[In the following essay, Grinnell compares the transforming powers of the theater with those of witchcraft and observes that while Richard relies on both to destroy his enemies, Shakespeare employed them as metaphors through which he critiques his society.]

When Shakespeare created Richard of Gloucester, he created a master manipulator of character, one born, it seems, for the dangerous realm of the theater as conceived by Puritan critics. At the end of 3 Henry VI Richard tells us that he can “change shapes with Proteus for advantages” (III. ii. 192), and at the beginning of Richard III that his political aspirations rest upon “the plain devil and dissembling looks” (I. ii. 236).¹ Richard's equation for success seems clear; it is demonic and theatrical. The shape-shifting god Proteus that Richard so confidently invokes is simultaneously the devil—as John Cotta describes him, for example, in his 1616 pamphlet The Triall of Witchcraft as “that old Proteus”²—and the actor.

For Renaissance England, the ability to change one's shape is a dangerous power. Renaissance England valued the ability to read an individual by his or her surface, and assumed a direct relationship between internal quality and external display. Anxiety over the violation of this relationship erupted in a variety of ways, including formal sumptuary codes that regulated clothing, royal proclamations against improper representation, sermons preached against cross-dressing, and an active and often virulent pamphlet industry that sought to uphold representational codes by demonizing—both metaphorically and often literally—social groups who violated those codes.³

Late sixteenth century writers reflect this anxiety over people who do not conform to legal and cultural codes of appearance. For example, Linda Woodbridge, in her Women and the English Renaissance, quotes a wonderfully suggestive letter from John Chamberlain in 1620 that addresses one particularly disturbing breakdown in sumptuary expectations.

Yesterday the bishop of London called together all his Clergie about this towne, and told them he had expresse commaundment from the king to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons, against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poinards, and such other trinckets of like moment; adding withall that yf pulpit admonitions will not reforme them he wold proceed by another course.⁴

The external appearance of the body is an important site for mediating power in this society. As many social historians have noted, Queen Elizabeth's concern over the representation of her own body was central to her political power; her physical iconography was an active part of her rule. Leonard Tennenhouse tells us, “the features of Elizabeth's body natural were always already components of a political figure which made the physical vigor and autonomy of the monarch one and the same thing as the condition of England.”⁵ Because social and political power were read on the body, the public theaters became the target of much sumptuary anxiety as well. One of the essential fears driving the Puritan attacks on the theater was the insecurity inherent in a world where anyone could transform identity—both personal and political—simply by putting on a costume.⁶ A world in which appearance does not reflect something real, where one can appear to be something or someone that one is not, is a dangerous world. Actors often seemed at the heart of this danger.

For many people in the late sixteenth century, the public theater was inherently a demonic space. John Northbrooke makes that clear in his A Treatise wherein Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterludes … are reproved.

I am persuaded that Satan hath not a more speedie way and fitter schoole to work and teach his desire, to bring men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthie lustes of wicked whoredome, than those places and playes, and theaters are; And therefore necessarie that those places and Players shoulde be forbidden and dissolved and put downe by authoritie, as the Brothell houses and Stewes are.⁷

The theater was seen in many quarters as a hotbed of sedition and immorality. Fostering all manner of sin and degradation, the theater violated codes of conduct as well as sumptuary codes, and was presented as a place in which the devil's work was effectively carried on. Northbrooke's treatise is typical of the anti-theatrical literature of the time. From the end of the sixteenth century and into the beginning of the seventeenth the theater was often seen in terms of its wickedness, and its association with the world of the demonic.⁸

In an interesting way, the theater's opponents characterized it in much the same terms as witchcraft was being characterized during this period. The connection between witchcraft and the theater was a semiotic one; for Renaissance England, witches were signs of the violation of cultural rules just as actors were. Though witchcraft was a very complex social phenomenon, witches were almost always defined in terms of the taboos they violated, the social boundaries that they crossed, and by their failure to contain themselves within the loosely defined social costume allowed them in their community. Witches were accused of violating the boundaries of their own and other people's bodies, of violating the connection between appearance and reality, of appearing to be one thing, and actually being something else, and of transforming others into different shapes and genders. They were powerless old women, from the most powerless strata of society, who wielded unexpected, and unauthorized supernatural power.⁹ Like an actor, the witch could change her shape to suit her needs.¹⁰ She is one who quite literally “changes shapes with Proteus for advantages.” The great skeptic, Reginald Scot, writing in 1584, credits witches with the power to change themselves into the shapes of animals, and the shapes of other people,¹¹ and this malleability of body connects them iconographically with the Renaissance theater and the actors whose business it was to transform themselves every day.

