Press, 1973.

Estes, Leland. “The Medical Origins of the European Witch Craze: A Hypothesis.” Journal of Social History (Winter 1983): 271-84.

Ewen, C. L’Estrange. Witchcraft and Demonianism: A Concise Account Derived from Sworn Depositions and Confessions Obtained in the Courts of England and Wales. London: Heath Cranton, 1933.