SOURCE: “Engendering the Tragic Audience: The Case of Richard III,” in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, Verso, 1995, pp. 263-82.

[In the following essay, Rackin examines the disempowerment that occurs to the female characters when Shakespeare transforms a history play into a tragedy as he does with Richard III.]

I

Although the First Folio classifies Richard III with Shakespeare's other English histories, the title pages of the Quartos suggest generic difference. In the case of 2 Henry VI, the title page indicates both the episodic chronicle structure of the play and its historical subject: ‘The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne’. The Quarto of Richard III, by contrast, designates at once its self-consciously dramatic form as tragedy, its origins as a script for theatrical performance, and its strongly centred focus on the male protagonist: ‘The Tragedy of Richard the third, Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephewes: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants’.

In Shakespeare's time, the story of Richard III was repeatedly identified as tragic. Edward Hall had entitled his account of Richard's reign ‘The Tragical Doynges of Kynge Richard The Thirde’, Richard's story (along with those of Clarence, Hastings, Buckingham, and Jane Shore) was identified as a tragedy in A Mirror for Magistrates. Thomas Legge's Latin play Richardus Tertius, performed at Cambridge in 1579, is identified in contemporary texts as an exemplary tragedy, singled out by Sir John Harington and Thomas Heywood to illustrate the beneficial effects of tragic drama, and by Francis Meres in his list of ‘famous tragedies’.¹ Yet another play about Richard, anonymously published in 1594 and entitled ‘The True Tragedy of Richard III’, begins with a dialogue between Truth and Poetrie that identifies ‘Tragedia’ as a player in the coming action and the subject of the play as a ‘Tragedie’ (Sig A3^r).

This essay is an attempt to delineate the ways the reconstruction of history as tragedy in Richard III transvalued the representations of women on Shakespeare's stage, and transformed the gendered relationship between actors and audience in the playhouse. I should begin, however, by acknowledging that the distinction between history and tragedy was by no means clear. The protagonists of tragedy, like those of history, were understood to be characters of high rank. Moreover, in the Renaissance as in antiquity, plays identified as tragedies frequently took their subjects from history. (Shakespeare himself is a good case in point: of the eleven plays designated as tragedies in the First Folio, all but Romeo and Juliet and Othello have historical subjects.)²

Despite the many similarities between the subjects of the two genres, contemporary descriptions of the ways they affected their audiences are strikingly different in regard to issues of gender. Anti-theatrical invective typically attacked all theatrical performance as effeminating, but the English history play offered a significant exception.³ Thomas Nashe, in fact, used the example of the English history play to defend theatrical performance against its detractors: ‘our forefathers valiant acts … are revived’, he declared, ‘than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate days of ours?’ Commemorating the valiant deeds of heroic forefathers and celebrating the masculine virtues of courage, honour, and patriotism, the theatrical representation of English historical subjects could redeem theatrical performance as a means of reclaiming the endangered masculinity of the men in the theatre audience.

Tragedy, on the other hand, was likely to inspire womanly emotions in its spectators. According to Stephen Gosson, ‘The beholding of troubles and miserable slaughters that are in Tragedies, drive us to immoderate sorrow, heaviness, womanish weeping and mourning, whereby we become lovers of dumpes, and lamentation, both enemies to fortitude.’⁴ The claim that tragedy produced womanly softness in its spectators was not confined to anti-theatrical discourse. Sir Philip Sidney recounts a story from Plutarch in which the performance of a tragedy ‘drewe aboundance of teares’ from the eyes of a tyrant ‘who, without all pitty, had murthered infinite nombers, and some of his owne blood’ (pp. 177-8). Arguing for the salutary effects of tragedy, Sidney does not identify them as effeminating. The terms of his argument, however, suggest just that. He claims, for instance, that tragedy ‘openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue’. As Gail Paster has demonstrated, men's bodies opened and wounded were gendered feminine; and the ulcer image directly parallels the terms in which Hamlet will address his guilty mother: ‘Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, / That not your trespass but my madness speaks; / It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, / Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen’ (III.iv.145-9).

Women, in fact, were especially prominent in descriptions of the effects of tragedies on early modern audiences. In a 1620 recollection of a performance of The Spanish Tragedy, for instance, ‘Ladyes in the boxes’ are said to have ‘Kept time with sighes and teares to [the player’s] sad accents’. As Richard Levin points out, the numerous contemporary accounts that describe ‘women weeping in the theatre’ suggest a perception ‘that women had a special sensitivity to, and perhaps a special preference for, pathetic plots and situations’ (pp. 170-71).⁵

In An Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood recounts three anecdotes to illustrate the beneficial effects of tragedies on their auditors. Two of them centre on women who had murdered their husbands. In the first, ‘a townes-woman (till then of good estimation and report)’ watching a play about a woman who had committed a similar crime ‘suddenly skritched and cryd out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me’, and subsequently confessed her crime to the people about her in the audience. In the second, the particulars of the tragic plot are somewhat different, but they have exactly the same effect on the wicked woman: during the performance of a play in which a labourer, envied by his fellow-workers for his diligence, is murdered by having a nail driven into his temples, ‘a woman of great gravity’ becomes ‘strangely amazed’ and ‘with a distracted & troubled braine oft sighed out these words: Oh my husband, my husband!’:

The play, without further interruption, proceeded; the woman was to her owne house conducted, without any apparant suspition, every one coniecturing as their fancies led them. In this agony she some few dayes languished, and on a time, as certaine of her well disposed neighbours came to comfort her, one amongst the rest being Church-warden, to him the Sexton posts, to tell him of a strange thing happening him in the ripping up of a grave: see here (quoth he) what I have found, and shewes them a faire skull, with a great nayle pierst quite through the braine-pan, but we cannot conjecture to whom it should belong, nor how long it hath laine in the earth, the grave being confused, and the flesh consumed. At the report of this accident, the woman, out of the trouble of her afflicted conscience, discovered a former murder. For 12 years ago, by driving that nayle into that skull, being the head of her husband, she had trecherously slaine him. This being publickly confest, she was arraigned, condemned, adiudged, and burned.

(sig GI^v, G2^v)

Heywood's lurid examples represent an extreme case. The plays he describes belong to the subgenre of domestic tragedy, an innovative dramatic form that moved down the social scale and into the home to find its subjects in a domestic space where female characters could and did play central roles (Dolan). Not all of the female spectators of tragedy were imagined as ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’, and not all of the spectators of tragedy were imagined as women. None the less, the spectators were repeatedly and consistently described in contemporary accounts as moved to emotions and responses (compassion, remorse, pity, tears) that were understood as feminine. This conception of the effects of tragedy as feminizing, although not always explicitly stated, is remarkably consistent: it appears in arguments for and against the theatre, in the prologues and epilogues to plays, in accounts of actual experience as well as in prescriptive directions.

The Induction to A Warning for Fair Women (1599) begins with the stage direction: ‘Enter at one doore, Hystorie with Drum and Ensigne: Tragedie at another, in her one hand a whip, in the other a knife’. During the ensuing dispute with Comedie and Hystorie, Tragedie's feminine gender receives repeated emphasis. She is addressed by the others as ‘mistris buskins’ and ‘my Ladie Tragedie’, and she describes the kind of performance she requires as one that will produce feminine emotions in the audience:

I must have passions that must move the soule,
Make the heart heave, and throb within the bosome,
Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes,
… Until I rap the sences from their course …

(sig. A2^v, A3^r)

Over half a century later, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, described the effects of Shakespeare's tragedies in similar terms:

in his Tragick Vein, he Presents Passions so Naturally, and Misfortunes so Probably, as he Peirces the Souls of his Readers with such a True Sense and Feeling thereof, that it Forces Tears through their Eyes. …⁶

In direct contrast to Nashe's celebration of the history play, which imagines an audience of men inspired by the representation of a heroic masculine world to emulate the manly virtues of the forefathers, tragedy is repeatedly described as appealing to women as well as men; and its appeal to men is repeatedly described as directed towards their feminine sympathies, softening hard hearts, piercing guilty souls with remorse, ravishing the entire audience with the feminine passions of pity and fear, and forcing them to weep.

A similarly gendered difference characterized the subjects of the two genres. On the stage as in the audience, the exemplary subjects of tragedy—‘Gods and Goddesses, Kynges and Queenes’ (Webbe, p. 249)—were understood to include women as well as men.⁷ Because history sought to commemorate the past, reconstituted as a nostalgically idealized world of the fathers, women and sexuality occupied only marginal roles. Both tragedy and comedy, however, assigned important roles to women and marriage. In comedy, conflicts between older and newer social dispensations are characteristically resolved in marriage; in tragedy they often constitute the hero's predicament, which is typically defined at least partly in terms of his relationship to women. This is true not only in plays like Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, which centre on romantic relationships, but also in virtually every tragedy in the Shakespearean canon, with the possible exceptions of Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens.

Shakespeare's history plays opposed the troubling realities of cultural change by projecting a better world in the past; his tragedies played out those cultural contradictions in the struggles of an individual heroic figure destroyed by the irreconcilable conflicts they produced.⁸ Deeply implicated in those contradictions, the ambivalent place of women in Shakespeare's world and the instability of the gender ideology that attempted to contain them were central issues in tragic drama (Rose; Callaghan).

II

The reconstruction of history as tragedy in Richard III is accompanied by a remarkable transformation in the representation and placement of female characters. Paradoxically, even as the female characters are ennobled, they are also disempowered. On the one hand, women are much more sympatheticaly portrayed. On the other, they lose the vividly individualized voices and the dangerous theatrical power that made characters like Joan and Margaret in the Henry VI plays potent threats to the masculine project of English history-making. Robert Weimann's distinction between locus and platea can be used to chart both the elevation of the female characters and their containment. Weimann associates the locus with the upstage site of mimetic illusion, ‘allofness from the audience and representational closure’ which privileges the authority of the objects represented, the platea with the forestage where actors addressed their audiences, a liminal space where the authority of the represented narrative could be challenged by calling attention to the immediate theatrical occasion with all its subversive potential.⁹ Although not always or necessarily literalized in specific locations on the physical stage, the different acting styles and different relationships between actor and audience that Weimann associates with locus and platea provide a useful basis for understanding the transformation of women's roles in Richard III. Ennobled, the female characters move into the privileged locus of hegemonic representation, but this move also subsumes them into the patriarchal project of that representation, and distances them from the present theatre audience.