Shakespeare acknowledges the conflation of witchcraft and theatricality, and the dangerous political ramifications of a world in which individuals cannot be identified by their exterior surfaces, when he presents Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Shakespeare connects Richard with witchcraft throughout the play: in the iconography of his body; in the language used to describe him by characters who know him; and in Richard's own awareness and use of the damnable power inherent in witchcraft accusations. But whereas Shakespeare had presented stage witches before (Joan la Pucelle and Margery Jourdain are notable in their efficacy and conventional supernatural power), in Richard III, witchcraft is no longer a supernatural power.¹² It is a political power, a symbolic and metaphoric power ushered in by the iconography of Richard's body. Though witchcraft is an important part of the iterative imagery that surrounds him, Richard is explained equally by the imagery of the theater as it was constituted by anti-theatrical writers.

Richard's body is at the center of his identity. In his opening monologue he tells us that the shape of his exterior has determined his actions, that his body has determined his soul.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time
.....And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasure of these days.

(I. i. 14-31)

Richard tells the audience that his body is to blame for his inability to operate benevolently in the new, peaceful, world, that his appearance has determined a role from which he cannot escape. But even this claim turns out to be an illusion, an act, as we see when, one scene later, he intercepts Lady Anne as she takes the corpse of Henry VI to burial.

Richard's seduction of the Lady Anne, with the corpse of her father-in-law bleeding at their feet, shows the audience that Richard is more than “grim-visaged war” with whom he has associated his misshapen body in the opening monologue. Using the rhetoric of seduction, Richard reinvents himself as a desperate lover. His success in this role shows us that his blasted body is no block to his participation in what he earlier called “this weak, piping time of peace” (I. i. 24). Indeed, his chameleon-like power to be the lover of his adversary's widow marks for both the audience and, in an interesting way, Richard himself, his fitness to survive in a world that judges itself by appearance. In such a world, the demonic Proteus is the figure of the ruler. Shakespeare gives us Richard's exultation as he realizes the extent of the power he wields.¹³

Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?
I'll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What! I that killed 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 witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit at all
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!

(I. ii. 227-37)

To win Anne, Richard uses theater. He is no longer trapped by a body that shapes him for villainy; instead, he shapes himself to fit his chosen role. Richard moves from arguing that his body shapes his identity, to actively transforming himself theatrically. Once a limiting factor, his body now becomes a fluid ally, shaped by his rhetorical ability into a body capable of playing multiple characters.

Richard's body, then, is central to this play, but it is central because it is an actor's body, a witch's body, a body that can be shaped to appear to be anything that he wants it to be. The iconography of Richard's body bears out the dangerous instability in his identity. He is born “like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear whelp / That carries no impression like the dam” (3 Henry VI, III. ii. 161-62), and he tells us in his opening monologue that his body is unnatural, “deformed, unfinished.” Richard cannot be controlled because he cannot be clearly defined. As Marjorie Garber has pointed out, Richard is both prematurely born (“sent before my time / Into the breathing world scarce half made up” [Richard III, I. i. 20-21], and born overly mature [with teeth in his head, 3 Henry VI, V. vi. 75]),¹⁴ the nature of his body resisting definition and stability from the start.

Symbolically, then, Richard's body is a body that is not controlled by its physical boundaries; it is a grotesque body, a body that overflows its edges to take on new shapes. Interestingly, women's bodies, as well, were considered transgressing bodies, bodies that did not remain within the boundaries set for them by patriarchal culture. As Peter Stallybrass has argued, for Renaissance England woman is “that treasure which, however locked up, always escapes. She is the gaping mouth, the open window, the body that ‘transgresses its own limits.’”¹⁵ Richard's uncontrolled body is iconographically linked to this feminine body. Similarly, Mikhail Bakhtin in his now classic study of popular carnival, Rabelais and His World, emphasizes the grotesque, transgressive nature of the lower class mass body, particularly as it is seen from the perspective of dominant aristocratic culture. “The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects” Bakhtin says.¹⁶ “Scarce half made up,” Richard is precisely that unfinished body (Richard III, I. i. 21). Richard, then, carries in his own body the symbols of the popular and the feminine, the two distinguishing characteristics of the witch.

The first description that we get of Richard by another character reinforces those semiotics and paints him as a fiend, as a demon conjured from hell. As Richard interrupts the train taking the slain Henry VI to burial in the first act of Richard III, Anne responds:

What black magician conjures up this fiend
To stop devoted charitable deeds?

.....

