SOURCE: “‘Foul Wrinkled Witch’: Superstition, Skepticism, and Margaret of Anjou in Shakespeare's Richard III,” in Cahiers Élisabéthains, Vol. 52, October, 1997, pp. 25-37.

[In the essay below, Mason challenges critics who suggest that the female characters in Richard III are only powerful as a group. Mason explores the power exerted by the women in the play, noting the ways in which they individually, as well as collectively, serve as Richard's antagonists.]

‘Foul wrinkled witch’ is Richard of Gloucester's greeting to Margaret of Anjou in Richard III I.3.¹ By calling Margaret ‘witch’, Richard endows her role with an implied power, a power that as we shall see, has impressed many later commentators. But the endowment is complex and possesses profoundly contradictory elements which this essay will explore.² At the same time Margaret is sharply differentiated from Queen Elizabeth, Lady Anne, and the Duchess of York, though all are queens, or nearly so. And even though Richard later accuses Elizabeth also of witchcraft, there is a marked contrast in the circumstances, and the follow-up of the two accusations.³

The differentiation of the women needs to be established against a critical background which has often been dramaturgically simplistic and reductive. Traditionally, the women of Richard III have been regarded as valuable in their status as a group, as grieving chorus.⁴ Indeed, at times the women are bonded together—in II.2, II.4, and for part of IV.4, for instance, when groups of women join in ritual lamentation, a kind of keening—but in other scenes (I.2, I.3, and the second half of IV.4) each appears in solo confrontation with Richard. Rather than forming merely an amorphous group with a common function as choric observer, their position through the first four Acts of the play is stronger than this: each also is presented separately, one of a series of antagonists.⁵ But for some critics, in their group existence lies their only value: “Not one of them has had very much personality as a woman, and artistically the play gains very much by the omission. Their part is simply to stand there as Women and, by so doing, cast ironic light upon men's war for greatness” (Mackenzie 73).

A. P. Rossiter, in the brilliant and erratic Angel with Horns, belittled them with ridicule: “In the lamentation scenes—where a collection of bereft females comes together and goes through a dismal catalogue of Who was Who and Who has lost Whom (like a gathering of historical Mrs. Gummidges, each ‘thinking of the old 'un’ with shattering simultaneity)—there, even editors have found the proceedings absurd; and readers difficult” (Rossiter 3-4). For Wolfgang Clemen the choric function outweighed in importance any details of individuality:

The most powerful impact made by this impressive scene [IV.4] results from the image of the three queenly figures, uttering lament and accusation, goddesses of revenge uniting to oppose the murderous tyrant; it is this dramatic image (containing in itself the essence of the whole drama) rather than the individual speech that lingers on in the memory. This total impression ought not to be allowed to sink under the mass of detailed observations resulting from an analysis of the scene

(Clemen 176).

The critic diminishes the clear differentiation that exists even in the first, ritual section of the scene. The long debate which follows between Elizabeth and Richard, being inconsistent with his scheme, he finds irrelevant, “unsatisfactory both from a psychological viewpoint and as dramatic art”.⁶ But it is the debate and the decision which follows it that directly bring about the dénouement, the successful basis for Richmond's rising, and the foundation of the Tudor dynasty.

Using the chorus as a starting point, Phyllis Rackin has illuminated broad aspects of the play/audience relationship: “On the one hand, women are much more sympathetically 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” (“Engendering” 51). But while the women use the formal language of their class, details of their rhetoric differentiate them sharply.⁷ Anne's unsophisticated imagery and hyperbole characterize her as youthful and wayward, ready to fall into Richard's logical and emotional snares; Elizabeth uses irony and other figures of thought as skilfully as Richard himself; and the Duchess of York's language is direct and relatively uncomplicated, until she expresses the confusion of her situation in the brief series of oxymorons in IV.4: ‘Dead life, blind sight, poor mortal living ghost’ (26). Margaret's imagery signals a more primitive response: she emphasizes gnawing and biting, with resonances of the Scriptural weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell.⁸ She expresses crude rage as she calls her child victim, Rutland, ‘that peevish brat’ (I.3.194). And the rhythms of her lines link the images into a predominant sense of ritual.

