How Women Function in "Richard III"

In her book Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, Nina S. Levine describes how Richard’s simultaneous dependence on and hatred of women that results in his “warring with women” throughout the play was ultimately reflective of the crisis of succession and a female monarch experienced by Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience (99). Levine argues that while Richard makes a claim for the women as unnatural, sexually perverse enemies, an Elizabethan audience would have seen their lamentation and cursing as “an acceptable model for female heroism” that allows the female characters “a place in politics [beyond] Richard’s misogynistic construction of women as either aggressors or victims” (102). Rather than portraying Margaret as a passive victim, she is aligned with Richard as a foil character, equally implicated in the play’s bloody conflict while actively reasserting her last “vestiges of power” in the form of elaborate curses (102). Anne on the other hand embodies the contradictory role of women within a patriarchal lineage system, in which she becomes trapped within Richard’s manipulation of “courtly discourse” to confirm both his power over her and his dependence on her. Finally, Levine illustrates how Elizabeth functions as a positive symbol of maternal heroism and aggression, battling for her children rather than herself (107-8). However, the women also represent a maternal source of destruction that mirrors contemporary concerns with “the female Tudor body politic” and Richard’s own misogynistic discourse on the subversion of masculine power and proper sexuality (110). Levine suggests that the women “turn their grief into vengeance” in an attempt to “[right] the monstrosity they have engendered” in Richard, or as an Elizabethan audience would have seen, in the Queen’s England (115). Ultimately, the play “interrogates the differences between the patriarchal myth of Tudor origins and the political realities of the 1590s” by underscoring Shakespeare’s ending that “[restores] patriarchal authority…and [returns] women to their place, off the political stage” as fictional and unrelated to the reality of England’s reliance on “women’s roles…in ensuring the succession…and the nation’s welfare” (120, 122).

Not only does this essay provide the role of women in the play with historical relevance, suggesting what they might have meant to Shakespeare’s audience, but it also demonstrates how Shakespeare’s use of Tudor propaganda might be used to critically examine patriarchy and its cultural myths. According to this essay, the women of Richard III are actively engaged in politics in a way that undermines traditional gender roles and empowers them, even when they are potentially implicated in the destruction and chaos of the play. This essay establishes the world of the play as destabilized in a way that empowers its female characters, providing them a crucial place in the political sphere even within a system that attempts to exclude them. Levine’s essay also allows a modern production to situate the play within the frameworks of post-modernism, cyborg feminist theory, and the current political scene that has just experienced a comparable overturning of traditional white, Western, patriarchal notions of who is fit to rule a country.

References:

Levine, Nina S. Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. 1998.

Hypermasculinity and "Richard III"

In his essay “The Unruly Masculinity of Richard III,” Ian Frederick Moulton writes that Shakespeare’s first four history plays not only address wars of the fifteenth century, but “concerns and anxieties provoked by the contemporary war with Spain,” addressing “the dangers of feminine rule [and] uncertain succession of the crown, the threat of foreign invaders, and the excesses of unruly or self-serving captains” (254). A play about “masculine disorder,” Richard III features the inversion of traditional gender values, women appear as strong, masculine usurpers while men appear weakened (255). Moulton argues that, “in the absence of strong masculine royal authority, English manhood…turns to devour itself” (258). The deformed Richard is the personification of this “destructive masculine force,” represented by his emblem the boar and contrasted by his successor Richmond (259). Moulton also points out that Richard’s reference to his inability to cry over the death of his father suggests his “excess of masculine heat” and imbalance of the humors (260-61). Richard’s disregard for the order of patriarchy and the bonds of male warriors is what makes his viciousness, ambition and skill in battle makes him monstrous and dangerous to the state rather than a military asset (262). Moulton also describes the way in which deformity was perceived in the sixteenth century as connected to sin, eroticism, female imagination during childbirth and was considered threatening to the nation (262-3). Moulton concludes by explaining how Richard’s wooing of Anne demonstrates his need for women within the patriarchal order of reproduction despite his mysogeny, demonstrating his inability to see gender as non-essential (268).