What do you tremble? Are you all afraid?
Alas, I blame you not, for you are mortal,
And mortal eyes cannot endure the devil.—
Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell!
Thou hadst but power over his mortal body,
His soul thou canst not have. Therefore be gone.
GLOUCESTER.
Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst.
ANNE.
Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not,
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill'd it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.

(Richard III, I. ii. 33-52)

Throughout the play, Richard triggers language that defines him as demonic. In an aside, the banished Queen Margaret says, “hie thee to hell for shame, and leave this world, / Thou cacodemon, there thy kingdom is” (I. iii. 142-43); Richard's reach is compared to “the reach of hell” by Queen Elizabeth (IV. i. 42); Queen Margaret tells the Duchess of York, “from forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept / A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death” (IV. iv. 47-48), and she finally calls him “hell's black intelligencer” (IV. iv. 71).¹⁷ Between the iconographic semiotics of Richard's body and the direct language involved in plot-line descriptions of him, Richard becomes a symbolic witch: dangerous, evil, cloaked in the demonic with an almost supernatural power to change his aspect. But he is never an actual witch in the popular or traditional sense of the word. Shakespeare asks the audience to note the language, to be aware of the witchcraft that seems to run through the play, but in the end Richard himself teaches us how we should read that witchcraft and the illegitimacy that has been encoded in his body.

While Richard's enemies (and indeed his critics) describe him in terms of devils and hell, Richard fashions himself as the victim and the enemy of the demonic, and is careful to locate witchcraft beyond his own sphere of power, in the sphere of his political enemies.

GLOUCESTER.
I pray you all, tell me what they deserve
That do conspire my death with devilish plots
Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail'd
Upon my body with their hellish charms?
HASTINGS.
The tender love I bear your Grace, my lord,
Makes me most forward in this princely presence
To doom th' offenders, whosoe'er they be:
I say, my lord, they have deserved death.
GLOUCESTER.
Then be your eyes the witness of their evil.
Look how I am bewitch'd; behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling, wither'd up;
And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.

(Richard III, III. iv. 59-72)

Richard is poised at a critical moment in his quest for the throne. All that now stands between him and the crown are the young Princes in the tower and the Queen herself. Here in his council, Richard launches a political attack on the Queen and her followers, including Lord Hastings, the Lord Chamberlain, whom he knows will staunchly support the crowning of Prince Edward as Edward V. Though we have learned earlier, and his council would certainly have known, that Richard's physical defects are congenital and not the result of witchcraft, it is nonetheless an effective and powerful ploy.¹⁸

HASTINGS.
If they have done this deed, my noble lord—
GLOUCESTER.
If? Thou protector of this damned strumpet,
Talk'st thou to me of “ifs”? Thou art a traitor.
Off with his head!

(73-76)

Hastings is linked to the witchcraft of the Queen and Jane Shore, to the destabilizing force that Richard claims is threatening him. Hastings is charged with treason and executed.

Shakespeare's audience knows that this is simply political expediency on Richard's part. Richard has intended to take off Hastings' head since learning that he would not support Richard's bid for the crown. But the charge of witchcraft resonates with the imagery that has surrounded Richard throughout the play, and this moment in which Hastings loses his head to a politically orchestrated witchcraft accusation is a central one to the understanding of Shakespeare's use of witchcraft in this play. Witchcraft is dangerous because it is secret and theatrical. Among other things, it manipulates its appearance in the service of power. Being accused of witchcraft links Hastings to the destabilizing representational power of witchcraft and immediately makes him dangerous. Linking Hastings with witchcraft provides Richard with an excuse for Hastings' removal from the political scene and gives Richard another effective form of theatrical power.

But Richard's use of witchcraft to undermine and destroy Hastings asks us to make one further interpretive move. Richard's use of witchcraft as a self-conscious political tool parallels Shakespeare's own use of witchcraft in this play. As Richard connects Hastings to the damned and dangerous witchcraft of the powerful women in his world, so Shakespeare connects Richard himself with the semiotics of witchcraft. Richard forcefully locates Hastings in the demonic realm and has him taken away to be executed. No less forcefully, Shakespeare locates Richard in a demonic position and has him executed at Bosworth field. Both are represented as political uses of a particular kind of coded language which illegitimizes and damns those described in its terms.

Richard's self-conscious use of witchcraft as a tool of power forces us to look critically at Shakespeare's use of witchcraft in this, and other plays. If witchcraft can be, after all, simply a cynical tool for illegitimizing one's enemies, as Shakespeare indicates in Richard's use of it, then the demonic language that surrounds Richard himself, and tangentially, the iconographic signs that Shakespeare uses to make Richard illegitimate, are also simply tools. A mastery of theater enables Richard to condemn Hastings, and a mastery of theater enables Shakespeare to condemn Richard. In Richard III, both acts are equivalent. Theater enables the charge of witchcraft and through that charge, reveals itself as a powerful and dangerous force in the world of Richard III. As history was considered a glass wherein theater-goers saw themselves, theater reveals itself as an equally powerful and potentially dangerous force in the Elizabethan world through which this play made its way.

