Telltale Women: Chronicling Gender in Early Modern Historiography 2020023741, 9781496208491, 9781496224446, 9781496224453, 9781496224460

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Very Prey to Time
2. Your Hope Is Gone
3. From a Noble Lady to an Unnatural Queen
4. So Masculine a Stile
5. You Must Be King of Me
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Tel ltal e Women

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors Allyson Poska Abby Zanger

Telltale Women Chr on i cl i n g Gender i n E ar ly M o dern H i stor i o gr aphy

Al l ison Machl is Me y e r

Un i ve r si t y of Ne br a ska P r e ss  Lincoln

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

A version of chapter 1 originally appeared as “Richard III’s Forelives: Rewriting Elizabeth(s) in Tudor Historiography” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 26 (2013): 156–­83. A version of chapter 5 originally appeared as “The Politics of Queenship in Francis Bacon’s The History of the Reign of King Henry VII and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck” in Studies in Philology 111.2 (Spring 2014): 312–­45. Parts of the introduction originally appeared as “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII” in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9.2 (Fall–­Winter 2015). Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Meyer, Allison Machlis, author. Title: Telltale women: chronicling gender in early modern historiography / by Allison Machlis Meyer. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2021] | Series: Women and gender in the early modern world | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020023741 isbn 9781496208491 (hardback) isbn 9781496224446 (epub) isbn 9781496224453 (mobi) isbn 9781496224460 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Queens in literature. | Women in literature. | English drama—­Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–­1600—­History and criticism. | Historical drama, English—­History and criticism. | Queens—­Great Britain—­ Historiography. | Women—­Political activity—­Great Britain—­Historiography. | Great Britain—­In literature. | Great Britain—­History—­1066–­1687—­Historiography. Classification: lcc pr635.w6 m49 2021 | ddc 820.9/9287—­dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023741 Set in Arno by Mikala R. Kolander.

For Nate Meyer

Con t e n t s

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Early Modern Royal Women and the Historical Record 1 1. A Very Prey to Time: Rewriting Elizabeths in Tudor Historiography and William Shakespeare’s Richard III  29 2. Your Hope Is Gone: Narrowing the Nation in The True Tragedy of Richard III and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV  77 3. From a Noble Lady to an Unnatural Queen: Imagining Queen Isabel in Chronicle History and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II  121 4. So Masculine a Stile: Gender and Genre in Elizabeth Cary’s The History of Edward II  175

5. You Must Be King of Me: Queens and Rivals in Francis Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck  221 Coda: Double Drowned in the Gulf of Forgetfulness 265 Notes 269 Bibliography 303 Index 323

Ack nowle d gme nt s

This project started at the University of Illinois–­Urbana-­Champaign, where a wonderful scholarly community of faculty and fellow students supported my work. My greatest thanks go to Lori Humphrey Newcomb, whose tireless reading of drafts, incisive and helpful feedback, brilliant scholarly insights, and quiet confidence in me made so much possible. Carol Thomas Neely, Catharine Gray, and Curtis Perry all offered astute advice on and thoughtful attention to my work. Brian Walsh deserves special mention not only for his judicious feedback but for his excellent teaching and research, which together first piqued my interest in early modern historiography. My amazing cohort of graduate students studying early modern literature at uiuc, including Tara Lyons, Sara Luttfring, and Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, have inspired me for the past fifteen years. Along with Sarah Alderfer, Christa Olson, Anne Brubaker, and Kim O’Neill, they remain dear friends and fabulous colleagues. Elizabeth’s readings greatly improved early drafts and her unfailingly good counsel continues to immeasurably improve my teaching, scholarship, and academic life. I completed this book through the support of two additional institutions, Assumption College and Seattle University. In Massachusetts, Becky ix

DiBiasio, Jim Lang, Mike Land, Paul Shields, Chris Beyers, Kristen Carella, and Ann Murphy were all excellent supporters and mentors during my first years as a faculty member, and I am indebted to the caring community they built for me as a junior scholar. Rachel Ramsey remains one of my best scholarly and professional role models, and her long-­distance friendship and ever-­present wisdom still sustain me in my work. Seattle University provided generous research support, including a summer faculty fellowship and a faculty development grant that allowed me to finish this book. My English Department colleagues in Seattle, including Susan Meyers, Christina Roberts, Mary-­Antoinette Smith, June Johnson Bube, Sharon Cumberland, Kate Koppelman, and Sean McDowell, offered support in big and small ways while I finished this project. María Bullón-­Fernández, Charles Tung, and Molly Clark Hillard shared advice and affirming, essential career guidance, and I am deeply grateful for their advocacy. Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective’s wonderful feminist productions have helped me think about historical drama in new ways, and their generosity and camaraderie are true gifts. I thank Jeffrey Todd Knight and Elizabeth Tavares for their excellent local fellowship. Parts of every chapter of this book began as conference papers, and I presented sections from it at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference annual meeting; the South Central Renaissance Conference; the Classics, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies graduate research cluster of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington; and at five Shakespeare Association of America seminars. The many respondent comments to the early inklings of this project were invaluable. This work was also supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on “Tudor Books and Readers: 1485–­1603” in 2014. The wonderful scholars of our ensuing Tudor books and readers writing group—­J. Asia Rowe, Ann Pleiss Morris, and Nedda Mehdizadeh—­read numerous drafts, shared ideas, and offered moral support that vastly improved this project. I thank Bridget Barry and Courtney Ochsner at the University of Nebraska Press for their patient guidance and to the two anonymous readers whose thoughtful readings and enthusiastic encouragement helped make this book better. x  Acknowledgments

My family has nourished and cared for me while I worked on this book. My parents, Gary Machlis and Sally Graves Machlis, both instilled in me the value and pleasure of creative and intellectual labor and always genuinely supported my scholarly interests. I am grateful for the unconditional encouragement and love of my mom and my sister, Sarah Pierce, who both inspire me with their resilience, strength, and kindness. My wonderful, funny, and loving sons, Henry and Robbie, have made me a happy and lucky mom. The daily care my husband, Nate, extends to me and our children made my writing possible, and his reminders to look up from a book now and then have helped make my life joyful. I quote early modern texts in their original punctuation and spelling, including i/j and u/v and w. I silently change early modern italic type to roman, except when I cite from a modern edition. I normalize and shorten the titles of frequently referenced works, and I provide stc numbers in my citations of early modern books.