Because the traditional subjects of English history were the heroic deeds and dynastic struggles of kings and noblemen, the female characters in Shakespeare's other English history plays are typically defined in gendered antithesis by low social status and foreign nationality. The foreign tongues spoken by the Welsh woman in 1 Henry IV and the French woman in Henry V, and the malapropisms that disfigure the speech of Mistress Quickly signal their inability to enter the official discourse of English history. In direct antithesis, all of the female characters in Richard III are highborn English women who speak in the undifferentiated, formal blank verse that constitutes the standard language of the playscript. Recruited in the service of the hegemonic project of the plot, the accession of Henry VII to the English throne, the women are also subsumed in its hegemonic discourse.¹⁰ Even Margaret, the most powerful of Richard's female antagonists, speaks in the generalized rhetorical terms that constitute the normative language of the play.

Assuming their tragic roles as pitiable victims, female characters are no longer represented as dangerous, demonic Others. The subversive theatrical energy of the peasant Joan is replaced by the pathos of suffering English queens.¹¹ Margaret, the adulterous wife and bloodthirsty warrior of the Henry VI plays, is transformed into a bereaved and suffering prophet of divine vengeance for the crimes of the past. In the Henry VI plays, the female characters are defined as opponents to the masculine project of English history-making. In Richard III, all of the women support the desired conclusion of the historical plot, the foundation of the Tudor dynasty.

Although the overarching goal of the dramatic action in Richard III (as in all of Shakespeare's English histories and a number of his tragedies as well) is the maintenance of a legitimate royal succession, in this play, unlike the earlier histories, it is the male protagonist who opposes the patriarchal project. The threats to patrilineal succession represented in the Henry VI plays by Joan's sexual promiscuity and Margaret's adultery are replaced by Richard's murders and his deceitful effort to deny the legitimacy of his brother's innocent children, the rightful heirs to the throne he usurps, and even of Edward himself. In Richard III, the subversive power associated with female characters in the earlier plays is demystified, and all the power of agency and transgression is appropriated by the male protagonist. The threat of adultery is no longer real, and the character who threatens to displace legitimate heirs is not any adulterous woman but the slanderous man who brings the charge. Witchcraft, the quintessential representation of the dangerous power of women, is similarly reduced from a genuine threat to a transparent slander. Both Joan in 1 Henry VI and Eleanor Cobham in 2 Henry VI summon demons to the stage. In Richard III, however, there are only Richard's unsupported and obviously false chargest against Queen Elizabeth and Jane Shore.

Joan in 1 Henry VI is the prototype for the marginal and criminal status of the women in the Henry VI plays and also for their subversive, theatrical energy. Her very subversiveness, however, authorizes her dramatic power. As both Catherine Belsey and Karen Newman have observed, the custom of requiring witches to confess from the scaffold ‘paradoxically also offered women a place from which to speak in public with a hitherto unimagined authority which was not diminished by the fact that it was demonic’. These public occasions were also theatrical. As both critics note, ‘the crowds at trials and executions’ were frequently described as ‘beholders’ or ‘the audience’, and ‘Pamphleteers often described[d] the scene of execution explicity as a play.’¹²

Two episodes, one near the beginning of the play and one near its end, illustrate the way the powerful role of demonic other, occupied by women in the Henry VI plays, is now transferred to Richard. The longer of these is the second, the encounter near the end of Act IV between Richard and Queen Elizabeth, where Shakespeare altered his historical source in order to ennoble the character of the widowed queen. As Barbara Hodgdon observes, Shakespeare ‘displaces those attributes the chronicler ascribes to the Queen onto Richard’ (pp. 109-10). In Hall's version, Queen Elizabeth exemplifies female ‘inconstancie’, first promising her daughter Elizabeth (or, in the event of Elizabeth's death, her next daughter, the Lady Cecile) to Richmond, then, persuaded by promise of ‘promocions innumerable and benefites’, agreeing to Richard's demands:

… putting in oblivion the murther of her innocente children, the infamy and dishonoure spoken by the kynge her husbande, the lyvynge in avoutrie leyed to her charge, the bastardyng of her daughters, forgettyng also ye feithfull promes and open othe made to the countesse of Richmond mother to ye erle Henry, blynded by avaricious affeccion and seduced by flatterynge wordes, first delivered into kyng Richards handes her. v. daughters as Lambes once agayne committed to the custody of the ravenous wolfe.

(pp. 391, 406)

Shakespeare's widowed queen, unlike Hall’s, keeps faith with Richmond and adamantly refuses Richard's urgings to forget past wrongs. Insistently recalling the fate of her murdered children, she charges: ‘No doubt the murd’rous knife was dull and blunt / Till it was whetted on thy stone-hard heart / To revel in the entrails of my lambs's (IV.iv.227-9). Shakespeare thus appropriates for Elizabeth's use against Richard the very arguments, and even the terms, by which the authoritative narrative voice in Hall's chronicle condemns her action.