Clemen (48) and other commentators see Margaret as “the most powerful of Richard's female antagonists” (“Engendering” 51).⁹ Certainly the language which Shakespeare has attributed to her is hypnotic: “there arises against his brazen Carl Orff-like music the one voice [Richard] quails before (if but slightly): the sub-dominant notes of Margaret and her prophecy of doom, to which the ghosts will walk in the visionary night before Bosworth” (Rossiter 13). This, however, is an interpretation skewed by romance, for Richard shows no sign of quailing: on the contrary, he eggs Margaret on when it is to his advantage. And it is in fact the Duchess of York's voice that calls in IV.4 on the spirits of the children: ‘And there the little souls of Edward's children / Whisper the spirits of thine enemies / And promise them success and victory’ (IV.4.192-4).¹⁰

Of the four women in the play, Margaret and Elizabeth are queens, Anne becomes a queen, and the Duchess of York is the widow of a pretender to the throne. They are nearly equal in worldly status, but Margaret alone has attracted commentary which implies her power is more than temporal: “With the entrance of Margaret—an almost mythical figure emerging from a distant past—the play takes on a new dimension. The action no longer unfolds purely on the level of personal interplay, for historical and even supernatural overtones now make themselves felt” (Clemen 48). But her presence is unhistorical, her claims of legitimacy for the Lancastrian cause open to debate—and the appeal to the audience's sense of the supernatural (or, more strictly, the praeternatural)¹¹ is subverted by counter-associations which Shakespeare has embedded in the role. If we overlook these associations, we overestimate Margaret's place in the ideological structure of the piece, and consequently undervalue others'—especially Elizabeth's.

It was part of Shakespeare's art to provoke, stimulate and entertain his audience with complex, sometimes contradictory, implied signs, and nowhere are they more evident than in Richard III. The characterization of Margaret incorporates the duality and instability of shifting signs.¹² It reflects a blend of superstition and scepticism which is most effective and subtle. The epithet ‘witch’ applied to Margaret for the first time in Richard III, calls up multiple associations. Shakespeare has introduced the notion of witchcraft already in the Henry VI plays, in Joan la Pucelle and in Eleanor of Gloucester, and in both instances we can see scepticism at work.¹³ Margaret's duality is less obvious. In the earlier plays her position as a woman of power is a node of problems, and that power takes several forms: in 1 Henry VI V.5, Suffolk experiences her sexual attractiveness at their first meeting.¹⁴ In 2 Henry VI she is portrayed as Suffolk's mistress, and as a governing woman in the vacuum created by Henry's weakness, but her role is subordinated to the main plot of rebellion and intrigue among the men. In the Third Part her role is more active, and provokes intense hatred. York has some vicious titles for her: ‘She-wolf of France’, ‘Amazonian trull’, ‘proud queen’, and of course ‘Tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide’ (3H6 I.4.111 ff.), but there is never a mention of witchcraft in the accusations. Her son refers to her as ‘a woman of this valiant spirit’ (V.4.39), and she speaks in Christian phraseology as Oxford and Somerset go to their deaths: ‘So part we sadly in this troublous world, / To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem’ (V.5.7-8).

Critical acceptance of Richard's stereotypical portrayal of Margaret as a witch-figure in Richard III emphasizes the sensational at the expense of the rational. She has no function in the plot, being ultimately powerless, “a crazed figure of impotence” (Hammond, in Arden 109), who is defeated by the Yorkists in battle and by Richard in the confrontation at court. On Margaret's first appearance, before Richard nominates her ‘witch’, Shakespeare calls on a mixed reaction from the theatre audience; there is an interplay of superstition and scepticism in the responses of the courtiers of I.3, the on-stage audience for Margaret's performance, which again helps both to differentiate their roles and to challenge multiple levels of response from the audience in the theatre. The ambivalence continues through the recollections of her ‘prophecies’ by the dying lords Grey, Rivers, and Hastings, and culminates in IV.4, when, after a threatening opening and climactic outpouring of feelings of revenge, Margaret leaves the stage rather than face a second confrontation with Richard. Her curses are then surpassed by the fury of the Duchess of York, which is made more appalling because the speaker is Richard's mother. But again the roles are differentiated: rage is transmuted into another kind of female power, subversive policy, and Margaret's ‘prophecies’ are seen to be less effective than another kind of language, Elizabeth's disputatious rhetoric. The memory of Margaret lingers in Buckingham's death speech, and his words create a powerful sense of closure: yet his recollection of her claim to be a ‘prophetess’ is itself problematic, as we shall see.

There is no historical foundation or known source for Margaret's appearance at the court of England after Edward IV's death, or even during his final sickness. I.3, together with the first section of IV.4, is Shakespeare's invention, and to justify Margaret's presence, commentary usually focusses on her place in the Christian providential apparatus which underlies the Tudor myth: she is seen as representative of Old Testament revenge in opposition to the New Testament reconciliation theme as represented by Richmond. Her presence is a reminder that in spite of the years of Edward's peace, injustice has been done and that God, and not only Richard, would bring retribution on the Yorkists. An audience familiar with the history might have considered her mere presence so surprising that it was evidence of her supernatural powers. But it is not so simple, for the ambiguity which pervades the play is a feature of every detail. Margaret's powerful, magnetic stage presence in this scene (brought about by rhetoric and the dark associations of witchcraft) is persistently undercut: Margaret is both subversive and subverted. Scepticism accompanies the notion of witchcraft. And the writing sets up moral paradoxes: like the lying Cretan, the evil accuser is essentially nihilistic. Paradox breeds a black humor, and when Margaret curses Richard, he is amused, and meets her on her own level, with a joke timed to spoil her punch line.