Moulton’s essay not only makes a clear case for Richard III as a complex narrative of gender roles and patriarchal order as well as situating the play’s themes within historical events and ideology. While Richard appears to be a problematic figure in gendered terms, situated between masculine power and feminine weakness represented by his deformity, this essay shows how these two gender identities can coexist. Richard’s need to assert his masculinity in the form of ambitious and cruel political scheming may be understood as the consequence of his physical deformity, not as an Elizabethan manifestation of “sin” and warped eroticism, but a psychological response. Moulton’s essay provides insight into the complicated role of women in the play relative to anxieties about Elizabeth I as both strong leader and “usurping woman,” demonstrating how they can at once act outside of accepted social roles to confront a male authority and become victims of a usurper themselves. Moutlon’s essay ultimately provides a way of understanding Richard III not only as part of a historical study of gender roles and nation-building, but also reveals its potential as a modern critique of patriarchy, revealing its inadequacy in the face of individual agency and non-traditional gender roles.

References:

Moulton, Ian Frederick. “’A Monster Great Deformed’: The Unruly Masculinity of Richard III.” Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 47, No. 3. Autumn. Folger Shakespeare Library. 1996. Pp. 251-268.

Cyborg Feminism and "Richard III"

I could gush about Donna Haraway and athlete/model/actress/badass Aimee Mullins, but instead I'll try to reign it in and focus on why this feminist theory tailored to our technological age has anything to do with a play written hundreds of years ago about a man with a disability.

In A Cyborg Manifest: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century Donna Haraway describes how the cyborg in today’s world of biotechnology, robotics, and cybernetics is not limited to its monstrous science-fictional image of future warfare and domination but is also a powerful tool of post-modernism and feminism, undermining the binary tradition of white, masculinist, Western culture to allow new understandings of sexuality and selfhood. Haraway’s argument rests on the premise that “we are all cyborgs,” who join material reality with imagination, function outside of gendered notions of reproduction and erase the boundaries between public and private spheres (384-5). Cyborg politics not only calls attention to its own artificiality, it also challenges the naturalization of dichotomies like body/mind, organism/machine, nature/culture, women/men. Haraway suggests that the cyborg is “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” that “[indicates] that science and technology provide fresh sources of power” (388-9). The female cyborg is freed “of the need to root identification in vanguard parties, purity, and mothering” and becomes empowered by her appropriation of “masculine” information and technology (392). Cyborg feminism asks the question “why should our bodies end at the skin?” and insists on bodies as “maps of power and identity,” actively communicating and creating new meaning. Haraway’s cyborg imagery provides “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,” concluding by stating that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (394).

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto functions as a potentially powerful framework for a play that participates in a Western masculine literary tradition, particularly for new ways of understanding issues of deformity and gender in Richard III within a contemporary setting. For example, rather than trapping Richard’s deformity within the boundaries of systems of whole/part, or male control, aggressiveness and fertility/feminized weakness and sterility, it can also be understood within the cyborg imagery of the “enhanced” human, challenging Richard’s role as naturally depraved or villainous and accusations of his mother/sorceress-creator as perpetrator. Queen Margaret’s identity as a war veteran might also explore new territories of gender identity, her physical and political immobility potentially complicated by her access to technology. Cyborg feminism also calls into question the “naturalness” of the female characters as cursing witches, lamenting mothers, usurping queens or powerless widows. When women have access to masculine technology, military force and cyborg identities, a patrilineal monarchy that rests on the strict dichotomy of women as reproducers and men as rulers become entirely unstable. Within a cyborg feminist framework, the women of the play are neither harpies and hags nor helpless victims, excluded from masculine military strength and equated with nature, but instead they seize significant agency. Their curses become their powerful tools of communication, their access to technology as a means of participating in the chaos and killing. Even the considerable reproductive power enjoyed by the women of the play can be understood as part of their cyborg identities, pushing the boundaries of female agency at the intersection of biology and politics at a time when the nation was concerned over its female monarch, the embodiment of this contradiction of gender identity. When seen as part of cyborg feminist discourse, the disruption of order in Richard III is no longer the result of “problematic” overturned gender roles, but representative of both Elizabethan and contemporary politics and culture, full of frightening and liberating uncertainty punctuated by advancing technology. Within a world of cyborg imagery, Shakespeare’s characters no longer have fixed meanings within political or gender discourses, giving the production freedom to challenge traditional performances of Richard III and its characters while addressing culturally relevant issues such as post-modern identity, advancing cybernetic technology, and polymorphous sexuality and gender roles.

Want to see more? Check out Cyborgs and Prothetics.

Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Twentieth Century.” Feminist Theory, A Reader. Second Edition. Ed. Kolmar, Wendy and Frances Bartowski. McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. 2005.