Acknowledgments  xi

Tel ltal e Women

Introduction Early Modern Royal Women and the Historical Record

History is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. In the second preface of the 1559 edition of The Mirror for Magistrates, William Baldwin describes his task—­to write a poem that tells the stories of a succession of fallen princes in the style of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (ca.1432–­38)—­and his historiographical methods, which theorize the relationship between the verse history of the poem itself and prior written history.1 Baldwin and his seven collaborators first turn to English chronicles for the material they will reshape—­“we opened such bookes of Cronicles as we had there present”—­where they are confronted with multiple versions of English history.2 The necessity of selection and omission in recording history creates the first of many conceptual problems that are explicitly addressed in the poem and its paratextual material.3 While sifting historical events to craft the Mirror, the historiographers bicker about the worthiness of their subjects and the veracity of their stories, and they comment on the effects of those stories on their own emotions as readers and on a larger canon of history. The Mirror’s prose links characterize history writing as a process of recursive differentiation undertaken by collaborative historiographers with a keen awareness of the contingencies of rewriting past events. Near 1

the close of the 1559 edition, one collaborator discovers a brief mention in their chronicle sources of the Duke of Exeter “found dead in the sea betwene Dover and Calays”; noting that the drowned duke has been passed over by the chroniclers Robert Fabyan and Edward Hall, he urges his collaborators to include the man’s story, lest he “is like to be double drowned, both in the sea, and in the gulfe of forgetfulnes.”4 This inventive expression of the watery effects of choosing to omit or include one figure’s history within a larger narrative reveals the collaborators’ recognition of the multiplicity of conflicting narratives in their source material and their concerns about what could be lost in historical transmission.5 Despite their acknowledgment of the consequences of forgetting, the historiographers of the Mirror, after assigning one of their own to “seeke out that story” of the drowned duke, get carried away by the famous history of George, Duke of Clarence—­“one drowned likewise”—­and never allow Exeter his own lament.6 The Mirror, in its ironic articulation of the power of omission to “double drown” historical figures, thus evokes a key problem of history making that this book explores: narratives that consistently reveal and dramas that systematically “drown” female political action in a gulf of forgetfulness. In act 4, scene 4 of William Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard is confronted by his mother, the Duchess of York, and his brother Edward’s widow, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who have vowed to smother him in “the breath of bitter words” with which they recount his crimes.7 Richard, who finds himself “intercepted” by questions about the dead relatives he has murdered, calls for trumpets and drums to obscure the truth: “Let not the heavens hear these tell-­tale women / Rail on the Lord’s anointed” (4.4.143–­44). He then instructs his adversaries to “either be patient, and entreat me fair, / Or with the clamorous report of war / Thus will I drown your exclamations” (4.4.145–­47). Richard’s assessment of the duchess and Queen Elizabeth as “tell-­tale women” labels them as tattling railers, but his words also acknowledge the potential power of their truth telling; they possess an alternative historical account of the Wars of the Roses to his own, one that can identify him as a tyrant rather than as the Lord’s anointed king and smother him in the process. In his parallel threat to blot out their exclamations with the sounds of war, he also vocalizes the fortuities of historical recording—­the 2  Introduction

drowning of voice, agency, and action in history’s gulf of omission—­that the historiographers of the Mirror theorize and that dramatic adaptations of narrative historiography enact. This book reassesses fundamental notions—­established by source study as well as feminist criticism of history plays—­about how early modern history writing depicts royal women. I argue that chronicle and political histories value royal women’s political interventions and use narrative techniques to invest their voices with authority and power. As my analyses reveal a pattern of representation of royal women’s agency evident in the work of Edward Hall, Richard Grafton, Raphael Holinshed, and John Stow, as well as Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Elizabeth Cary, they propose more shared contours between chronicle histories and political histories than previous generic categorizations allow, and I use the inclusive term historical narrative to signal such shared contours. Such fine-­grained focus on narrative history reveals similarities in strategies and source use among historiographers, the important collaborative nature of their work, and their political investments, treating chronicle and political history with the same attention to political contingencies as is afforded to the history plays. Dramatists who used these narratives as crucial sources for their history plays—­including William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Christopher Marlowe, and John Ford—­all grappled with a historical record that offered ample precedents for depicting royal women’s perspectives and political influence as legitimate. They did so by consistently reshaping their sources to create stage representations that condemn the power and authority available through queenship and promote dramatic fantasies that separate royal women from the political action granted them by their familial roles. By tracing how the sanctioning of women’s political participation changes from the narrative page to the dramatic stage, I demonstrate that gender politics in both canonical and noncanonical history plays are produced by dramatists’ intertextual engagements with a rich alternative view of women available in the narrative historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My study proposes a new critical history of royal women’s political agency in historiography, so that the figures of this project, and audiences’ and readers’ possible receptions of them, do not remain double drowned in the gulf of forgetfulness. Introduction  3

Queenship and Political Agency My reassessments of the representation of royal women in early modern historiography build upon ongoing critical conversations about the extent to which literature and history has afforded and recognized early modern women’s political action. I respond to Phyllis Rackin’s call for scholarly interrogation of the hegemony of a monolithic story of patriarchal oppression in early modern texts, wherein she proposes that a more complete history and “a revitalized feminist criticism” might emerge from our attention to the multiplicity of stories about women’s place in the early modern world.8 The varied depictions of royal women and the patterns of adaptation of their lives in early modern historiography explore this multiplicity and complicate received narratives about what kinds of history disempowers women through representation. This study, as it focuses primarily on male historiographers, also follows Kathryn Schwarz’s exploration of the “ways in which predominately male-­authored texts address the volition of women” in her examination of the paradox of early modern women’s will through compliance in literature.9 Building upon Valerie Traub’s view of male discourse about women as constitutive to their lived experience and Dympna Callaghan’s account of representation’s effect on subjectivity, Schwarz traces the conceptual fault lines created by male-­authored stories of feminine volition.10 I explore how comparisons of multiple textual accounts of the same events in English history can similarly reveal both “the distorting lens of masculine unease” and male authors’ more surprising representations of female agency.11 The clearest contrasts between these varied representations are found in the kinds of agency they afford to historical women: narrative historiographers frequently imagined for royal figures an agency rooted in political action and effects, while dramatists reimagined that agency as a primarily rhetorical intervention that could be mobilized to nationalist ends, to delineate boundaries between private and public spheres, and even to reflexively critique women’s political action and illuminate the circumscription of their political power. My focus on a few specific royal women—­a term I use to signal not just women of royal blood but all women who could make political interventions through their formal or informal relationships to the sovereign—­attends 4  Introduction