Shakespeare divides the surprise of her appearance. The theatre audience receives the first shock, then tension builds until she reveals herself to the on-stage audience. Her appearance is not simply startling, nor is the confrontation limited to direct opposition of arguments; each element is subversive. Her opening lines, like Richard's, are addressed to the theatre audience, and by their presentation undermine the onstage action as well as expressing vengeance with which to attack directly the onstage characters. The timing of her entrance accomplishes another kind of undermining: through Richard's derogation of Elizabeth and all women in I.1, and his skilful manipulation of Anne in I.2, Shakespeare has developed some audience expectation to the confrontation between Elizabeth and Richard in I.3. The conflict has its own mini-structure, and is about to climax as Margaret enters. Just before her entrance, Shakespeare has put into Elizabeth's mouth:

I had rather be a country servant maid,
Than a great queen, with this condition,
To be so baited, scorn'd, and stormed at:
Small joy have I in being England's queen

(107-09).

The lines recall a famous outburst of Queen Elizabeth I, with a somewhat different conclusion: ‘If I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with the greatest monarch’.¹⁵

The moment of Margaret's entrance interrupts the first skirmish between Elizabeth and Richard, and undercuts that climax. Margaret's entrance, according to the Folio Stage direction, is timed to top, by immediately following, Elizabeth's lines.¹⁶ There would have been a double irony in early performances, one in the action of the play, Margaret having formerly been ‘England's Queen’, and one as a ‘nudge’ between author and audience, both presumably being able to recognize in Elizabeth's words, phraseology so close to at least one well-known speech of Elizabeth I.

Margaret's opening remarks appear to be attempts to establish a rapport with the theatre audience based on her sense of thwarted justice. Then the nature of her attempt to dominate her hearers changes. When she makes herself plain to the court, who are her onstage audience, Shakespeare's lines imply the significant gesture of their sense of shock, i.e., their trembling. Margaret immediately turns it to her advantage: ‘Which of you trembles not, that looks on me? / If not that I am Queen you bow like subjects, / Yet that by you depos'd you quake like rebels’ (160-2). She attributes their quaking to the presence of her wronged royalty. At once, Richard introduces the implication that only sorcery could have brought about her terrifying presence. By calling her ‘Foul wrinkled witch’ (164), he sends out a covert call for unity against the satanic threat. But for the audience, the additional level of scepticism is developed.

The section which follows is, like all of the women's scenes in this play, without precedent in the historical sources. It has, however, a parallel which subverts the power of her ‘witch’ associations, in Chapter III of Reginald Scot's sceptical Discouerie of Witchcraft.¹⁷ The thrust of Scot's work is to discredit the superstition that endows poor old women with spurious power. He described the so-called witches, in language of which Richard's reminds us, as ‘fowle, and full of wrinkles’. Scot of course was writing about women of the villages. In such a situation an old woman may have been the lone survivor of a previous generation, and Margaret's relationship with this younger, thriving court is very comparable.

It falleth out many times, that neither their necessities, nor their expectation is answered or served, in those places where they beg or borrowe; but rather their lewdnesse is by their neighbors reprooved. And further, in tract of time the witch waxeth odious and tedious to her neighbors; and they again are despised and despited of hir: so as sometimes she cursseth one, and sometimes another. […] Thus in processe of time they have all displeased hir, and she hath wished evill lucke unto them all; perhaps with cursses and imprecations made in forme

(30).

Having been called a witch, Margaret at first remains dignified, only reminding the courtiers of the injustice of her situation. It is Richard who persists in a game of superstition, introducing the idea that curses are efficacious, by claiming that his father's curse has been fulfilled in the fate which has befallen Margaret:

The curse my noble father laid on thee
When thou didst crown his warlike brows with paper,
And with thy scorns drew'st rivers from his eyes,
And then to dry them, gav'st the Duke a clout
Steep'd in the faultless blood of pretty Rutland—
His curses then, from bitterness of soul
Denounced against thee, are all fall'n upon thee,
And God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed

(174-81).

Richard covers himself by finishing ‘God, not we’, but his theologically unsound implication is that God has followed the leadership of York as he cursed. Richard sets up the frame into which Margaret is to fit herself.

Margaret had attempted to establish in front of the theatre audience a character of injured virtue which falters as the courtiers assault her verbally for the murder of little Rutland. Details of characterization distinguish the courtiers too from each other. Elizabeth refers to the justice of God. Hastings expresses sympathy for the child, and Buckingham empathizes with Northumberland's grief for Rutland's death, in ironic anticipation of their fatal support for Edward's children later. Dorset adopts a more passionate ‘young-man's’ eagerness for revenge. Rivers pulls in an association with a broader political arena.¹⁸

Eliz. So just is God, to right the innocent.
Hast. O, 'twas the foulest deed to slay that babe,
And the most merciless, that e'er was heard of.
Riv. Tyrants themselves wept when it was reported.
Dors. No man but prophesied revenge for it.
Buck. Northumberland, then present, wept to see it

(179-87).