By using the language of witchcraft and by demonstrating the semiotic overlap between witchcraft and the theater, Richard III acknowledges the political nature of both witchcraft and theater. By demonstrating Richard's use of witchcraft as political and cynical, as metaphor and rhetoric rather than as supernatural power, Shakespeare enables his audience to recognize the application of theater and witchcraft in other social venues. Whether in the Elizabethan court, or the villages of rural England, the language of witchcraft, Shakespeare tells us, is linked to the practice of theater and marks a social and political, rather than a supernatural, struggle.

Describing English culture in the sixteenth century, Jonathan Dollimore has said that “not only manuals of court behaviour but handbooks of rhetoric emphasised culture as theatre, as dissimulation and feigning, advising on the construction of an artificial identity in the service of power.”¹⁹ Since Stephen Greenblatt's groundbreaking work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, scholars have acknowledged the inherently theatrical nature of power in Renaissance England.²⁰ Shakespeare clearly recognized it as well. And though Shakespeare's business was the theater, and he was a master practitioner of it, Richard III gives us an ambivalent portrayal of theatricality. “I can add colors to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school” Richard says (3 Henry VI, III. ii. 191-93), and we recognize in him and his ability both a conventional Elizabethan mode of power, and something that is dangerous and potentially evil. In anybody's hands, even the hands of the legitimate governors, theatricality, Richard III tells us, has the potential for chaos, disorder and danger.

The language of witchcraft helps to define the dangerous theatricality that underlies Richard's character. In Richard III there is no supernatural witchcraft. Instead there are political tools, and language that hides under the guise of witchcraft. This is a change in Shakespeare's use of witchcraft and marks an important moment in his development as a playwright. With the help of the language of witchcraft, we can see in Richard III the increasing complexity of Shakespeare's political vision and his acknowledgment that his own profession, like the witchcraft prosecutions in England, was powerful and inherently political. By the time Shakespeare gets to Richard III, Joan la Pucelle, Margery Jourdain, and Roger Bollingbroke have disappeared and given way to Richard of Gloucester, and witchcraft has become primarily a political tool in a politics of fear, a cynical, though powerful set of signifiers in a political arsenal.²¹ Though witchcraft retains its demonic definition, it is emptied of all but political power. For Richard III, the witch is a role one might act in a theater of alienation and damnation, and more importantly, it is a role one might assign, forcibly, to another. Shakespeare draws upon the inherently theatrical nature of historical witchcraft and locates witchcraft and the theater in a demonic, political realm.

Shakespeare borrows language and imagery from the anti-theatricalists and combines it with the language of the witch-hunt to fashion the political language of Richard III. In a sense, then, Shakespeare gives us an anti-theatrical argument in Richard III, and in the figure of Richard shows us the potential danger in the act of theater. But Richard III is not, finally, an anti-theatrical text. Though Richard is constructed of anti-theatrical discourse, Richard does not have the final say in Richard III. As many critics have pointed out Richard III has, in addition to Machiavellian individualism, a providential shape.²² Through Richard's agency—political and Machiavellian though it is—Tudor history is written. The houses of York and Lancaster are punished for their civil brawls, and the Tudors are ushered onto the throne. This providential impulse ultimately controls the anti-theatrical language that is used to construct Richard and his world. In Richard III, theater is dangerous, but ultimately controlled by, and a servant of, providence.

In Richard III Shakespeare uses the theater and the language of witchcraft to expose the dangers of theatricality and the political nature of witchcraft persecution in his society. In doing so he also exposes the theatrical and dangerous nature of Elizabethan power itself, a subtle social observation that is hidden by the comforting providential ending of the play. As Tudor providence depends upon the demonizing of Richard III, however, a move that Shakespeare's play demonstrates is political and intentional in nature, the play serves, finally, to highlight the power of language and of theater. In Richard III, contemporary witchcraft and theatricality are powerful systems of language and dangerous political weapons. By wrapping them in the controlling assumptions of providential history, he gives us a text that both critiques and affirms Tudor history, while foregrounding the dangerous theatricality of the late Elizabethan age.

Notes

1. All references to Shakespeare's texts are from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, 1972).

2. John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-Craft (1616; rptd. in The English Experience, 39, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), p. 92.