to historical queens, mothers, and mistresses who held, at times of acute dynastic upheaval, anomalous roles for early modern women. Less anomalous than Mary Tudor or Elizabeth I, these queens still occupied unusual positions of power and exercised political agency in irregular ways during moments of monarchical crisis. The early modern history writing that chronicles the historical women of this study—­Queen Isabel, Elizabeth Woodville, Elizabeth York, and Mistress “Jane” Shore—­does so through discourses about gender, female sexuality, motherhood, and marriage that affected all early modern women. Historiography also traces their unique access to the political through their relational positions to the king. As many writers of the early modern period sought to document in eclectic new narrative and dramatic forms the problems afflicting English monarchy in the middle and late medieval period, historiographers returned to these particular women again and again to diversely imagine their contributions to English history. Feminist scholarship on queenship over the last few decades has refined and extended how we understand the power, influence, authority, and agency of historical queens of the medieval and early modern periods.12 The royal women—­the queen consorts, queen mothers, and queen dowagers—­with familial and personal proximity to the monarch always held some measure of “governmental authority” and participated in “public political action,” though the expression of that authority and involvement was complicated by the duality of familial roles that made queenship both and always public and private.13 Medieval queenship, as Theresa Earenfight describes it, “was inherently ambiguous, uneasily balanced between public authority and private influence, between governance and subjugation.”14 Numerous accounts of sovereignty and power conclude that a blurring of public and private spheres of influence is perhaps the most notable feature of queenship.15 Assessments of a queen’s influence through her marriage, motherhood, intercession, kinship networks, household, estates, and officially codified public roles, such as her custody of the Prince of Wales or her position on his council, all indicate that domestic and public authority overlap for royal women, and that in spite of reductions in queens’ official power during the medieval period that “lessened their direct role in government,” Introduction  5

queens “preserved a share in rulership” through family roles.16 As Earenfight observes, familial influence, at least when the family is royal, “was indeed real political power.”17 Though real, the queen’s political power was most often expressed and understood in relationship to the king and intended to amplify his own: J. L. Laynesmith notes that in the late fifteenth century, “the office of the queen was essential to the effective exercise of sovereignty . . . indeed, it was an integral part of the king’s public body.”18 Yet historical accounts of late medieval queenship demonstrate that this power was wielded differently from queen to queen, and the narrative and dramatic stories of these women often selectively focus on the frequent conflicts of interest between the queen’s multiple familial roles and her support of the king’s sovereignty. At times, such as in the example of Elizabeth York, a queen’s “role in confirming and representing the legitimacy of her husband’s kingship” could be undermined simply by her own claim to the throne.19 All of the queens in this study find themselves in direct or indirect disagreement with the king at some point in their lives, and as I demonstrate, they become most visible in the historical record when those disputes expose their exercise of power as ambiguously private and public, domestic and political. Perhaps the queen’s most important familial role frequently in tension with her contributions to the king’s public image was that of motherhood. The authors I examine all understood the queen consort’s motherhood as a source of power and, potentially, disorder: their invocations of motherhood offer manifold judgments about its disruptive capacities, at times sanctioning motherhood as a source of legitimate political contention with the king and at others lamenting the unique access to the monarch it provided. Feminist historians of medieval and early modern queenship definitively concur with Laynesmith’s claim that “motherhood for a queen was a uniquely political role.”20 The implications of motherhood varied widely; the medieval royal women in the historical narratives and history plays of this study often achieve political power through their motherhood and relationships to their children. Many of these queens are subjects of enduring interest in part because they must navigate their dual positions as wives (or widows) and mothers during times of dynastic—­and thus, for 6  Introduction

them, familial—­crisis. Elizabeth Woodville’s character is frequently established in both narrative and dramatic historiography by her unusual love match marriage to Edward IV, but it is defined by her responses to Richard III’s protectorship over her son, Edward V, after her husband’s death. The disparate narrative and dramatic histories of Queen Isabel all direct their interpretive force at her public altercation with Edward II over the rights of their son. Chronicles by Grafton, Holinshed, and Stow variably evaluate her resistance against her husband in defense of her son; both that resistance and defense are defined in terms of her marital or maternal relationship with an English king. Diverse accounts of how motherhood enabled queenly power permeate historical narratives, which often highlight the integral role of a queen’s unofficial maternal influence on the workings of kingship. Because a queen’s motherhood can so easily be conceptualized as the most traditional and domestic of early modern women’s social positions, it also regularly becomes a role that playwrights revise to explore the implications of women’s political influence in English history. As wives, royal women’s expressions of influence were most visible in their intercessory power. Intercession was a flexible and dynamic mechanism of power for queen consorts, sometimes manifesting as arranged, ritual public acts and at other times as carefully managed report. It could be a formalized process that positioned a queen consort as a mediator between the public and the monarch, producing financial resources that she might use to strengthen her public image and help her husband’s subjects.21 Or it could be informal, directly personal pleading that often overlapped with another aspect of informal influence, that of private counsel to the king. Intercession relied on spiritual models that linked its practices with motherhood, such as the Virgin Mary, as well biblical precedents, like that of Esther. Paul Strohm demonstrates that intercession was a particularly valuable technique for navigating the gendered expectations of queenship and kingship, as a queen’s humble pleading allowed a king to change his mind or show benevolence without negative public consequences.22 As a social construction of femininity that was primarily about men, intercession generally “affirm[ed] the masculinity of the monarchy.”23 However, because they relied so strongly on a performance of feminine gender expression that Introduction  7

included vulnerability and emotive affect, intercessory acts also invoked ambivalent gender stereotypes about women’s fickleness, frailty, and even sexuality.24 As John Carmi Parsons shows, while the rituals of medieval queenship, particularly intercession, acknowledge the queen’s influence, the “multivocality and ambiguity” of the symbols and rituals associated with the queen could also be viewed as “enacting limitations on her power.”25 Such polyvalence in the presentation of queenly power as primarily intercessory—­ simultaneously acknowledging a queen’s power and distancing her from the king’s public authority—­is evident across early modern narrative and dramatic histories, which differently assess the same acts of intercession. The multiplicity of meanings attached to intercession made it a focal point for historiographers shaping accounts of queenly power: it could be framed as an opaque, illicit misuse of a woman’s access to the king—­achieved through manipulative performances of sexuality, frailty, or piety—­or it could be presented as sanctioned, public, and necessary intervention. Early modern historiography also variously represents the target of a queen’s intercessory power: because intercession was comprised of a set of performative gendered behaviors that relied upon emotional appeals and often connected to motherhood, it could be mobilized not only in relationship to the king but also, at times, against him, as when Queen Isabel famously arrives as a petitioner at her brother Charles’s court in France, in some accounts sent by her husband, Edward II, and in others versions independently seeking assistance. In other textual accounts I examine, queens’ intercessory acts are reframed by playwrights as wholly private, potentially selfish behaviors, which reduced these acts’ represented political import or positioned a queen’s motives for using intercessory power as corrupt. Expressions of royal women’s unofficial power, including intercessory models, become even more ambiguous when those women are not related to the king by blood or marriage. Narrative and dramatic texts about the Wars of the Roses that depict the nebulous role of the king’s mistress, particularly Edward IV’s lover, Mistress Shore, reveal a gendered anxiety about women’s potential to claim power through channels that are usually reserved for a queen consort. In the functions where the prerogatives of the queen overlap with that of the king’s mistress—­providing counsel, 8  Introduction