Attacked from all sides, Margaret gathers together the shreds of her power by picking up on Richard's suggestion that curses work:

Did York's dread curse prevail so much with heaven
That Henry's death, my lovely Edward's death,
Their kingdom's loss, my woeful banishment,
Should all but answer for that peevish brat?

(191-4)

She begins her own series of ‘imprecations made in forme’, at the end of which Richard calls her ‘thou hateful wither'd hag’ (215). Margaret, like Scot's ‘witch’ has been induced by the reactions of others to believe in her own powers:

These miserable wretches are so odious unto all their neighbors, and so feared, as few dare offend them, or denie them anie thing they aske: whereby they take upon them; yea, and sometime thinke, that they can doo such things as are beyond the abilitie of humane nature

(29-30).

When she begins to play the witch by cursing, the rhythmical repetitions are chant-like, and she succeeds in creating a frightening presence. The response of the courtiers varies again, giving vent to the possible range of opinions in the theatre audience. Again Elizabeth expresses the conventionally correct religious attitude: ‘Thus have you breath'd your curse against yourself’ (240).

A careful reading of the reactions of the other courtiers reveals that none of them entirely believes Margaret at the time. But Shakespeare could certainly call on the vestigial and primitive response of fear in his audience through Buckingham's and Rivers's physical response: ‘My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses’ (304). Elizabeth's son Dorset adopts a rationalistic approach by calling Margaret ‘lunatic’ (254).

Richard, having lured Margaret to reduce herself to cursing, mocks and trivializes her further with a schoolboy trick of turning the curse against herself. A more orthodox view of cursing is given by Buckingham in this scene: ‘For curses never pass / The lips of those that breathe them in the air’ (285-6). Later Anne, too, implies that curses are self-defeating. In IV.1.70-80 she describes the curse she laid on Richard, his immediate wooing of her, and how she herself became ‘the subject of mine own soul's curse’ (80). The most evil feature of Margaret's cursing is her assumption that those whom she hates must also be subject to the hatred of God (303).

Curses, which call down evil on another, and prophecies, which merely foresee it, are not quite the same, and Margaret moves from curses to prophecy as she turns from Elizabeth and Richard to Buckingham. But educated contemporary views of prophecy also were sceptical.¹⁹ Several critics have pointed out that Margaret's prophecies when correct are no more than her own experience could tell her was likely (Arden 110, Williamson 56). That some of them come true, may point to political astuteness rather than diabolical or even divine inspiration. She is wrong in telling Elizabeth that she will lose all her children. Furthermore, the daughter who survives is the vessel of historical change.

Margaret concludes by telling Buckingham that he will think she was a prophetess—again an ambivalent prognosis, since those who believe in prophecies are also in a state of sin.²⁰ The lords' comments at their executions are subtly differentiated. Responding to Grey's ‘Now Margaret's curse is fall'n upon our heads’ (III.3.15), Rivers turns the cliché sentiment into acceptable piety: ‘O remember, God, / To hear her prayer for them, as now for us’ (III.3.18-20). Hastings and Buckingham, who, as supporters of Richard, have been less innocent, fall further into superstition. Hastings catalogues his own superstitions: Stanley's dream (which he wrongly remembers), his horse stumbling, and his own rash boast of privilege. He concludes with: ‘O Margaret, Margaret, now thy heavy curse / Is lighted on poor Hastings' wretched head’ (III.4.92-3). Buckingham is more aware of the divine component of justice, but concludes: ‘Thus Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck’ (V.1.25).²¹ They exemplify those who in Scot's words, ‘weighing the fame that goeth upon the woman (hir words, displeasure, and cursses meeting so justlie with their misfortune) doo not onelie conceive, but also are resolved, that all their mishaps are brought to pass by hir onelie meanes’ (30). Margaret and her ‘prophecies’ must be set against the complex background in which the rational analysis of Christian scepticism existed side by side with emotional and superstitious feelings.

