When I think of the great Shakespearean roles for women who would be a challenge and a joy to perform, complex characters like Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Rosalind, and Portia first come to mind. Though this may reflect on my limitations (especially as a scholar of Renaissance literature), never once have I placed Margaret of Anjou on this list, though she is present across four plays (Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III), has lines of crackling ferocity and tender bereavement, and lives a full life—from girlhood to old age—across the play cycle.
Charles O’Malley and Scott Stern’s Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen revised my perspective on this character and the performance history of this intelligent, violent, alluring, and powerful queen. When I spoke with O’Malley and Stern about the book, it was, in part, Margaret’s near-invisibility in the canon of Shakespearean roles that energized the research and writing processes. Stern realized, “she could be an interesting entry point to a discussion of Shakespeare that seemed somewhat lacking, which is to say [a discussion about] characters unlike those most people are familiar with.”
The Henry VI plays, written in the late 1580s and early 1590s, remain understudied and infrequently produced largely due to an assumed consensus that the plays are unpolished and theatrically incoherent. With highly episodic plots and textual inconsistencies in the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the Henry VI plays are often cut and condensed into one or two plays when they are produced for the stage.
There is also the fact that these plays are certainly the work of collaboration, with strong support for both Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe as Shakespeare’s co-writers. While collaborative writing for the theater was the norm in Elizabethan England, the intervening centuries’ exaltation of Shakespeare as the author par excellence creates an uncomfortable relationship to plays that so clearly flout that narrative’s expectations. And while the comparison may be an unfair benchmark, the Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V) rises to the top as the superior Shakespearean tetralogy.
Yet, Henry VI, Part 2 was popular in Elizabethan England, and as Shakespeare’s Margaret amply shows, the plays have been the vehicle for innovative staging, outstanding acting, and risk-taking direction at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and especially by performers such as Helen Mirren and directors like Peter Hall. The scholar Phyllis Rackin suggests that the Henry VI plays and Richard III might take the collective title “Margaretsaga” to reflect Margaret’s recurrence and centrality and to remind audiences of these unique, female-forward Histories.
To bring Margaret into focus, O’Malley and Stern had to grapple with the historical narratives—about the real Margaret of Anjou, life and theater culture in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare studies—and the performance histories of the plays from the late sixteenth century through the twenty-first. From the outside, the scope seems impossibly large with a high risk of over-generalization or making broad cross-century assumptions.
However, Stern’s and O’Malley’s co-authorship is the well-calibrated shuttle capable of weaving the interconnected but disparate scholarly conversations around Maragaret together into a cohesive tapestry. What I find remarkable about Shakespeare’s Margaret and the seamless co-writing of O’Malley and Stern is the writers’ abilities to delve into a complex mix of literary, political, theatrical, and performance histories and emerge with precise, clear, and engaging storytelling. While O’Malley approached the material from the practical, performance-based point of view, Stern looked through the lens of history. The melding of these perspectives yields a surprisingly resilient space of imagination and research that lives up to O’Malley’s hopes that the book can both “hold water for any scholars that read it” and meet “anyone who likes theater or who has any passing interest in Shakespeare.”
O’Malley studied Shakespeare’s history plays while earning a PhD in Dramaturgy from the Yale School of Drama. While he didn’t initially imagine a book-length future for Margaret, Stern (who is bot hO’Malley’s writing and life partner) thought otherwise. Stern’s experience in the world of nonfiction (his previous books include The Trials of Nina McCall, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas) convinced them both that their combined scholarship and writing experience could provide the necessary breadth and balance such a study requires.
O’Malley succinctly explained their writing process to me: “[Scott] was teaching me how to communicate this type of information, as I was introducing him to the information.”
O’Malley’s dramaturgical approach drives the book through centuries of engagement with Margaret. In an especially illuminating moment, the authors acknowledge the abruptness with which Henry VI, Part 2 moves from a riotous onstage scene of the peasant Jack Cade’s rebellion into the bizarre and invented scene of Margaret entering Henry’s chambers, carrying the head of her dead lover, the Duke of Suffolk. (The historical chronicles upon which Shakespeare and others based the Henry VI plays indicate that Margaret relied upon the Duke of Suffolk as a father-figure and guide. There is no indication that they were ever lovers, though the Duke of Suffolk was banished from England in 1450, and his ship to Calais was intercepted and the Duke killed and beheaded.) Rather than shying away from or denying the oddities of these scenes, O’Malley presents the dramaturgical questions that re-present the material: “Does anyone but Margaret see that there is a severed head onstage? No one else mentions it. Does anyone but Henry know that Margaret is onstage? No one else acknowledges her.”
The dramaturgical approach to messy, historically promiscuous, and little-performed plays refreshes the narrative that these plays aren’t worth performing or are fundamentally flawed. O’Malley explained to me that he wanted to create a “narrativized journey through theater history where people could think about ‘What was it like to go to this type of thing? How did theater work in society at this time?’”
Stern added that the book is really an attempt at “trying to take stage and putting it back to page.”
