The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens

Kavita Mudan Finn, Valerie Schutte, Kavita Mudan Finn, Valerie Schutte

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319745176
• eBook ISBN: 9783319745183
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare's career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter's Tale; from vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themesand methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies.
Winner of the 2020 Royal Studies Journal book prize

© The Author(s) 2018

Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's QueensQueenship and Powerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kavita Mudan Finn¹ and Valerie Schutte²

(1)

Independent Scholar, Manchester, NH, USA

(2)

Independent Scholar, Beaver Falls, PA, USA

Kavita Mudan Finn (Corresponding author)

Valerie Schutte

End Abstract

In the brightly costumed alternate universe of Tom Stoppard and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), where Queen Elizabeth I not only attends but comments upon the 1593 premiere of Romeo and Juliet, that monarch informs the rising playwright William Shakespeare, “I know something of a woman in a man’s profession. Yes, by God, I do know about that.”¹ She then commissions “something more cheerful next time, for Twelfth Night,” implying the beginning of a beautiful friendship even as Shakespeare’s romantic muse, the fictional Lady Viola de Lesseps, gives up her dream of joining a troupe of players to sail to the New World some fifteen years too early. While this scene is most assuredly fiction—Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare probably never met in person, and even if they did, it would not have been at the Curtain Theatre—it nonetheless cuts to the heart of the two primary concerns that underpin any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship. The first is the relationship between queens as they appear in Shakespeare’s plays and the ambiguous, contradictory figure of Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled during the first ten or so years of his career.² The second is the knotty issue of gender presentation when all the roles, including queens, were originally written for and played by young boys rather than by women. The chapters in this volume engage with these concerns in different ways, ranging from close-readings of individual plays to discussions of political or ideological context, contemporary allusion, adaptation, and performance history.

Of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, sixteen include at least one character who is described as a queen at some point during the play, not to mention the numerous puns on queens and queans.³ These characters range across his entire career, from the fury of Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays (early 1590s) to Hermione’s quiet yet powerful dignity in The Winter’s Tale (1611), from Tamora’s bloody revenge in Titus Andronicus (c. 1593) to Lady Macbeth’s madness and Katherine of Aragon’s heroic despair in Henry VIII (1613). They appear in solo and co-authored plays alike, and while most appear in history plays or tragedies, they can also be found outside those traditional genres. If one counts princesses, it is possible to add Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595), which features a princess of France playing what may or may not be political love games with the King of Navarre; and some plays feature both, such as the genre-bending Pericles (c. 1608), whose queen Thaisa and her daughter Marina undergo well over a play’s worth of reversals of fortune before being restored to their rightful titles. This volume brings together scholars and practitioners from history, literature, theater, and fine arts to illustrate the many facets of queenship that Shakespeare explores in his plays.

Queenship as an area of study has exploded over the last thirty years, but it is only within the last ten years that scholarship has shifted from explorations of potential queenly power within a patriarchal framework to investigations that challenge traditional concepts of royal male authority. As this research has evolved, so has our understanding of “queens” potentially being queens consort or queens regnant and the difference in possible political power, authority, and patronage that the different roles afforded. “Kings,” in contrast, are by default kings regnant. Scholars such as Theresa Earenfight, Joanna Laynesmith, and Carole Levin have greatly contributed to our understanding of queens and queenship, advancing fresh readings not just of individual queens, but the institution of queenship as a whole.⁴ As Earenfight writes: “The sheer abundance of works may seem daunting—the bibliography is impressive—but believe me when I say that this is just the beginning.”⁵ There have also been several significant anniversaries in recent years, including both the quincentenary of the birth of Queen Mary I and the quatercentenary of the death of Shakespeare in 2016.⁶ We envision our volume to contribute to, and expand upon, the excellent scholarship and cultural rememberings that have emerged from these important anniversaries.

While Queen Elizabeth I is always present in the backdrop of any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship, this collection is primarily concerned with queens as characters and theatrical constructs. The twenty-five main chapters in this volume include investigations of rhetoric and theatricality, motherhood, politics, and intertextuality and are organized into eight sections, each comprised of two to four chapters. The first section aims to provide a broad synopsis of queenship in Shakespeare, allowing the following seven sections to delve into more nuanced and specific analyses of different plays. Lori Leigh’s chapter offers an overview of the two broad-based critical discussions with which this introduction opened, before considering more closely Marie Axton’s theory of the Queen’s Two Bodies and its relationship to the use of boy players onstage in female roles.⁷ Transitioning from the general to the specific, the chapter by Ugo Bruschi and Angela Reboli explores a series of instances across Shakespeare’s career when he puts his queens into contact with the general public, particularly in moments of unrest.