Margaret next appears in IV.4. Shakespeare's presentation within this scene is less directly linked with recognizable sceptical material, but there are stylistic elements which subvert her pretensions to power. The first words of the scene pick up the progression of seasons from Richard's opening address. Discontented winter and glorious summer have moved on to an autumn of decay: ‘So now prosperity begins to mellow, / And drop into the rotten mouth of death’. The world-sharing which has been implied between Margaret and Richard is strengthened by stage convention: Margaret too is allowed to address the audience directly, with the deictic ‘Now’, and both roles use it to invite the audience to participate in their destructive glee. The imagery of voracity is repeated throughout Margaret's role: she has earlier spoken of the gnawing ‘worm of conscience’ (I.3.222) and later refers to Richard as a hell-hound which hunts (IV.4.48); and to a sheep-killer: ‘That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, / To worry lambs, and lap their gentle blood’ (IV.4.40-50). Margaret calls Richard also a ‘carnal cur’ and says he ‘Preys on the issue of his mother's body’ (57). By using the same devouring imagery of herself as she does of Richard, she links herself again with him: ‘I am hungry for revenge / And now I cloy me with beholding it’ (61-2). But at the beginning of the scene the image of the waiting mouth of death, recalling the open Hell's Mouth of mediæval iconography or of a mediæval stage, serves to support Margaret's witch persona but also to undermine its potency.

Throughout the scene, the imagery is vividly iconological as well as sensory. The imagery of the hound of hell (47-58) becomes in lines 71-8, as Hammond describes it, ‘Faustian’, (77n., 279) concluding with a line that brings the Hell's Mouth motif round in a full circle and is as crowded as a mediæval painting: ‘Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray’ (75). These suggestions of an antiquated artistic style and of an old theatrical practice contribute to the characterization of Margaret as a queen whose day and power are past.

Glynne Wickham has claimed that “In the structure of plays, in costume and in setting, Elizabethan and Jacobean Londoners could still spy the prototypes beneath the veneer of change”.²² Professor Wickham wrote of the scenic ‘prop’ of a tomb, and of its use in The Winter's Tale and Antony and Cleopatra. The prototype to which he refers is that of the tomb to which the angel and the three Maries come on Easter morning, part of the ritual surrounding the Quem quaeritis trope. His argument would appear to lend greater credence to Wolfgang Clemen's comparison of the women of this scene of Shakespeare's with the three Maries. The staging of the scene and certain echoes from the older liturgy for Easter Day (surely to the audience the most familiar of all the church services), support the connection which both critics have made. Margaret appears alone by the wall of a stone monument. In this case the Tower of London has been grave to Elizabeth's two sons and to the Duchess's son Clarence. Elizabeth's language picks up some of the tone of the Easter service: ‘When the Sabboth was paste, Mary Magdalene, and Mary Jacoby and Salome, bought swete odoures, that they myghte come and annoynt him’.²³ The timing of Elizabeth's entrance and her reference to sweetness, create some of the effect of the echo of ‘My new-appearing sweets’, which echoes also in another direction, ‘The first fruits of them that sleep’ (one of two anthems for the day). There is a cumulative pattern of other liturgical echoes from the service for Easter Sunday. The lesson for the day is Exodus xii, which narrates the Passover, the slaughter of the Paschal lamb, and the death of all the first born of Egypt: ‘And Pharaoh rose in the nyghte, he and his servauntes, and al the Egyptians, and there was a great crye in Egypt: for there was not a house, where there was not one dead’ (Holie. 30). One of the psalms for the day is no. lvii: ‘and under the shadow of thy winges shalbe my refuge, until this tyrannie be overpast’.²⁴ Compare Elizabeth's ‘Hover about me with your airy wings, / And hear your mother's lamentations’ (13-14). Each echo is small in itself, a word or so in the appropriate sequence, as though the music of the liturgical readings and anthems were running in the background. The analogy with the Maries would hold fairly well for Elizabeth and the Duchess, but Margaret's function in this scenario is less clearly defined. Is she the angel of the tomb, one of the mourners for the innocent dead, or a more sinister presence?

The tone of the scene becomes a distortion of the Easter ritual, for Margaret calls the women together to curse Richard (35-43). She leads and joins in a ritual of grief and anger that in its repetitions becomes a parody of the ritual plea for mercy, the Litany (Brooke 125). As the liturgy becomes parodic, the suggestion is that here is a coven or Sabbot in the making, led by Margaret. She curses the issue of the Duchess's womb in a vicious reversal of the greeting of the Biblical Elizabeth to Mary. ‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ (Luke 1.42) becomes ‘From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept / A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death’ (47-8).²⁵

There is a strong sense of the women collectively, as a unit. The sense of ritual creates a bond not only among the group on stage, but also between them and the theatre audience. But this is a temporary effect which is weakened when Margaret leaves, and dissolves with Richard's entrance, though he too picks up some liturgical echoes as he accuses the women of railing on the Lord's anointed.

The latter part of the scene, between Elizabeth and Richard, has been too summarily dismissed by traditional criticism. Two kinds of rhetoric, Margaret's and Elizabeth's, are juxtaposed, and the second is clearly superior. The kind of power which underlies Margaret's speech is power to destroy and enslave, a crude, mystical idea of power. Yet even while she predominates, the tone of the scene is rendered antiquated by details of imagery and the suggestions of ritualistic rhythms and behavior. At the end of her section (118 ff.), Margaret consciously leaves her part to be played by Elizabeth, and Antony Hammond has commented that it is alarming that Elizabeth ‘joins in’ the incantatory curses of Margaret (Hammond 110).²⁶ But in fact Elizabeth, though she asks to be taught how to curse, never curses; she argues with Richard on another level. There is no real joining of forces between Elizabeth and Margaret. The Duchess and Elizabeth shake off the yoke which Margaret has laid on them. They do go on to oppose Richard openly, but not in her way.