intercession on behalf of others, intimacy, and sometimes royal maternity—­a troubling area of unofficial influence arises, one that is no more successfully relegated to a private sphere than the queen’s, but lacking the sanction of an official position. Intercession in particular becomes a problematic aspect of political intervention; in stage plays that provide greater space to Mistress Shore, her intercessory actions—­enabled by her physical proximity to Edward—­link her sexual power over him to discourses of the corrupt favorite and shifts in rhetorical power. Such unofficial influence is a pressure point in the dramatic adaptations that incorporate Mistress Shore’s story, which ultimately indicts the counsel and intercessory power of both mistress and queen because of the overlap of their relationships to the king and the sources of their power. In early modern historiography, the depictions of royal women associated with an English sovereign and their uses of the power that access to the monarch brings have a collective representational impact: the diminished legitimacy of a mistress’s influence does not redirect that power toward the queen consort but calls into doubt her similar access to and relationship with the king. Kinship networks are even greater sites of potential friction with kingly authority where the exercise of royal women’s power takes on more visibly public and political dimensions. Elizabeth Woodville’s large kinship network—­a product of both her native Englishness and her prior marriage to Sir John Grey—­is infamously identified, in both narrative and dramatic historiography, as a key source of trouble with Edward IV’s own Yorkist family. While described by most early modern writers documenting the end of the Wars of the Roses as egregious in their demands upon the monarchy, the advantageous marriages of Elizabeth’s family members were “a classic instance of the conflict inherent in a queen’s dual (or triple) kinship networks.”26 Like motherhood, extended kinship networks were aspects of a queen’s familial life that could underpin a king’s authority, or, in times of monarchical crisis, work against it. In the historiography about Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Isabel, and Elizabeth York, the access and influence of a queen’s extended kinship network is frequently invoked to condone or condemn a queen’s political actions when they are in opposition to her sovereign. Introduction  9

A queen consort’s kinship networks could interfere with her support of the king’s legitimacy even when she was not in conflict with her spouse. In the case of Elizabeth York, whose blood claim to the throne was better than Henry VII’s, her family was “ideologically invaluable but a political liability,” providing him both necessary Yorkist aid against Richard III and a series of pretenders to his throne.27 Her Yorkist bloodline positioned Elizabeth as both buttress and threat, leading to attempts to minimize her authority and access to Henry’s English subjects and an increased symbolic emphasis on her childbearing of Tudor heirs. But Elizabeth York’s female kin, in the figure of her aunt, Margaret of Burgundy—­sister to Edward IV and Richard III—­also became a touchstone for writers interested in royal women’s expressions of power. Bacon and Ford provide divergent assessments of the meaning of Margaret’s autonomous political influence and her own kinship alliances, which often position her as a threat against Henry in spite of her niece Elizabeth’s role as queen consort. The kinship networks that produced opposing dynastic and national loyalties for English queens were nexuses wherein expressions of power were still conceptualized as familial but were also more obviously public and often oriented away from the monarch himself. A queen consort’s kin were a potent reminder that the familial—­at least in regard to the reigning English dynasty—­had both potentially valuable and potentially hazardous political dimensions. Narrative and dramatic historiography frequently grappled with the effects of a queen’s kinship networks on monarchical history and English nationhood; alongside motherhood, female kinship was one locus where a queen’s political agency could be variously sanctioned or indicted, represented as a matter of state or domesticated as a matter of private familial life. The wealth of scholarship on queenship that has emerged from feminist historians in the last three decades demonstrates that medieval royal women held real political power as wives, mothers, and even mistresses. This scholarship also outlines important shifts in the function and expression of queenship over the course of multiple centuries in the late medieval period that reduced the official channels of influence available to queens: the rise of a central governmental bureaucracy, attempts to limit factionalism among powerful nobles, and the consolidation of power in the person of the king 10  Introduction

that marked a rise in English national consciousness and also increasingly limited queens’ direct influence on the monarchy through public political office.28 These changes to the structure of queenship did not eliminate its power, but they did change its expression of such power: late medieval royal women’s authority was increasingly wielded interstitially and frequently located in ambiguous overlaps of the public and private spheres. The ambiguity within expressions of queenship as both public and private allowed early modern authors interested in recounting the historical events of the late medieval period to interpret royal women’s power in widely variable ways: some, like Grafton, finding legitimate political power in the authority of a queen mother and others, like Heywood, finding pernicious unfair influence in the access available to a king’s wife. A malleable but crucial aspect of English monarchical history that allowed writers to manipulate women’s representation in relation to politics, queenship, as I demonstrate in the following chapters, became a site of contested meanings in early modern historiography. Considerations of the “soft power” that defines late medieval queenship and its associated practices has usefully expanded studies of monarchy, kingship, and sovereignty by moving beyond traditional political history, interrogating conceptual divisions between public and private, and expanding definitions of the terms authority and even power itself.29 As I examine royal women’s political participation within both early modern narrative history and its stage adaptations, I employ an additional, though disputed, term particularly applicable to a study of historiography that uses literary techniques: agency. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-­Davidow understand agency as a capacity to act and “to act otherwise, to intervene in the world, to have an effect.”30 This definition has much in common with Pauline Stafford’s sense of a historical queen consort’s exercise of power as “the ability to take part in the events” and to have the “means of strategic action.”31 The concept of agency has been valuably refined by literary critics aware of its mediation by authorial representation and social structures.32 Traub, while profitably calling attention to the danger in applying such a concept to literary characters, argues that scholars might still find a “limited ‘agency’” in literary works, one defined “as the circumscribed negotiation of Introduction  11

beings granted subjectivity within their culture.”33 Whereas Traub’s caution against the attribution of agency to characters without attention to cultural scripts distinguishes between fact and fiction, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s tracing of the extant artifacts of a historical woman’s actual words as they transform into a fictive text demonstrates how the recorded agency of historical figures becomes culturally mediated through fictive adaptation in the case of Sojourner Truth.34 Contemporary newspaper reports never record the most powerful, repeated line of abolitionist Frances Dana Gage’s published version of Truth’s famous speech—­“Ain’t I a woman?”—­but they do document Truth’s objections to accounts of her speech that assigned her a black dialect. Gage’s rendition of Truth’s speech includes “the arguments, evidence, and metaphors” supported by many extant artifacts, but it also recasts those artifacts through racist stereotypes that, according to Campbell, produce a “malign agency” indicative of the ways that agency is subject to reversal.35 This study likewise examines historical figures made fictive; as history plays adapt the historical events described in the narratives, they revise the arguments, evidence, and metaphors invented by their predecessor historiographers to retell history with a difference. As Strohm demonstrates, textual representations through narrative history supplant the lives of historical figures, producing layers of characterization that “have the effect of imposing themselves, occupying the place of the life they would describe.”36 The comparative lens of this study considers these layers of characterization in relation to one another; while the lived experience of these historical women is always occluded, “the ways their subjectivity is constructed through representational means,” as Traub posits it, is highlighted through an examination of differing forms of agency.37 Different narrative and dramatic techniques in historiography direct readers’ sympathies, as Gage’s addition of dialect to Sojourner Truth’s words do, making these texts “protean” in both form and reception.38 Mediated by cultural scripts, male-­authored discourses, and generic form, the political and rhetorical agency afforded to historical female figures made literary characters in early modern historiography is nevertheless a valuable measure