In Shakespeare's representation, it is Richard and not Elizabeth—or any of the women—who becomes the sole object of condemnation. The women are deprived of theatrical power and agency, both of which are appropriated by Richard, along with their demonic roles. The audience is never allowed to see Elizabeth deciding to bestow her daughter on Richmond. All we get is Stanley's laconic report that ‘the Queen hath heartily consented / He [Richmond] should espouse Elizabeth her daughter’ (IV.v.7-8); and a number of critics have accepted Richard's judgement at the end of their encounter that the queen is a ‘relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman¹³ Like the other women in Richard III, Elizabeth serves as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy. She gives forceful and eloquent voice to Richard's crimes, but her own motives can remain ambiguous because they are finally irrelevant to the outcome of the plot. What is important is that Richmond marries her daughter; whether or when the queen gives her consent is of so little consequence that it is never clearly specified in Shakespeare's script.

The earlier incident is much more brief, a telling moment in Act I when Richard literally appropriates the demonic power of a woman's voice. Margaret of Anjou, sent at the end of 3 Henry VI back to France (where her historical prototype died in 1482), returns unhistorically in Richard III like a voice from the dead to recall the crimes of the past and pour out curses on her old enemies. In Act I, Scene iii, she comes onstage as an eavesdropper who punctuates the dialogue with bitter comments delivered to the audience, unheard by the other characters. Finally, she moves forward to dominate the stage with a great outpouring of curses and denunciations, directed at each of the other characters in turn. When she comes to Richard, however, he interrupts the stream of malediction to turn Margaret's curses back upon herself. ‘O, let me make the period to my curse!’ she complains. ‘Tis done by me’, he replies, ‘and ends in “Margaret” ’ (I.iii.216-38).

This exchange dramatizes what will be a major source of Richard's theatrical power—his appropriation of the woman's part.¹⁴ Characterized throughout in terms of warlike masculinity and aggressive misogyny, Richard also commands the female power of erotic seduction. His monopoly of both male and female sexual energy is vividly portrayed in his seduction of Anne. The turning point comes when Richard lends her his sword and lays his breast ‘naked’ for her penetration (I.ii.177). Overwhelmed by Richard's aggressive passivity, Anne's resistance quickly collapses, whereupon Richard seals his sexual conquest by enclosing her finger with his ring. ‘Look how my ring encompasseth thy finger,’ he says. ‘Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart’ (I.ii.203-4). Owner of both the sword and the naked breast, both penetrated ring and penetrating heart, Richard has become, as Rebecca Bushnell points out, ‘both the man who possesses and the woman who submits’ (p. 124).

The power that Richard takes from women is not only the power to curse and seduce; it is also the power to transcend the frame of historical representation, the ability to address the audience directly without the knowledge of the other characters, and the theatrical energy that serves to monopolize the audience's attention. The structure of Richard's exchange with Margaret is also the structure of the early scenes in the play: it is always Richard who has the last word—along with the first. Each scene is punctuated by soliloquies in which Richard addresses the audience, predicting the action to come, responding to the action just past, flaunting his witty wickedness, gloating at the other characters' weakness and ignorance, and seducing the fascinated auditors into complicity with his diabolical schemes.

The association between the transgressive, the demonic, and the theatrical is consistently used to characterize Richard. It is, in fact, associated with his story from its beginning in More's History of King Richard the thirde (c. 1513-18), written about thirty years after Richard's death, the source for the versions Shakespeare found in Hall and Holinshed.¹⁵ In Shakespeare's representation, as in his sources, Richard's wickedness is repeatedly and explicitly associated with his characterization as an actor. These associations are established even in 3 Henry VI. Just before his murder by Richard, Henry asks: ‘What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?’ (V.vi.10). Earlier in the play, Richard has a long soliloquy in which he identifies himself as a villain in exactly the same terms that Renaissance writers typically used to describe actors:

Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile,
And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
.....I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murtherous Machevil to school

(III.ii.182-93)¹⁶

In Richard III. Richard's identity as a master performer becomes the structural principle of the dramatic action. As Alexander Leggatt has observed, this ‘is the only play of Shakespeare's to begin with a soliloquy by one of its characters’. Not only the central character in the locus of historical representation, Richard also monopolizes the platea of direct address to the audience; he ‘is not just hero but chorus and presenter as well’ (p. 32).¹⁷ The early scenes of the play are punctuated by asides and soliloquies in which Richard announces his chosen dramatic role (‘to prove a villain’), shares his wicked plots with the audience before stepping back into the frame of representation to execute them upon the other characters, and then returns to the platea to gloat about the efficacy of his performance.

By defining his villainy as theatrical tour de force, Richard invites the audience to suspend their moral judgement and evaluate his actions simply as theatrical performance. Significantly, the most striking instance of this manœuvre occurs in the soliloquy at the end of the scene when he seduces Anne. ‘Was ever woman in this humor woo’ d?’ he asks the audience. ‘Was ever woman in this humor won?’:

What? I that kill’d her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding withness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
…
Hath she forgot already that brave prince,
Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since,
Stabb’d in my angry mood at Tewksbury?
…
And will she yet abase her eyes on me,
That cropp’d the golden prime of this sweet prince
And made her widow to a woeful bed?