A sizeable gain from this approach is, paradoxically, the new attention directed at the eighteenth century when Margaret was excised from the Henry VI plays and versions of Richard III. As O’Malley and Stern write, “Margaret’s eighteenth-century erasure overlapped precisely with the increasing cultural significance of Shakespeare as a literary icon.” During our conversation, Stern elaborated on this aspect of the historical narrative:
“The period of Margaret’s absence really coincides with the emergence of Shakespearean criticism and scholarship as fields of inquiry. And so people are starting to think critically about these plays in a new way and starting to also canonize them at the exact moment that Margaret is absent. What can we read into that absence and what are people saying at this moment of her lowest or weakest ebb?”
eighteenth century editions of Shakespeare’s plays (which included scene breaks and character lists for the first time) and England’s rise as a colonial, imperial power that leveraged Shakespeare as a cultural asset. Shakespeare’s Margaret offers a clarifying and innovative lens through which to reassess the Shakespeare we’ve inherited as every bit as variable, challenging, alluring, complex, beautiful, over-determined, and always ready to make an entrance at the the moment that Margaret is absent from the stage. Absence often speaks as loudly as presence, and this historical approach grants critical context for Margaret’s representations. “It’s impossible, I think, to rigorously talk about Margaret without talking about the different ways that she’s been interpreted and the different ways people have periodized her and sought to contextualize and made arguments with respects to her over multiple centuries,” Stern told me.
As with the dramaturgical approach to Margaret and the Henry VI plays, the historiographic narrative does more than reveal patterns of attention toward and use of this character. Margaret becomes both sign and cipher of changing attitudes toward Shakespeare, toward female performance, toward politics, and toward theater as play and as a mirror of culture.
Following these adjacent historical narratives prevents O’Malley and Stern from assuming too much about their subject or her representation’s overlap with contemporary understandings of feminism, female gender performance, and class consciousness. In their introduction, they eschew any collapse between the historical Maragaret and the historical representations she’s found through Shakespeare: “readers should be wary of trying to locate in Margaret modern notions of heroism or justice, girlboss-ery or badass-ery,” they write. Much later in the book, the authors detail a 1951 production of Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III on the island of Roatán, which is off the coast of Honduras. The island’s inhabitants had a tradition, dating at least to the early twentieth century, of performing Shakespeare and these plays from the “Margaretsaga.” O’Malley and Stern present the details of these productions carefully but never veer into unwarranted speculation about what such productions and performances of Margaret meant to Black laborers in the Caribbean. Instead, they ask questions of history and performance: “And what did Margaret mean to Alva Bennett [the Roatán actress]? Was she oppressor, collaborator, or empowered icon? She could have been any of these. Or she could have just been a part to play, a vehicle for artistic expression, an escape from drudgery. She was, undeniably, a legitimate excuse to wield a sword.”
As this example shows, Margaret does make it back onto stages, starting in the late eighteenth century through standalone adaptations of the story of the Lancasters and the Yorks, such as The Earl of Warwick (1766) and Margaret of Anjou (1777). Plays such as these not only nudged theater toward a return to the Henry VI plays but also proved a powerful vehicle for the rise of the actress. Major eighteenth century actresses, such as Sarah Siddons and Mary Ann Yates, brought Margaret to life for new audience, while early nineteenth century actresses such as Julia Glover and Kate Bateman performed Margaret in Richard III and plays cobbled together of scenes from the Henry VI plays.
Here again, the dramaturgical approach of Shakespeare’s Margaret enriches the narrative around Margaret and the history of the Henry VI plays by presenting the adjacent history of the celebrity, particular the celebrity actress. Yet, as the authors are clear to note, “while many biographical works cover the life of [actor Edmund] Kean, not a single book about Julia Betterton Glover, England’s most prominent actress for over half a century, has been written .” In our interview, O’Malley noted that Joe Roach’s classic study of charisma and celebrity, It, inspired his interest in the eighteenth century. Though Margaret is often absent from stages during this era, O’Malley explained how the eighteenth-century interest in public personalities and aesthetics “propels you toward the future phenomenal actors” that do portray Shakespeare’s Margaret. That list includes Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, and Barbara Jeffords.
Another pleasure of Shakespeare’s Margaret are the images of these performers and productions. Margaret’s return to the stage comes at a time of increased engraving in newspapers and entertainment ephemera and, eventually, the photograph. Actresses striking seductive or violent poses as Margaret (depending on their interpretation and the production’s promotion) are a delight of the book and literally show the reader the coincidence of Shakespeare’s Margaret and the burgeoning cultural phenomena of celebrity actors. I can’t resist noting that an engraving of Kate Bateman and her sister Ellen as children portraying Richmond and Richard III in a children’s production of Richard III is astonishing.
Indeed, another strength and innovation of Shakespeare’s Margaret is the attention to child actors and onstage gender performance, especially around the issue of boys performing Margaret during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The long arc of theater history, viewed through these plays, reveals the ways that children, gender performance, and queer histories have always attended Shakespeare and his Margaret.
Perhaps a reader of the book might bring to fruition O’Malley’s go-for-broke dream for the “Margaretsaga:” “When you squish the plays together, you’re creating a new dramaturgy. I would love to see all these plays done together, same cast, and see how disjointed they really are. I think that’s really fun! Each play has a different protagonist, each play you’re aligning with different people, and I think that would be really fascinating.”