As soon as Margaret leaves, the tone of the scene changes. Shakespeare has assigned to Elizabeth imagery which suggests a new approach. From the misty magic of ritual chanting and hatred, the Duchess and Elizabeth emerge into the cooler light of reason, as expressed in the law, and into human sympathy. To the Duchess's question ‘Why should calamity be full of words?’ Elizabeth responds with legal imagery and with kindness:

Windy attorneys to their clients' woes,
Airy succeeders of intestate joys,
Poor breathing orators of miseries:
Let them have scope, though what they will impart
Help nothing else, yet do they ease the heart

(127-31).

This is quite different from the crude language of blood and gaping mouths used by Margaret (and by Anne before her). Civil law implied the natural light of reason. The Duchess next wishes defeat on her son, but from a position of moral righteousness. After the Duchess's diatribe, Elizabeth says ‘Though far more cause, yet much less spirit to curse / Abides in me’ (197-8). The scene which follows is a long disputation in which Elizabeth strips Richard of all excuses for the past and disregards all promises for the future. She cannot defeat him utterly in this contest because he holds the only trump card, which he wields: the threat of death over all those, including Elizabeth herself and her daughter, who are within his reach. In demanding marriage with her daughter, Richard threatens:

Without her follows to myself, and thee,
Herself, the land, and many a Christian soul,
Death, desolation, ruin, and decay

(IV.4.407-09).

It is his one credible prognosis. Elizabeth uses art and policy, the traditional feminine skills of government, to escape.²⁷

The series of women forms, singly or in groups, the antagonist to Richard throughout Acts I to IV of the play, in increasing order of success. Margaret, like Anne, is an antagonist who fails, though not quite so completely. Elizabeth's victory is devious, but its very deviousness leads to Richmond's triumph. Neither history nor the dynamic structure of the play could allow the climax to occur before Richmond won the battle at Bosworth field. But that success could not have come about, according to Shakespeare, if Elizabeth had not illustrated the limitations of Margaret's prophetic powers by escaping with her daughter from Richard's threats.²⁸

We arrive, then, at a revaluation of the relative positions of Elizabeth and Margaret. Margaret is not Richard's most powerful opponent, because her position is undercut throughout her presence on the stage. Elizabeth defeats Richard in argument and surpasses him in dissimulation. But nothing, finally, is simple. The monochromatic characterization of Henry Tudor, and Elizabeth's concluding ambiguities should be seen as a less than wholehearted Shakespearean endorsement of the Tudor event. By juxtaposing signs from contradictory world-views, Shakespeare stimulates all the audience and at the same time invites them to be self-critical: as we have seen above, this has been recognized in Shakespeare's treatment of historiography. It is true also of his presentation of witchcraft and prophecy. Ghosts and Demons appear on stage in the first tetralogy, as features of well-tried theatrical convention. But Shakespeare has been careful in 1 Henry VI to have the Fiends appear to Joan when she is alone, and to make the Ghosts in Richard III appear in the dreams of Richard and Richmond. The presentation leaves open the interpretation that they are a figment of the imaginations, informed by conscience, of the characters to whom they appear. Similarly, though Margaret is called a witch, Shakespeare suggests the sceptical interpretation of her words and actions. …²⁹ Criticism has long accepted that the ‘new’ Richmond replaces the ‘old’ rule of the Plantagenets. In the structure of this play, the ‘new’ Elizabeth, great-grandmother of the contemporary Queen, replaces the ‘old’ Margaret, and the ‘old’ magic is replaced by the cooler rule of law, wielded with political skill in the name of divine justice and mercy.

Notes

1. All references in this essay to Shakespeare's plays are to the Arden editions: King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (1981; reprint ed. London: Routledge, 1988); The Second Part of King Henry VI, rev. ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. (London: Methuen, 1957); The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. (London: Methuen, 1964).

2. My thanks are due in this paper to Professor John Murphy of the University of Colorado for his detailed help, and to Professor Howard Norland of the University of Nebraska for his comments, and to both for their friendly support.

3. Everyone present recognized that the accusation against Elizabeth was a trumped-up charge. See The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Richard S. Sylvester, ed., (New Haven: Yale, 1963), 48: ‘And thereupon euery mannes mind sore misgaue them, well perceiuing that this matter was but a quarel. For wel thei wist, that ye quene was to wise to go aboute any such folye’.