(I.ii.227-48)

This soliloquy, which ends the scene, goes on for thirty-seven lines, reminding the audience of the historical wrongs that should have made Anne reject his suit, flaunting the theatrical power that made her forget the past. Here, and throughout the first act of the play, Richard performs a similar seduction upon the audience. For the audience as for Anne, the seduction requires the suspension of moral judgment and the erasure of historical memory, since Shakespeare's contemporaries would have entered his theatre well aware of the demonic role that Richard had been assigned in Tudor historiography; but the sheer theatrical energy of his performance supersedes the moral weight of the hegemonic narrative.

The conflation of the historical seduction represented onstage with the theatrical seduction of the present audience, of the character Richard with the actor who played his part, and of the feminine character he seduces onstage with an audience placed in a feminine role, is implicit in two well-known anecdotes associated with the play from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In March 1602, John Manningham recorded in his diary an account of a ‘citizen’ in the audience ‘upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3’ who ‘greue soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri: the 3’.¹⁸ Another anecdote, not explicitly sexual, also attests the identification of Richard with the actor who played his part. Bishop Richard Corbet, a friend of Ben Jonson, described a visit to the site of the Battle of Bosworth Field in which his host, ‘when he would have said, King Richard dyed, / And call’d—A horse! a horse!—he, Burbidge cry’de’.

Both these anecdotes point to a subtle but significant difference between conceptions of tragedy and history, a difference which helps to explain both the ennobling and the disempowering of the female characters in Richard III. Contemporary descriptions of the history-play genre focus on the historical objects of representation. Celebrating ‘our domesticke histories’, Thomas Heywood asks:

what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the personater were the man Personated. … What English Prince should hee behold the true portrature of that [f]amous King Edward the third, foraging France, taking so great a King captive in his owne country, quartering the English Lyons with the French Flower-delyce, and would not bee suddenly Inflam’d with so royall a spectacle, being made apt and fit for the like atchievement. So of Henry the fift.

(I: sig B4^r)

Thomas Nashe makes essentially the same claims for the theatrical performance of English history. For Nashe as for Heywood, the value of the history play is identified with the value of the objects of historical representation. ‘[W]hat a glorious thing it is’, he insists, ‘to have Henrie the fifth represented on the Stage, leading the French King prisoner.’ He imagines ‘How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding?’ (4:238-9). The thought of the weeping spectators, however, leads inexorably to the thought of the ‘Tragedian’: the present actor who elicits the spectators’ feminine tears replaces the historical character who constitutes the object of masculine emulation.

Conceived as historical drama, the play features the objects of representation. Conceived as tragedy, it features the theatrical power of the actor. In either case, the role of the protagonist is reserved for a male character, but so long as the protagonist is identified, like Heywood's Edward III or Nashe's (and Shakespeare’s) Talbot, with the locus of historical representation, the transgressive power of theatrical performance can be mobilized by a woman like Joan (or a disorderly, effeminate man like Falstaff) to subvert the hegemonic narrative. Once the protagonist assumes the role of tragic hero, however, he can also dominate the platea. Not only the character privileged in the represented action, the tragic hero is also the actor privileged in theatrical performance. When Richard speaks to the audience, the platea begins to assume the function it would have in plays like Hamlet and Macbeth as the site of the soliloquies where the masculine subject of tragedy was to be constructed.¹⁹

III

The movement in Richard III from historical chronicle to tragical history is also a movement into modernity. Tragedy, as Catherine Belsey has shown, was deeply involved with the emergent conception of an autonomous masculine identity defined in performance. The history play was doubly associated with the past, not only with the traditional heroes of the historical chronicles it represented, but also with an older conception of masculine identity rooted in patrilineal inheritance. As a dramatic genre, moreover, tragedy represented the wave of the future, while the vogue of the history play was remarkably short-lived, beginning in the 1580s and ending soon after the accession of James I (Levy, p. 233; Rackin, pp. 30-32).

Both transitory and transitional, the Shakespearean history play was shaped by the same process of rapid cultural transformation that quickly produced its obsolescence as a dramatic genre. The plays combine two potentially contradictory versions of national and personal identity, rationalizing new conceptions of royal authority and masculine identity by reference to old models of patrilineal inheritance, amalgamating medieval cultural structures of dynastic succession with emergent concepts of personal achievement and private property. In so doing, they anticipate the new concept of feudalism that Richard Halpern describes as James I's ‘major innovation on the absolutist claims of the Tudors’, the conception of the crown as a piece of property inherited by the king. As Halpern explains:

[The older] theory relies on a divine conception of political authority, which is mystically passed from the body of the ruling king to his successor; it regards the monarch as the political representative of God and therefore invests the office of kingship with certain unique qualities. The [emergent] ‘feudal’ theory, by contrast, envisions not a mysterious transmission of power but a legal transmission of property, with the king as little more than a particularly privileged landlord. Political authority derives not from divine sanction but from the prerogatives of property ownership, and is conterminous with it.