12  Introduction

by which to evaluate historiographers’ complex navigations of the historical record, prior texts, and generic conventions to construct the subjectivity of royal women. I use political agency to describe those moments where male historiographers and playwrights imagine female historical figures as political and historical actors capable of influencing the course of history by participating in nationally significant political events in a potentially efficacious way. Agency is also created by form and understood by readers and audiences: as narrative historiographers imagine political agency for historical female figures, the rhetorical strategies of the narrative genre make that agency visible and frame its reception, and the conventions of stage drama likewise provide tools for directing readers and audiences to see playwrights’ revised literary characters’ opposing ineffectuality.39 Early modern historical narratives often implicitly conceive of royal women’s participation in politics as agential, as “having an effect”; these texts also generally use narrative evaluation to assess political agency as an appropriate expression of queenship. Historical drama, conversely, downplays women’s effective political action in favor of staging their rhetorical agency. The history plays examined here, including Richard III and Perkin Warbeck, often devote extensive stage time to royal women, mobilize audiences’ sympathies toward them, and afford them outspoken moral righteousness. However, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth Woodville and Ford’s Katherine Gordon both display rhetorical agency that self-­consciously critiques women’s political agency in prior historical narratives, articulating women’s powerlessness to change the course of history or voicing views of royal marriage that eliminate queenly power. Spectacles of rhetorical power are turned to speak against the political action afforded their narrative precedents, presenting an alternative to political agency that dramatically reimagines royal women’s roles and attempts to assert impermeable boundaries between their personal and political lives. One of the most consistent shifts in the pattern of adaptation of royal women’s stories in early modern historiography that I trace is a reframing of women’s agency from that of a sanctioned political actor to that of a self-­critical rhetorical witness.

Introduction  13

Intertextual Historiography This study of royal women’s agency reframes prevailing generic categorizations of early modern historiography by identifying the historical narrative as a flexible and capacious genre that exhibits a sustained interest in the problems and possibilities of women’s political influence and by proposing that historical drama’s revisions of this narrative history to stage royal women and structure national identity are important to our critical understanding of the history play genre. To do so, I approach the relationship between narratives and history plays as intertextual rather than as a hierarchy of source material and literary text. The hierarchies that often structure source study are pervasive; they affect generic classifications of historiographical texts as well as perceptions about the relationships among them. Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter have recently demonstrated “that how critics assess and acknowledge sources remains interpretively and politically significant,” but in their account of literary study’s—­especially New Historicism’s—­attitudes toward source study, they also reveal the tenacity of “critical antipathy” toward sources for drama.40 As Lori Humphrey Newcomb notes in her survey of the history of Shakespeare source study and its colonialist logics, which are bound up with ideologies of Shakespearean exceptionalism, “source study is burdened by a history of contempt for its objects of study.”41 Elsewhere Newcomb proposes the alternative concept of “a dynamic and ongoing interchange” between romance sources and Shakespeare’s plays to elucidate the relationship between Robert Greene’s Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale.42 Such a conception of interchange is an important starting point for the reevaluation of historical narratives that is part of this project: narrative sources for historical drama are perhaps those source materials most often deemed contemptible and inferior to dramatists’ reinventions, and the “critical axiologies” that value Shakespeare’s romances above their sources might be said to even more definitively crown the history plays as kings and identify the chronicles as their bastard siblings.43 Criticism that brings narrative and dramatic historiography together through a source study approach often stubbornly reiterates Stephen Booth’s 1968 assertion that “we care about Holinshed’s Chronicles because Shakespeare read them,” in spite of interventions by scholars who treat the chronicles and 14  Introduction

other narrative forms of historiography as individual texts with cultural and literary worth.44 And while studies of the history play can reflexively accept such divisions between dramatic art and narrative history as inferior base matter, analyses of historical drama also contain internal hierarchies that privilege Shakespeare over his contemporaries.45 Feminist criticism on women in early modern historical drama, while offering excellent correctives to early scholarship that ignores women in the history plays, often replicates the assumptions of source study that gloss over the intellectual complexity of chronicle and political histories in favor of the commercial stage play. The persuasive and nuanced feminist readings of Shakespeare’s history plays by Phyllis Rackin and Jean E. Howard, Barbara Hodgdon, and Nina Levine, for example, have not fully attended to the varied representations of women in historical narratives of the early modern period. Rackin and Howard link their compelling arguments about women’s marginalization in the history plays to women’s similar status in narrative historiography: Representatives of the unarticulated residue that eluded the men’s historiographic texts and threatened their historical myths, women were inevitably cast as aliens in the masculine domain of English historiography; but, in addition to reproducing the marginal status of women in the discourse of English history, the separation of female characters from the central scenes of English historical representation expressed the gendered distinction between the authoritative masculine discourse of history and the disreputable feminized world of the playhouse.46 For Rackin and Howard, then, women’s political marginalization in the history plays arises out of a masculine historical record codified in historical narratives and already excluding women. While Levine tells an opposite story of Shakespeare’s revision of sources, arguing that instead of continuing a marginalization of women’s participation in politics initiated by source narratives, “the stage gradually makes a place for women in history,” she concludes that Rackin and Howard’s observations about representations of women in Tudor chronicles “still hold,” reifying the claim that Shakespeare’s chronicle sources were merely “patriarchal stories.”47 Thus, some Introduction  15