With three chapters ranging from the early 1590s to the Jacobean period, the second section focuses on the mechanics of queens exercising power onstage. Carole Levin considers the three women of King John, two queens and a ruling duchess, who happen to be among the play’s most compelling characters, and who exercise a surprising amount of power during the chaotic reign of the titular king. Sandra Logan’s chapter looks at King Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia as a case study for how foreign queenship might, under certain circumstances, be deployed as a positive force, while Miranda Fay Thomas’ chapter explores alliances between queens in two late romances The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

One of a queen’s primary functions, be she a queen consort or reigning in her own right, was to provide an heir to the throne and to secure the succession. The third section explores the relationship between queenship and motherhood. While it may seem paradoxical to open with two women who are not mothers (at least in their respective plays), Sally Fisher’s chapter uses Eleanor of Gloucester (2 Henry VI) and Lady Macbeth to interrogate Shakespeare’s attitudes toward queenship and motherhood. Lauren Rogener then analyzes two Roman plays, Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, which depict mothers (one a queen in name; the other a queen in all but name) going to war for their sons, in the context of Elizabeth I’s martial rhetoric and performance, particularly under the threat of the Spanish Armada. Lastly, Mary Villeponteaux offers a wide-ranging study of queens as mothers across Shakespeare’s plays.

Two of the four chapters in the fourth section are devoted to Queen Margaret of Anjou, owing to the prominent role she plays in the three parts of Henry VI and in Richard III, primarily through her rhetoric. Liberty Stanavage uses Galenic theories to explore the gendered aspects of Margaret’s rhetoric, while Bella Mirabella focuses on her use of anger as a political tool. The third chapter by Shiladitya Sen compares Cleopatra’s deployment of rhetorical and meta-theatrical flourishes to the earlier depiction of Prince Hal, later King Henry V, linking these two complicated characters in significant ways.

Sometimes Shakespeare’s adaptation of his source material leads to the excision, conflation, or otherwise minimizing of queens. Especially when compared to the first tetralogy, the lack of prominent women in the second is puzzling, but the chapter by Kavita Mudan Finn and Lea Luecking Frost argues that this absence operates as a signifier of dynastic unrest. Anne Boleyn plays a similar role in Shakespeare’s collaborative effort with John Fletcher, Henry VIII, or, All Is True, according to the chapter by Rebecca Quoss-Moore, while Nicole Lamont rounds out the section by looking at the queen regnant who is conspicuously present (albeit as an infant) in that same play.

The sixth section considers the depictions of queens in specific plays within their immediate political contexts. Carolyn Brown explores the background politics of the mid-1590s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost and its potentially troubling parallels with the internecine struggles of France and Navarre. In her chapter on Henry VIII, Mira Assaf Kafantaris focuses on the marital aspirations of James I for his children and the play’s inscription of the anxieties generated by those aspirations, and Susan Broomhall’s chapter reads a play with no queens—All’s Well That Ends Well—as a commentary on French politics, particularly the struggle between Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers earlier in the sixteenth century.

The penultimate section focuses on intertextual links between Shakespeare’s queens and texts he may have been responding to or later texts inspired by him. Laura Schecter places Shakespeare’s fairy queen Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside his contemporary Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Aurélie Griffin uses Jacques Derrida’s formulation of différance to interrogate the role of the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Livia Sacchetti reads Cleopatra against Lévinas and other philosophers contemplating the infinite. Finally, Courtney Herber sets Henry VIII in conversation with Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s roughly contemporary play La cisma de Inglaterra (1627).

The final section begins with two chapters on adaptation and modern performance of Shakespeare’s history plays—Charlene Smith explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations of the first tetralogy centered on Margaret of Anjou, while Bill Robison analyzes how film adaptation augments or circumscribes the character of Princess Katherine in Henry V. The final chapter by Amy Kenny uses the character of Cleopatra to return to the topic with which the volume begins—queenship on the early modern stage and its fraught relationship to the young male actors embodying it.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. General Studies
• Part II. Queenship and Sovereignty
• Part III. Queenship and Motherhood
• Part IV. Queenship and Rhetoric
• Part V. Absent/Missing Queens
• Part VI. Staging Queens and Contemporary Politics
• Part VII. Queenship and Intertextuality
• Part VIII. Performing Queenship
• Back Matter