(pp. 220-23)

One way to state the problem in Richard III is in terms of the contradiction between these two models of royal authority. Representing the end of the old Plantagenet dynasty and its replacement by the House of Tudor, the project of the play is to ratify the property rights that Richmond acquired by his victory at Bosworth Field with the warrant of God's grace expressed throughout the play by prophecies, dreams and curses, and the patriarchal legitimacy that he appropriates by his marriage to Elizabeth.

The new conception of royal authority was implicated in new understandings of masculine identity. In the older, feudal model, not only a man's property, but also his title, status and personal identity were all determined by patrilineal succession. Increasingly, however, a man's status and identity were determined simply by his wealth. Instead of an inheritance, ratified by time and patriarchal succession, a man's place in the social hierarchy could now be achieved by his own performance. Ultimately, even the ideal of the landed hereditary aristocrat would give way to that of the self-made man. For the time being, the status and land purchased by new money were validated by genealogical fictions of aristocratic lineage.

This transition involved a transformation of the functions of marriage. In a society where social and economic status were based on patrilineal succession, the most important function of marriage was to contain sexuality and avoid the production of illegitimate children. In a society where the marital unit itself became the basis of social and economic status, marriage changed from being the instrument of reproducing patriarchy over time to the site of producing new wealth and status within its own time. As Karen Newman points out, by the 1590s the earlier conception of marriage as a necessary alternative to whoredom—as the lesser of two evils—was increasingly displaced by celebrations of ordered family life as the model and foundation for the good order of the state (Newman, p. 25). This transition is generally associated with the movement from Roman Catholic asceticism to Protestant celebration of marriage. However, it also involves the replacement of the notion that marriage is valuable only as a means of procreation of legitimate heirs by the belief that it is valuable in itself; and as such it can be seen as a concomitant of the transition from feudalism to an early form of capitalism in which the family was the basic unit of economic production among the emergent middle classes.

Authority was still gendered masculine and rationalized historically, but there were significant differences in the ways a man's place in the status hierarchy (and therefore his identity) was established. In the older, feudal model, status was grounded in land, inherited from an authorizing father and transmitted through the body of an effaced mother. In the newer model—the product of an emergent capitalism and an emergent nation-state—the material basis for power and authority was monetary wealth. That wealth did not need to be inherited; it could just as well be obtained by a man's own efforts, and it could be derived either from land or from some other source of monetary income, including the acquisition of a wealthy wife.

Transforming the structure and functions of the family, the cultural transformation that led in the long run from the masculine ideal of the hereditary feudal aristocrat to that of the self-made capitalist man also produced a new conception of women (Belsey, ‘Disrupting’). Women became a form of property: acquiring a woman, like acquiring any other property, became a means of validating masculine authority and manhood. Within the feudal, dynastic model of cultural organization, a man was defined as his father's son, and the ideal woman was a chaste mother who transmitted the father's legacy. Once a man's status came to be defined by his own performance, however, the ideal woman became the marriageable heiress, the prize to be attained by a man's own efforts, the material basis for the establishment of his own wealthy household.

This is not to say, of course, that wealthy and aristocratic wives were not valued by feudal noblemen, or that chaste mothers had no place in the logic of bourgeois gender ideology. The simple schematic opposition I am proposing cannot begin fully to account for the richly textured variety of social practice and socially conditioned desire, for differences over time and across class, or the ways variations in the material conditions of individual lives qualified the force of prescriptive ideals. Even within the relatively closed discursive field of Shakespeare's English history plays, both models of the family and of gendered identity can be seen, although since history was a conservative genre, the patriarchal, feudal model predominates. The alternative performative model, although it becomes increasingly prominent in the second tetralogy, is much more fully elaborated in the comedies and tragedies.²⁰

In the Henry VI plays, marriage is represented as dangerous and destructive to men. Both Henry VI and Edward IV reject prudent dynastic marriages in order to marry on the basis of personal passion; both marriages are represented as disastrous mistakes that weaken the men's authority as kings and destabilize the political order of their realms. Richard III, on the other hand, reaches its happy resolution in the marriage between Richmond and Elizabeth, the foundation of the Tudor dynasty. In so doing, it looks forward to Shakespeare's representation of Henry V, where the successful courtship of Katherine is presented as the culminating event of Henry's triumphant reign. The resolutions of those plots in marriage literalize the scripture from Proverbs, widely quoted in contemporary marriage handbooks and sermons: ‘A good wife is the crown of her husband’ (Newman, p. 15). Like a newly prosperous commoner who acquired a coat of arms in order to authorize his new wealth in genealogical fictions of hereditary entitlement, both kings authorize their possession of the lands they have won in military conquest by marrying women who can secure that land by genealogical authority to their heirs.

