"I of Old Contemptes Complayne": Margaret of Anjou and English Seneca

Goe to, these fierce and furious wordes thou woman mad refraine

(STT 1:21)

[Agendum efferatas rabida voces amove]

(HF 397)

Commentaries concerning Margaret of Anjou in history and in Shakespeare's first tetralogy emphasize her threatening status as an androgynous figure who "bare the whole swynge, as the strong oxe doth," and who epitomizes the movement of "monstrous female agency from margin to center."¹ Such criticism, occupied with the controversies regarding historiography, gender, and the body, ignores or de-emphasizes the influence of dramatic intertextual materials.² Shakespeare's reading of Seneca's tragedies, their influence on him, and his subsequent internalization of them, all help him make Margaret a vibrant and irresistible presence, in spite of the hostile chronicles that encouraged him to portray her as shrill virago and shallow harridan. Lycus's admonition to Megæra in Jasper Heywood's translation of Seneca's Hercules Furens (1561 / 1581) foretells these fierce and furious words, both critical and literary.³ Margaret may well exemplify what Naomi Conn Liebler labels the "feminine heroic."⁴

It is also a commonplace of first tetralogy analysis to explore what Kathryn Schwarz describes as the "simultaneity" of masculine and feminine in Margaret that "constructs the specifically disruptive effect of female agency," or what Linda Woodbridge calls, more simply, "sexual chiasma."⁵ New historicist and gender criticism often locates such troublesome androgyny in "cultural sources" such as conduct books and religious treatises. Yet it may also have roots in Seneca, since some women in his plays anticipate the early modern figure of the hic mulier. The boy who played Margaret in Shakespeare's theater surely enhanced the masculine tendencies of her character, and thereby continued a tradition associated with the staging of the Latin versions of the tragoediae during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Rome, St. Paul's School, Westminster School, and Cambridge, when young men performed the women's roles.⁶ So notions of androgyny not only contributed to the construction of feminine subjectivity in the formation of European drama before Shakespeare, but may have provided its norm. This seems to have provided an impetus for the translators in Thomas Newton's anthology, Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Translated into English (1581): Newton, Heywood, John Studley, Alexander Nevile, and Thomas Nuce. In the gender segregation of the early modern university, these playwrights created feminine dramatic versions of their masculine selves as they reanimated Juno, Megæra, and Medea in their own language, so that English Seneca served as intermediary between Latin Phaedra and Shakespeare's Margaret.

In an earlier study, I read women in Shakespeare's plays against a rubric of Senecan tendencies gleaned from the Tenne Tragedies: high rhetoric as well as the habit of using Stoic maxims, scelus (crime, sense of sin), furor, violence, witchcraft, and the capacity for self-definition and self-knowledge.⁷ I do not intend to revisit precisely the same material nor to ignore it, but to determine how Shakespeare rewrites, re-creates, and internalizes Seneca in Margaret. In this, I seek to demonstrate his ability to create dramatic feminine identity out of academic masculine materials, even in her last appearance in the canon (Richard III 1.3 and 4.3). Here, Margaret resembles a ghost such as Agrippina in Octavia, or a fury such as Megæra in Thyestes, or the spiteful goddess Juno in Hercules Furens, spitting curses in ahistorical moments that Shakespeare invents for decisive dramatic effect, even in the stage direction "Enter Old Queen Margaret behind" (1.3.108). Her final flyting of Elizabeth Woodville and Richard makes better theater than her pitiful death in exile, alone and unloved at fifty-three. Such vibrancy befits the woman character in Shakespeare with the most lines (collectively), one of only three characters in the canon who appear in four of his plays.⁸

I

Shakespeare criticism will never resurrect the issue of Senecan influence in the canon so that it again constitutes a subdiscipline in the field. The pervasiveness of poststructuralist theory has destabilized the very notions of source, influence, and...