4. Both feminists and ‘traditional’ critics have adopted this position: see Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III, English version by Jean Bonheim (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1968); Angus Mure Mackenzie, The Women in Shakespeare's Plays: A critical study from the dramatic and the psychological points of view and in relation to the development of Shakespeare's art (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924); A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures (London: Longmans Green & Co Ltd, 1961; reprint ed. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961); Phyllis Rackin, “Anti-historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories” (Theatre Journal 37, no.2 [October 1985], 329-44), Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), “Engendering the Tragic Audience: the Case of Richard III” (Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. 26. no. 1 [Spring 1993], 47-65); Margaret Loftus Ranald, “Women and Political Power in Shakespeare's English Histories”, Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts, 36, 1982; Patricia Silber, “The Unnatural Woman and the Disordered State in Shakespeare's Histories”, Proceedings of the PMR Conference, v.2 [1977] 87-96. Madonne M. Miner attempts to redress the imbalance created by the dazzling virtuosity of the characterization of Richard himself: “Why does one figure appear to assume a roundness of dimension while others, suffering from advanced anorexia, appear to atrophy?” (“‘Neither mother, wife, nor England's queen’: The Roles of Women in Richard III”, in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980]), 35. Irene G. Dash writes of the female bonding in certain scenes without relegating the women entirely to group status, in Wooing, Wedding and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (Columbia Univ. Press, 1981).

5. For treatment of the bonding, however temporary, as a positive attribute of the women, see Dash 201-04.

6. See p. 189, where he refers to “The actionless, dialogue-filled wooing-scene”, and p. 190: “This so-called ‘second wooing-scene’, in which Richard pleads with Elizabeth for the hand of her daughter”. He refers also to Samuel Johnson's comment: “Part of it is ridiculous, and the whole improbable”. E. M. W. Tillyard presents a similar argument in Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), p. 214. On the other hand, E. K. Chambers and J. Dover Wilson, among others, recognize Elizabeth's victory and the power of the scene.

7. Critics have recognized that the play is a rhetorical tour de force without noting the individuation of the roles within the rhetoric. See Hammond 114: “Richard III has long been recognized as the play of Shakespeare's which most depends upon the deployment of formal rhetoric”. See also his references and several other well-known studies: Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York 1947); David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); and Nicholas Brooke, “Reflecting gems and Dead Bones”, Critical Quarterly 7 (1965). See also more recently Wolfgang G. Muller, “The Villain as Rhetorician in Shakespeare's Richard III”, Anglia 102 (1984): 37-59; Russ McDonald, “Richard III and the Tropes of treachery”, Philological Quarterly v. 68 no. 4 (Fall 1989), 465-84.

8. See my article, “Queen Margaret's Christian Worm of Conscience”, NQ 239, 1 (March 1994), 32-33.

9. At the opposite end of the scale, she is to Margaret Ranald a: “needling, railing, lamenting, woman given to continual litanies of past crimes and sorrows, recalled with editorial suppression of her own guilt, while her appearance belies her past reputation for great beauty. … Her frustrated energy remains, but it is all gone into the world of words, curses which can strike fear even into the heart of Richard” (Ranald 57-8).

10. Rossiter (14) has allowed his Margaret fantasy to lead him to some other odd conclusions: “I cannot but think that when the old Duchess of York sits down upon the ground for the second lamentation-scene (to tell ‘sad stories of the death [sic] of kings’), the author's mind ran more upon Margaret as he wrote: ‘Dead life, blind sight, poor mortal living ghost’ (IV.4.26) [etc.]”.

11. I am indebted to Professor John Murphy for noting this distinction.

12. Joel B. Altman (The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 260) attributes to training in the sophistic tradition the Elizabethans' “amazing ability to respond on very different levels to the same story” and where two apparently contradictory views were present, their willingness to “acknowledge the validity of both truths”. Charles Osborne McDonald in The Rhetoric of Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama (University of Massachusetts Press, 1966) analyzes the ‘antilogy’ of Euripidean techniques (39). Rackin, Stages, notes of the historiography: “the plays project into dramatic conflict an important ideological conflict that existed in their own time, not only by having dramatic characters speak and act from opposing ideological vantage points but also by inciting these conflicts among their audiences” (44-5). None of these critics notes this duality as an attribute of Margaret's characterization.