feminist scholars study these narratives as derogatory frameworks that invite historical drama’s exclusion of women, while others who likewise approach historical narratives as negative source models find redemptive revisions rather than exclusions of women in dramatists’ adaptations. Source study’s antipathies toward narrative historiography have foreclosed recognition of the complex representations afforded women in these materials. In contrast to critical approaches that treat historiography as unshapely source material uninterested in the political actions of female historical figures, I argue that women were not simply an “unarticulated residue” in historiography, and that narrative sources represent royal women engaged in public acts of statecraft. Playwrights’ authorial choices to separate “female characters from the central scenes of English historical representation,” so astutely outlined by Rackin and Howard, were in fact made in contrast to source narratives’ vivid accounts of royal women’s political agency, and they reveal these dramatists’ own imaginative responses to the political action afforded royal women in narrative history. By reading the history plays most often located at the top of source study’s hierarchies within the more comprehensive context of their available historical precedents, by situating Shakespeare as one dramatic historiographer among many who adapts narrative history in patterns similar to his contemporaries, and by foregrounding the intertextual relationships between narrative and play, this book attempts to break out of such ongoing hierarchies of valuation to tell a fuller story about royal women’s representation in early modern historiography. Expansive intertextual approaches productively oppose the value-­laden assignations of “source” and “text” at the core of many accounts of the relationship between historical narrative and history play. For the past two decades, efforts to conceptualize source study as intertextual have invigorated scholarly engagement with traditionally identified as well as expansively imagined sources.48 John Drakakis traces the revival of interest indicated by Britton and Walter’s recent Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study to politically inflected theories of intertextuality and their ability to disrupt the discipline’s linear assumptions.49 These theories of intertextuality resist the seductive gradations of worth often embedded in the language and 16  Introduction

historic practices of source study and create a more accurate taxonomy of relationships among historiographical texts. Claes Schaar’s theory of historically grounded intertextuality is particularly applicable to the relationship between the historical narratives and dramatic adaptations explored here. Schaar posits that certain kinds of surface contexts (a poem, a play) include allusions and semantic echoes of other works, which he calls infracontexts. Recognition of infracontexts creates particular effects in readers, changing the meaning of the surface context so that it is inextricably bound up with the additional meanings generated by the recollection of another text.50 This emphasis on reader recognition acknowledges potentially diverse receptions to texts and the palimpsestic power of the source.51 The inseparability of the infracontext from the cumulative meaning of the surface context and the direct effect of their merging are key to the intertextual relationship between the historical narrative and the history play. Schaar’s further description of contrastive infracontexts, which do not seamlessly connect with surface contexts but rather work to “negate and annul them,” articulates an additionally useful theory of competing histories.52 As Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith observe, Schaar’s intertextual schema “shifts the focus from the source-­reading author (and from the source-­hunting critic) to the source-­recognizing reader” and “allows multiple and even contradictory infracontexts to coexist.”53 Dramatized versions of historical events depicting royal women often contrast rather than support narrative versions, so that readers and audiences, aware of multiple mediated versions of historical representation, register disparate accounts of queenship and agency that function as oppositional intertexts. My use of intertextuality considers the pluralities of knowledge evident in the choices made by historiographers and dramatists who re-­present such contested historical knowledge. Studies of drama and historical memory have long registered the important effects of oppositional histories produced by both changes to source material and embodiment onstage.54 While primarily interested in the effective force of the theater to rewrite historical accounts by reframing audiences’ understanding of historical figures, Jonathan Gil Harris observes that this process never fully occludes historical memory; rather, historical memory continually informs the meaning of theatrical Introduction  17

figures.55 The intertextual relationship between dramatic historiography and its narrative sources is usefully illuminated by what Schaar would call the surface context of the play—­inseparable from a cumulative meaning accrued by infracontext—­and by what Harris deems intertheatricality. In both formulations, contrasting histories produced in a variety of genres are an essential component of textual or theatrical meaning. These intertextual approaches explain the individual relationships among historical plays and their narrative predecessors as well as the large patterns of change within historiography that provide competing historical accounts of women’s political participation and implicitly register the contingencies of historical truths.56 Such intertextuality is, unlike many poststructuralist theories of intertextuality, also compatible with historically situated meanings.57 Applying intertextual methodologies to historiographical processes of composition also foregrounds the import of relationships among historical narratives. Chronicle histories integrate, revise, and respond to earlier chronicle narratives written in English, French, or Latin; they likewise interpolate political histories, and in some cases draw upon historical drama for their accounts. Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke includes More’s The History of King Richard III, an instance of proximate intertextuality that impacts chronicle history’s treatment of the royal women of the Wars of the Roses. Grafton’s view of queenship is similarly indebted to the intertextual influence of Jean Froissart’s French Chroniques, translated into English by John Bourchier (Lord Berners), and included in Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large. Cary’s narrative History of Edward II engages with not just one or two intertexts, but with two competing chronicle history traditions and Marlowe’s stage play—­as well as the generic pressures of political history—­to craft a palimpsest of queenship in narrative historiography. Thus, intertextuality signals relationships between and among historical narratives and history plays within and across generic and temporal categories, and indicates the import of a contextual field of historiography about women to the creation of historical meaning in both narrative and drama. The intertextual inclusion of prior records in narrative historiography blurs the generally accepted generic boundaries between political and chronicle histories. Even the stylistic boundaries between 18  Introduction

political and chronicle forms prove permeable: the attributes assigned to political histories, such as narrator evaluation, invented speeches and dialogue, and the psychological interiority of interior perspective, are found not just in chronicle histories’ intertextual absorption of political histories but more widely throughout the chronicles as well. Despite acknowledging difficulties in classifying diverse forms of early modern history writing, scholarship on what I inclusively term the historical narrative tends to emphasize, as D. R. Woolf does in Reading History in Early Modern England, the differences among forms such as chronicles and political histories and identifies them as distinct subgenres.58 Critics draw the starkest divisions between chronicle and political history, describing chronicle histories such as those written by Hall and Holinshed as vastly different in purpose and use from political histories such as those written by More and Bacon.59 For example, The History of King Henry VII’s lack of moral didacticism, its dispassionate evaluations of politics, and its use of orations are all assessed as evidence of the text’s debts to classical history, exemplarity as a political history, and superior form.60 Whereas such humanist political histories modeled on classical historians like Tacitus are understood as highlighting instructive lessons gleaned from a sharp focus on a single ruler and attention to individual psychology and human action rather than God’s will, chronicle histories are more often characterized as lacking in selection and organization and devoted to demonstrating man’s vulnerability to fortune.61 Such perceptions have led to greater sustained critical attention to the political histories of More, Bacon, and Cary as individual works by major authors, while literary studies’ engagement with prose historiography is more often achieved through a primary focus on historical drama and often informed by the biases of source study discussed above.62 Appraisals of historiography that denigrate chronicles and privilege humanist political histories for their supposed similarities to modern methodologies have been productively questioned via debates about the origins and development of early modern historiography.63 Beginning with Annabel Patterson’s influential account of the collaborative process of compiling a polyvocal chronicle history in Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, negative and Introduction  19

