Exiling Margaret in Shakespeare's Richard III

Queen Margaret of Anjou refers to herself in Richard III as a "proph- etess" (1.3.300). John Jowett calls her a "figure of Nemesis" presiding over the action in the latter portion of the play (60). According to M. L. Stapleton, Margaret is a Senecan character, "a vibrant and irresistible presence" "spitting curses … for decisive dramatic effect" (100–1). Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea find she proves "a most worthy opponent" to Richard by demonstrating "a specifically feminine capacity for effective leadership and formidable political force" (79, 95). Cristina León Alfar agrees, arguing that Margaret leads the other female characters in the play to confront Richard's tyranny and masculinist power by establishing "a form of feminist ethics" in which the women critique and defy the male authority that controls their lives and victimizes them, their sons and husbands (798, 793). According to Alfar, Margaret is "a speaker of truth" controlling the play's moral trajectory whose "power comes … from curses she rains down on her enemies" (800–1). And yet, this daring and apparently critical character disappeared from acting editions and stage productions of Richard III for nearly two hundred years, from roughly 1700 through the early twentieth century, taking her curses with her. Critics, scholars and theater professionals continue to debate the character's purpose and impact in Richard III, and Margaret still vanishes from contemporary productions.

One recent production provides an interesting example of this erasure: Queen Margaret, adapted by Jeanie O'Hare from Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and produced at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester under the direction of Elizabeth Freestone. While the play was celebrated by critics in England and can be seen "as exemplary of what is readily received as feminist Shakespeare performance today," Hailey Bachrach finds a "less empowering picture" in which the roles of female characters were "erased rather than enhanced" by the adaptation (492–93). According to Bachrach, O'Hare constructed the play from Margaret's more public scenes in the three Henry plays, such as her battle scenes and court appearances, while she excluded the private, domestic "scenes and speeches that challenge the accepted division between the personal and political" (499). O'Hare also added scenes that presented Margaret as a civic advocate for the concerns of the common people of England. In essence, Bachrach maintains that Margaret became masculinized as her role was concentrated on the public, political, martial aspects of the character. Bachrach argues that the play and production removed Margaret from private, personal and domestic spaces, eliminating the "feminized" forms of speech, such as curses and laments, that critics like Alfar, Liebler, and Jowett find so powerful (499–500). O'Hare's Queen Margaret also excluded the character's two appearances from Richard III, thus abandoning Shakespeare's full development of the role and rejecting the powerful "alternate linguistic and historical forms" Margaret and the other female characters employ to challenge and defeat a tyrant. Again, this choice reinforces more traditional, masculine and patriarchal understandings of history as political and military actions (501). Certainly, an adaptation might focus on a specific facet, trait, or quality of a character to explore that side of the role more deeply and reveal new insights while creating something original. Still, Bachrach's work suggests that Margaret and other female characters disappear from history plays in performance because the feminized spaces they inhabit and linguistic forms they exercise—their curses and laments—are incompatible both with perceived notions of essentialist history and historical fact, and with theatrical concepts of dramatic action.

The specific reasons for Margaret's absence in performance over the long stage history of the play vary. The character of Queen Margaret is considered, at best, a confusing presence. She has also been rejected as an ahistorical, improbable fiction and a vulgarity not worthy of Shakespeare. Most damning, Margaret is rejected as a tedious, nontheatrical, undramatic character. Examined collectively, productions of Richard III reveal a protracted ambivalence about Queen Margaret's role. The literary and performance theories that support Margaret's elimination from the script on the one hand explain her...