13. See especially Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, “Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc”, English Literary Renaissance 18, No. 1 (Winter 1988): 40-65 (Rpt. ed. Joan of Arc, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992). However, there is a fleeting suggestion of Erasmian scepticism and irony in Shakespeare's attribution of the word ‘cacodemon’ to Margaret. J. A. K. Thomson, in Shakespeare and the Classics (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1952, rpt. ed. 1966), p. 96, attributes Shakespeare's knowledge of the word to his reading of Erasmus's Colloquy “Exorcismus” (translated by Craig R. Thompson as “The Specter”, in The Colloquies of Erasmus [University of Chicago Press, 1965], 230ff). OED quotes Nashe (1594), possibly later than Richard III, and an early quotation from Trevisa. The page where the word should occur is missing from the fragmentary remains of Thomas Johnson's 1567 translation of “Exorcismus” (A Very mery and pleasaunt Historie done not long since, in this realm of England. Written in Latine by Erasmus of Roterodame, Dialoguewise, under the title of a Coniuration or Spirite [London: Henry Bynneman, for William Pickering, 1567]). Henry Bynneman published the Colloquies in Latin in 1571 (S.T.C. 10451), among other school textbooks. “Exorcismus/The Specter” describes the shenanigans that went on when one of the participants of the Colloquy attempted to follow up on the account of an apparition. See also Murphy 72-7 for comments on the value of this Colloquy in relation to King Lear, and a summary of the Colloquy.

14. Both Andrew Cairncross (The First Part of King Henry VI, Arden xlix) and Rackin (Stages 157) refer to the role of Margaret as a stereotypically strong Frenchwoman ‘taking over’ where Joan's role has left off.

15. J. E. Neale, in Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1559-1581 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), documents the existence of several MS copies of this speech (367). In Queen Elizabeth I: a Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1957), Neale mentions a similar statement during the negotiations for marriage with the Archduke Charles in 1563: “‘If I am to disclose to you what I should prefer if I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: Beggarwoman and single, far rather than Queen and married’” (142). The words also recall those attributed by Halle (following More) to Edward IV, during disputes about his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville: see the Arden edition, I.3.108n.

16. Editorial transposition of the Stage direction, on the grounds that Margaret must be seen on stage to hear Elizabeth's lines, would be inappropriate, for the earlier entrance would draw focus at the wrong moment. The Folio preserves the irony of Margaret's entrance on the words ‘England's queen’, and she may be assumed to have heard Elizabeth's words as she approaches.

17. The Discouerie of Witchcraft, introduced by Hugh Ross Williamson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). For differing arguments on the curses and prophecies in Richard III, see David Bevington, “‘Why should calamity be full of words?’ The efficacy of cursing in Richard III”, Iowa State Journal of Research vol. 56, no. 1 (August 1981), 9-21; Kirby Farrell, “Prophetic Behavior in Shakespeare's Histories”, Shakespeare Studies XIX (1987), 17-39.

18. Shakespeare's drawing of this small role is consistent with the traditional portrait of Anthony Woodville as serious, aphoristic. See More 14; and Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third: Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium Libellus, translated C. A. J. Armstrong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) pp. 67-9; and note Woodville's translation of Christine de Pizan's Morall Proverbes (London, 1478).

19. See also Lord Henry Howard's A Defensatiue against the Poyson of Supposed Prophesies [London, 1584], and John Murphy's Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and “King Lear” (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984), pp. 5-6. For an opposing point of view, see Kirby Farrell, “Prophetic Behavior in Shakespeare's Histories”, 23.

20. Howard comments:

    GOD forbyddeth vs: Audire (margin: Deut.13.3.) verba prophetae aut somniatoris: to lysten to the wordes of a Prophete or a dreamer: whose trade was euer odious among the true professours of religion, as appeareth by the scornefull kinde of speach, which (margin: Gen.37.19) Iosephes brethren vsed at his fyrst comming into the field, Ecce somniator venit, beholde the dreamer commeth

    (Howard, Defensatiue, M.i.).

21. See Marilyn L. Williamson, “‘When Men Are Rul'd by Women’: Shakespeare's First Tetralogy”, Shakespeare Studies XIX, 1987, 56: “Margaret does not arrogate the power to shape history, but has it attributed to her by its victims”.

22. Early English Stages: 1300-1600, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1963), 1.39. See also his Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969).

23. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910; reprint ed., 1913), 113. The Gospel (Mark xvi) which is the basis for the Quem quaeritis trope is in the Easter service of the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, not the Second, and not in Elizabeth's. In the Second Prayer Book and in Elizabeth's Prayer Book, the Gospel for the day is limited to John xx, beginning with Mary Magdalene coming alone to the grave. One can do no more than speculate on the reasons for the survival of the memory of the older Easter service.

24. The Bishops' Bible (The. Holie. Bible. [London]: R. Iugge, 1572) shows the Psalms in two versions, side-by-side, one for the Book of Common Prayer, the other ‘from the hebrewes’. This is the BCP version.

25. The image of Richard as Antichrist is by now almost commonplace. See Clemen 182, Hammond 102ff.

26. See also Rackin “Anti-Historians” 338, Stages 177; Silber, 93.

27. See Ranald 54: “Fatti maschii, parole femine, deeds are for men, words for women, the motto of the state of Maryland, may well be taken as a statement of the traditional European view of the relationship between women and power in history”.

28. The behavior of the historical Elizabeth Woodville on this occasion was inscrutable. Her evasive skill here is Shakespeare's invention.

29. See Scot 149-50 and Howard N.j.^v.