3. Current critical practice has invested the word “demonize” and “demonic” with a variety of meanings. For my purposes, to demonize is to link an individual or practice with the devil (or devils) either metaphorically or actually.

4. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 143.

5. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 102-03. The relationship between power and display are clearly articulated in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), in Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), in Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), in Christopher Pye's The Regal Phantasm (New York: Routledge Univ. Press, 1990), and in Theodora A. Jankowski's Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992) among others.

6. See Richard Grinnell, “The Witch, the Transvestite, and the Actor: Destabilizing Gender on the Renaissance Stage,” Studies in the Humanities, 29 (1996), 163-84.

7. Quoted in Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge Univ. Press, 1994), p. 25.

8. For some discussions of the anti-theatrical argument see Laura Levine's excellent Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), Jean E. Howard's The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, and Louis Montrose's recent The Purpose of Playing.

9. For these definitions of witchcraft see Christina Larner's Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981) and Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (New York: Blackwell, 1984), Joseph Klaits' Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), G. R. Quaife's Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge Press, 1970) or, for contemporary formulations of the witch, see William Perkins' “Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft,” (in Works, 3 vols. London: 1616-18), Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584; ed. Montague Summers, New York: Dover, 1972) or the more famous continental treatises on witchcraft, particularly Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum (1486-87, trans. Montague Summers, 1928; rptd. New York: Dover, 1971) or Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (Lyon: 1580) among others.

10. Note that I use the female pronoun here because studies indicate that in England from ninety-five to one hunded percent of prosecuted witches were women (Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, p. 85).

11. Scot, p. 6.

12. The old Queen Margaret exhibits many witch-like and arguably supernatural behaviors. I discuss her role in the play in note 17.

13. That the monarch is, essentially, an actor, is borne out particularly by Elizabeth I herself when, as Holinshed reports, she tells her parliament “we princes … are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world dulie observed; the eyes of manie behold our actions” (Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1808; rptd. New York: AMS Press, 1965, vol. 4, p. 934). Critics have actively developed this equation. See particularly Leonard Tennenhouse's Power on Display, Christopher Pye's The Regal Phantasm, and most recently, Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing for clear arguments about the relationship between the monarchy and the theater.

14. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 32.

15. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 128.

16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1968; trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984) pp. 26-27. Leonard Tennenhouse summarizes this figure in Power on Display: “Bakhtin's twin figures of the grotesque body and the mass body offer us a way of imagining an alternative social formation to our own that has all the features of this essentially anti-aristocratic discourse” (p. 41). Richard of Gloucester is symbolically connected to this anti-aristocratic figure.

17. Margaret occupies a particularly resonant position in this play. In many ways she is the character most easily recognized as a witch: an older woman who, because of wrongs done to her by her community, resorts to curses that have efficacy. Margaret, however, is a tool of the providential history being worked out in this play, a subject of a divine authority that has punished her, and will punish her opponents, and though that does not discount her from witch-ness, it does force us to see her as much in political as supernatural terms. This play is, as we shall see, more interested in political power than the supernatural, and Margaret's apparent witch-ness comes under the play's critique of this power, as will be clear by the end of this discussion.

18. As Holinshed says: “Herevpon euerie mans mind sore misgaue them, well perceiuing that this matter was but a quarell. For they well wist that the queene was too wise to go about anie such follie. And also, if she would, yet would she, of all folke least, make Shores wife of hir counsell; whome of all women she most hated, as that concubine whome the king hir husband had most loued. And also, no man was there present, but well knew that his arme was euer such since his birth” (in Holinshed's Chronicle: As Used in Shakespeare's Plays, ed. Allardyce and Josephine Nicoll, New York: Dutton, 1927, pp. 151-52).

19. Jonathon Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 179.

20. As Greenblatt argued in a later book, “Elizabethan power … depends upon its privileged visibility. As in a theater, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence and at the same time held at a respectful distance from it” (Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 64).

21. Shakespeare will not return to witchcraft as supernatural power until Macbeth, a play inspired by and in all likelihood written for the new king James I, whose interest in witchcraft was common knowledge in England. James, after all, had been involved personally in high profile witchcraft trials in Scotland in the early 1590's, and was the author of an influential volume on witchcraft entitled Daemonologie. Even in Macbeth, however, witchcraft is secondary to the human and political passions represented by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

22. For an almost notorious discussion of Shakespeare's history plays as providential history see E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus Press, 1961). For discussions of the conflict between providential and Machiavellian interpretations of history, see Phyllis Rackin's Stages of History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990) or Mathew Wikander's The Play of Truth and State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986) among others.