paradoxical assessments of the chronicles as wholly providential, purely political propaganda, and disorganized “trivial household trash” have been steadily revised through critical attention to their rhetoric, structure, and materiality, and their complex representations of politics, society, and religion.64 Additional studies of the early modern period’s fascination with the past address the valuable literary and cultural contributions of historiographers, including Holinshed, Hall, and Polydore Vergil, to England’s national imagination and historical consciousness.65 Janette Dillon has argued for the performative qualities of Hall’s Union that suggests its connections to, rather than differences from, political histories and even drama.66 And Peter C. Herman has invaluably corrected the ubiquitous Tillyardian view of Hall’s Union as mere Tudor propaganda, reading in Hall’s political investments and rhetorical techniques a pervasive endorsement of political dissent.67 Building upon these interventions, which have advanced more thoroughgoing and nuanced scrutiny of the formal structure, intertextual humanist influences, and complex political ideologies evident in chronicle history, this book demonstrates that the political sympathies and personal interests of historiographers such as More, Hall, and Grafton were more complicated than either established divisions between political and chronicle histories or the bifurcated story of chronicles’ service to both providential and secular authority suggests.68 The same features that undergird evaluations of political history’s superiority to chronicle history can be found not only in the work of Bacon and his fellow political historians of this period, More and Cary, but also in a wider range of historical narratives that includes chronicle history. Hall’s narrative of Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV in the Union, for example, contains evaluations of reported public opinions that share with More’s History of King Richard III skeptical assessments of perceived causes, while Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large assigns Queen Isabel extended invented dialogues that align her decision-­making with the nation’s interests and influence the structure of Elizabeth Cary’s political history, The History of Edward II. While distinctions between humanist political histories and chronicle narratives are both routinely challenged and highly customary, this project suggests new commonalities for these subgenres: intertextual borrowings between narratives and historiographers’ shared 20  Introduction

interests in licensing the political action of royal women obfuscate such critically imposed boundaries.69 By identifying historical drama’s adaptations of royal women’s representations from prior narrative historiography and investments in redefining queenship as shared key features, this study also suggests new defining attributes for the history play. The generic contours of the early modern history play are generally more recognizable and standardized than those of the historical narrative. Graham Holderness claims for the history plays a stability “in their occupation of a single discrete genre” not found in comedy or tragedy, which he traces to historical drama’s newness in the early modern period and its standard reliance on historical narrative sources.70 While source use is often a key factor in defining the genre, subject matter is also emphasized: Rackin and Howard identify history plays as texts that “deal with English history” and focus on individual rulers.71 Additional defining criteria beyond source material and subject matter posit that history plays dramatize events that claim to be true, select materials familiar to an Elizabethan audience, adjust historical fact for dramatic effect, espouse patriotism, and purport topical import.72 Shakespeare’s ten history plays are most prominent in such taxonomical investigations, and overvaluations of his contributions have shaped our current understanding of the genre.73 In spite of the relative stability of these generic features and the dominance of Shakespeare’s tetralogies, additional work on the history play has reimagined its contours by challenging Shakespeare’s placement at the center of the genre’s formation, by more capaciously defining the staging of historical material, and by considering material factors that influenced its popularity.74 Scott McMillin and Sally-­Beth MacLean, for example, trace the invention of the English history play to the Queen’s Men, whose late 1580s and early 1590s history plays, including The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The True Tragedy of Richard III, preceded and likely influenced Shakespeare’s own plays about those monarchs.75 Examinations of the genre’s interrogation of national consciousness, religious change, and performance of the past offer alternative classificatory criteria and register both overlaps and discontinuities in history plays’ reflections on English national identity.76 Introduction  21

The history plays examined in the following chapters—­Richard III, The True Tragedy’s of Richard III, Edward IV, Edward II, and Perkin Warbeck—­all match conventional critical descriptions: they rely on historical narrative sources to dramatize the native English past, they demand audiences’ proficient knowledge of historical intertexts, and they include discursive literary constructions of the English nation. But my analyses of these plays also incorporate more complicated categorizations of the history play genre, particularly those that consider the staging of women’s roles as a part of such taxonomies. Scholars studying the Queen’s Men have sought to redefine the Elizabethan English history play as a “‘medley’ including comedy and romance” and strongly shaped by a specific theater company that specialized in the form.77 Plays such as the anonymous The True Tragedy’s and Heywood’s Edward IV pose even greater challenges to easy classification of the genre, in spite of their focus on the end of the Wars of the Roses and indebtedness to chronicle sources. The dramatic strains of Heywood’s play, for example, have been variously described as some combination of chronicle history, domestic drama, or city comedy.78 The elements of city comedy and domestic tragedy present in these history plays and a number of others written by the Henslowe playwrights lead to their classification as citizen-­centered historical dramas, in contrast to Shakespeare’s aristocratically focused tetralogies.79 Ford’s 1634 Perkin Warbeck, meanwhile, is treated as a generic anomaly and read as a nostalgic throwback to the thriving genre of the 1590s.80 As with The True Tragedy’s and Edward IV’s expansions of the role of Mistress Shore, which signal their contrariety to the 1590s Shakespearean history play, Perkin Warbeck’s focus on the marriage of Perkin and Katherine is one critical marker of the play’s difference from earlier history plays.81 But Perkin Warbeck’s interest in shaping women’s rhetorical agency to address the problems of female political participation suggests continuities with rather than contrasts to Richard III and Edward II, while the True Tragedy and Edward IV reveal interests in defining a gendered national identity that likewise overlap with the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Rather than finding the presence of historical female figures indicative of difference between Shakespeare’s history plays and these so-­called hybrid works, I extend prior critics’ work 22  Introduction

on emergent nationalism in Shakespeare’s plays to examine the similar investments of citizen-­centered or domestic history plays of the 1590s.82 Patterns of dramatic adaptation of female representation—­which emerge in women’s exclusion from national identity, their relocation to private spheres, or their reimagined agency—­are present across the genre’s standard examples as well as its deviations. The adaptive patterns of playwrights working within the emergent genre of the history play follow movements in English national self-­definition to alter historiography’s perspectives about queenship. As analyses of the distinguishing features of the English history play indicate, nationalist sentiments have long been recognized as important aspects of early modern historical definition in literature and historiography. One of the “new discursive forms” that emerged “to represent the newly consolidated national state” and contest the chronicle history’s account of national selfhood structured around dynastic monarchy, the history play is often the logical center of discussions of literary expressions of national identity in the early modern period. 83 But historiography in all its forms explored national consciousness.84 Historical narratives—­including the chronicles identified by Richard Helgerson as the “Ur-­genre of national self-­representation”—­ link that representation to the hereditary dynasties of reigning monarchs, a coupling that has important implications for royal women’s political participation.85 While the temporal origins of modern nationalism are strongly contested, studies of early modern nationhood and literature generally concur that national self-­definition gradually shifted throughout the early modern period from a focus on the monarch’s dynastic realm—­ which included England’s royal women—­to the entity of the nation, defined by its citizenry and geographical space.86 Early modern nationalism as a governmental practice consolidated administrative power around the sovereign; nationhood as an ideological construct consolidated national identity around the country itself as a sovereign entity. Thus, emerging concepts of nationhood were strongly linked to the monarch but could also produce antimonarchical (and antidynastic) sentiment through a newly conceived separation of obedience to the sovereign from loyalty to the nation.87 The anomalous rule of Elizabeth I offered further opportunities and generated Introduction  23