Although both marriages are historical facts, their deployment in Shakespeare's plays is a product of dramatic selection. Their location as the satisfying theatrical culminations of the represented stories also satisfies the ideological imperatives of an emergent capitalist economy and an emergent nation-state that increasingly employed the mystified image of a patriarchal family to authorize masculine privilege and rationalize monarchical power.²¹ The ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (II. Cho.6), Shakespeare's Henry V is also a prototype for the emergent ideal of modern masculinity, a gender identity that can be established only in the performance of heterosexual conquest. The act of sexual domination constitutes Henry's greatest triumph. The association of royal authority with the authority of a father in a family looks ahead, in fact, to Jacobean ideology, to Filmer's Patriarcha, to the emergent construction of the masculine paradigm as paterfamilias.

In keeping with this ideal, all the female characters in Richard III are related by blood or marriage to English kings and defined by their familial relationships———as wife, as prospective wife, as mother, as widow. Unlike the Henry VI plays, where both Joan and Margaret appeared onstage in masculine battledress and led armies on fields of battle, the female characters in Richard III are confined to domestic roles and domestic settings. The domestication and sexualization of women represents a movement into modernity; it adumbrates the rising barriers that were to confine respectable women within the household, defined as a separate, private sphere. Richard III, like the plays of the second tetralogy, is noticeably more modern in its representations of women, of gender roles, of the English state and of the family.

The movement into modernity reaches its culmination in the concluding speech, when Richmond seals his victory at Bosworth Field by announcing his intention to marry Elizabeth of York. It is only by appropriating Elizabeth's genealogical authority as the last survivor of the House of York that Richmond can authorize himself as king and authorize the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty; only by becoming a paterfamilias that he can secure his new identity as king. Elizabeth, moreover, literalizes the legal status of a married woman as a feme covert, reduced to a disembodied name, a place-marker for the genealogical authority that Richmond's son will inherit.

The other female characters who appear in the play are also recruited in Richmond's project; and like Elizabeth, they are also sacrificed to it. Richmond's victory, in fact, re-enacts in benevolent form Richard's earlier appropriation of the feminine. Just as the play begins with Richard's appropriation of Margaret's power of subversive speech, it ends with Richmond's appropriation of the moral authority of bereaved and suffering women to authorize his victory. To serve that purpose, the female characters must lose their individuality and become an undifferentiated chorus of ritual lamentation, curse and prophecy that enunciates the providential agenda of the play. Recounting the crimes of the past, they speak as ‘poor mortal-living ghost[s]’ (IV.iv.26). Like the literal ghosts who appear on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, they announce the obliteration of patrilineal genealogy and invoke the higher authority of divine providence to validate Richmond's accession.²²

In praying for Richmond's victory, the ghosts of Richard's victims speak for the entire nation, which is now identified as a helpless, suffering woman. This identification is reiterated in Richmond's final speech: ‘Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord’, he prays, ‘that would reduce these bloody days again / And make poor England weep in streams of blood!’ The suffering victim of Richard's bloody tyranny, England is also the cherished object of Richmond's compassionate concern. Both here and in his oration before the battle, Richmond characterizes himself as a loving, protective paterfamilias, and he also promises his soldiers the rewards that go with that role:

If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,
Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors;
If you do free your children from the sword,
Your children's children quits it in your age.

(V.iii.259-62)

Richard, by contrast, resorts to jingoistic appeals to masculine honour and misogynist charges that Richmond is a ‘milksop’ and his soldiers are ‘bastard Britains [i.e. Bretons], whom our fathers / Have, in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d’. ‘If we be conquered’, he says, ‘let men conquer us’ (V.iii.325-34).

At this point in the play, the audience is prepared to reject Richard's aggressively masculine rhetoric and respond instead as Richmond's ‘loving countrymen’ who desire to ‘sleep in peace’. They are not, however, prepared to accept a female image of royal or theatrical authority. When Richmond invites the audience to join him in a prayer that the descendants of his union with Elizabeth will ‘Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, / With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days’, he appeals to their feminine desires for peace and prosperity and invokes the authority of their own female monarch to sanction his accession to the throne. But just as the Elizabeth whom Richmond marries can never appear onstage, the Elizabeth he foretells is never mentioned by name or identified as a woman.

Assuming the role of benevolent paterfamilias, Richmond constructs himself in direct antithesis to the solitary individualism of the tragic hero he supplants, the murderer of young princes, the character who defined himself from the beginning by his contempt for women and his separation from the loving bonds of kinship. None the less, the play ends as it begins, with a male character speaking from the platea empowered by his appropriation of the woman's part and his performative self-construction as the object of a feminized audience's desire.²³

Notes

1. I am indebted to Roger Abrahams, Rebecca Bushnell, Jean Howard, Donald Rackin, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for careful readings and helpful criticisms of earlier versions of this essay.

2. See Harrington, p. 210; Heywood, sig F4^v; and Meres, pp. 319-20.

3. On the convergence of history and tragedy, see Lindenberger, pp. 72-8. For Aristotle the ideal tragic protagonist was ‘highly renowned and prosperous—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families’—and also historical: Unlike comic poets, ‘tragedians still keep to real names’ (Poetics XIII, IX). Cf. Lope de Vega, p. 543: ‘For a subject tragedy has history and comedy has feigning.’

