Daunted at a Woman's Sight?: The Use and Abuse of Female Presence in Performances of the Histories as Cycles

Summary

Shakespeare's history plays show a man's world more unequivocally, more inescapably, more impenetrably than his comedies or Romances, perhaps even more than most of his tragedies. Yet when women appear in these plays they are rarely presented as mere victims of the system, or of individual men, but as having agency. Sometimes that agency even extends to become power. These instances open up a space to examine what power a woman can have in a man's world, and how we identify and reflect on such power. The process of staging the text will establish the position from the artists on what quantity but also what different qualities of power a woman can enact within a framework that is unabashedly patriarchal. Performance offers an excellent canvas on which to draw images of the potential varieties of female power and, whether deliberately or not, the performance practitioners who create those images also give indications of approval or censure. At first glance the history plays tend to offer less to the female performer than those of other genres, but the exceptions are exciting ones. Queen Margaret is an acknowledged tour de force of a role, stretching over four plays. The relative obscurity of 1 Henry VI means that many people remain unaware that Shakespeare wrote of Joan of Arc (or Jeanne la Pucelle here), but what he created was a virtuoso role startlingly modern in its conception. Richard III is often thought of as a vehicle for a single, male star, but not only includes four strongly differentiated female characters but shows them conversing together. In performances that can struggle to distinguish the many Lords from one another, the women trumpet their distinctiveness and individuality.