4. Early modern beliefs about the effeminating effects of theatrical performance and attributions of feminine characteristics to actors have received considerable attention in recent criticism, but see especially Howard, ‘Renaissance Antitheatricality’, and Singh, pp. 99-122.

5. Playes Confuted in five Actions, p. 215. Gosson's charge that tragedy would incite womanly passions in its auditors had an ancient and respectable precedent in Book X of Plato's Republic, where Socrates condemned the sympathetic raptures stirred up by the tragedian as ‘the part of a woman’ (39). For a perceptive discussion of the effeminacy of the tyrant figure and the effeminating effects of his representation in tragedy, see Bushnell.

6. Levin quotes the description of the ladies in the Spanish Tragedy audience from Thomas May's The Heir (1620).

7. CCXI. Sociable Letters (1664), reprinted in The Riverside Shakespeare 1847, and also quoted in Levin, ‘External Evidence’, p. 12. For an impressive array of similar descriptions, see Levin's entire article.

8. This is a familiar list. On the marginal roles of women in Shakespeare's English history plays, see Stages of History, Chapter 4.

9. In the words of Herbert Lindenberger, ‘Tragedy … gives history a way of making “sense” out of what might otherwise be a chaos of events; or the catastrophe whose inevitability it demonstrates works to confirm our worst fears about the nature of events and, by one of those apparent paradoxes that we often find when we examine the effects of art, it ends up helping us to cope with an otherwise unbearable reality’ (Historical Drama, p. 73).

10. See Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, pp. 73-85, 224-6, and ‘Bifold Authority’, pp. 409-10. For an excellent analysis of Richard III in terms of Weimann's theory, see Mooney.

11. As Nicholas Brooke has observed, ‘the flexibility of private speech’ in this play is almost entirely ‘confined to Richard’ (p. 108).

12. On the widespread use in English Renaissance drama of female characters, and especially of bereaved mothers, as ‘a symbolic focus of pity’ rather than individual figures ‘involved in … action[s] through [their] own motive and volition’, see McLuskie, p. 136 and Chapter 6 passim.

13. Newman, p. 67; Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, pp. 190-91.

14. Antony Hammond, the editor of the Arden edition, states that ‘Commentators have laboured to settle the impossible, whether Elizabeth's acceptance was real or feigned’ (p. 296).

15. Cf. III.vii.51, when Buckingham will advise Richard to ‘play the maid's part … and take’ the crown. See also Bushnell, pp. 118-26 for a brilliant exposition of this aspect of Richard's characterization.

16. See Hammond, pp. 77-8, for two striking examples, especially notable because, as Hammond points out, they occur in a passage that Shakespeare did not use in his play.

17. In addition to the repeated use of similar descriptions in anti-theatrical invective, it is noteworthy that Burbage himself, the actor who first played Richard's role, was compared in admiring contemporary descriptions to Proteus, the shape-shifter. For a good summary of Elizabethan descriptions of actors, including Burbage, see Montrose, pp. 56-7. On the image of Proteus as applied to actors, see Barish, pp. 99-107.

18. Compare Weimann's suggestive analysis in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, pp. 159-60.

19. A similar account, quoted by Schoenbaum, pp. 205-6, appeared in Thomas Wilkes's A General View of the Stage (1759), pp. 220-21.

20. For arguments that emphasize the differences between Richard and later tragic heroes, see Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, pp. 37-9; Adelman, p. 9. In Belsey's view Richard's isolation and self-assertion declare his alignment with the Vice ‘rather than defining an emerging interiority’. To Adelman ‘the effect’ in Richard's final soliloquy ‘is less of a psyche than of diverse roles confronting themselves across the void where a self should be’. She sees Richard as possessing a ‘powerful subjectivity’ in 3 Henry VI, which is emptied out in Richard III, as he remakes himself ‘in the shape of the perfect actor who has no being except in the roles he plays’ (pp. 8-9). For a discussion that emphasizes Richard's status as prototype for the modern tragic hero, see Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, pp. 159-60. In Weimann's view, Richard ‘marks the point of departure for modern tragedy … the Charakterdrama of an individual passion and a self-willed personality’ who combines the self-expressive threatrical energy of the traditional Vice with the ‘mimetic requirements of a locus-oriented royal personage’. Weimann concedes that ‘Richard III, of course, only points the way’, but he also insists that ‘the pattern seems clear’.

21. For the distinction between patriarchal and performative masculinities, see Jeffords. Many critics have remarked on the patriarchal structures of Shakespeare's English chronicle plays, but see especially Kahn, Chapter 3. On the differing structures of masculine identity in the comedies, see Williamson.

22. Many writers have made this point, but see especially Williamson, Chapter 3, ‘Patriarchy, Pure and Simple’, and Schochet.

23. For a suggestive analysis of this function of the ghosts, see Hodgdon, p. 114.

24. On the exclusion of female characters from the platea, see Helms, pp. 554-65. Helms associates the male monopoly of the platea in public theatre plays with the fact that men's roles were played by adult shareholders in the companies, while women's roles were played by boy apprentices. See Forse for an argument that female parts were also played by adult shareholders, including William Shakespeare.

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