additional desires for such ideological division between monarch and commonwealth at the end of the sixteenth century: masculinist narratives of English nationalism written under a female sovereign legitimated and relied upon patriarchal authority.88 Literary investigations of nationalism’s effects on women’s power—­often undertaken through readings of the history plays—­yield differing views about whether emergent nationalism or the dynastic formulations of national consciousness that preceded it were more conceptually inclusive.89 As my analyses show, narrative historiography frequently depicts dynastic models of national self-­representation that sanction royal women’s expressions of political authority and position them as contributors to England’s national well-­being. Historical drama, however, often embraces a different kind of national consciousness, one rooted in the exclusion of female political agency, to reimagine the scope and meaning of queenship on stage. In her study of early modern queens, Sharon Jansen offers what she calls a counternarrative to the dominant story of the rise of early modern nationalism that so heavily influences critical work on the English history play and its narrative intertexts. Jansen stresses the crossing rather than the creation of national boundaries made possible “by considering the lives of women,” an invocation that flags royal women’s traversal of national borders through their extended kinship networks and international marital alliances and opposes political history’s traditional privileging of matters of state over the more ambiguous matters of queenship.90 Jansen’s positing of a counternarrative to emergent nationalism generated by the study of royal women also cues readers to contemplate a shared rather than counternarrative, one that considers both the rise of national consciousness formulated at the expense of women’s political participation and the changing parameters of royal women’s power throughout this same time period. The administrative alterations in English governance that political historians identify as sources of an increasing nationalist imagination are also credited by feminist historians of queenship with reductions in historical queens’ public roles.91 Liz Oakley-­Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson, for example, document the tightening of the role of queen consort and the limitations upon her access to power from the thirteen to the seventeenth 24  Introduction

centuries, finding that the “form and function of queenship” transformed as governmental bureaucracy “encroached upon traditional feminine avenues for public power and influence.”92 These changes to queens’ public authority were not simply reductive, however: work on queenship shows that while “increasingly circumscribed within the public sphere,” the unique political dimensions of queens’ ostensibly familial roles allowed them real enduring influence.93 This book situates its reassessments of royal women in early modern historiography in the context of this shared narrative by keeping in view both the transformations in expressions of queenly power and the gendering of English national self-­awareness that made the agency of medieval queen consorts such a rich topic of literary exploration for early modern writers. Narrative historiographers and dramatists writing in the midst of these related cultural transformations found in both nationalist discourse and the increasing ambiguities of queenship resonant language and frameworks for depicting royal women that they navigated to diverse effect in order to address questions of political inclusion and exclusion. These writers actively manipulated the conceptual malleability of queenship to construct the subjectivity of royal women, producing drastically different assessments of the legitimate scope of women’s power. Sustained attention to their varying conceptions of female agency as political action or rhetorical intervention offers new insights into the generic conventions and intertextual methods within which these writers worked, and reveals the essential importance of royal women to historical narratives and drama of the early modern period. Chronicling Royal Women Chapter 1, “A Very Prey to Time: Rewriting Elizabeths in Tudor Historiography and William Shakespeare’s Richard III,” examines how a body of Tudor narrative historiography that represents the royal women of the late Yorkist regime as political negotiators was revised into Shakespeare’s famous stage play through a dramatic reduction of female authority. While the authors of narrative history in the Tudor period—­More, Vergil, Hall, and Holinshed—­variously envision their female subjects as agents of history through rhetorical strategies common to their genre, Shakespeare’s Introduction  25

adaptation of these intertexts excises dynastic women from the emerging conceptions of communal national identity that were important to the newly popular genre of historical drama. The play reframes royal women’s maternal mourning and recasts their power as a rhetorical agency that voices an inability to effect historical change, providing a new model of queenship in stark contrast to its narrative sources. Chapter 2, “Your Hope Is Gone: Narrowing the Nation in The True Tragedy of Richard III and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV,” analyzes two additional dramatic adaptations about the end of the Wars of the Roses. Often seen as very different from Shakespeare’s Richard III because of their populist, citizen-­centered sensibilities, these noncanonical plays in fact navigate their shared narrative source material in strikingly similar ways. These plays critique the access and influence possible for women under a dynastic system and challenge the legitimacy of women’s participation in politics. The True Tragedy and Edward IV define the English nation as a public victimized by monarchical power when women are granted misapplied preferment through personal affection. In their depictions of women’s unofficial dynastic access, these plays thus offer even more explicit accounts of dramatists’ investments in foreclosing women from emergent national identity than Richard III does. Writing during the heyday of the history play and at the close of an aging female monarch’s rule, these playwrights modified their historical narrative intertexts to critique queenship through the rhetorical interventions of its royal women. Chapter 3, “From a Noble Lady to an Unnatural Queen: Imagining Queen Isabel in Chronicle History and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II,” traces two distinctly different traditions of representing Isabel’s queenship in narrative historiography, which in the last two decades of the sixteenth century reveal shifting perspectives about royal women’s agency emerging from historiographers’ own investments in national history, their relationships to their contemporary competitors, the debate over historiographical methods, and the pressures of the commercial print market. Marlowe’s Edward II synthesizes these divergent historical accounts of Isabel, selecting and omitting evidence from Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Stow’s Annals of England to explore the conceptual problems 26  Introduction

of royal women’s political participation in ways akin to his contemporaries writing drama at the end of Elizabeth I’s life. Chapter 4, “So Masculine a Stile: Gender and Genre in Elizabeth Cary’s The History of Edward II,” turns to the first English political history written by a woman, analyzing how Cary’s view of queenship emerges from her use of generic precedents as well as her navigation of divergent chronicle history traditions and dramatic historiography documenting Edward II’s reign. Cary reworks the anxieties about women’s power sharply expressed in the 1590s chronicle history of Stow and the drama of Marlowe to interrogate the assumptions about favoritism and women’s essential nature undergirding some of the greatest political concerns raised by Stuart rule. Attending to Cary’s intertextual engagements with varied genres of historiography reveals her important revisions of early modern chronicle history, historical drama, and narratives of royal women, and identifies her interests and strategies as those shared with, rather than divergent from, the male historiographers of the early modern period who were also interested in questions of queenship and royal women’s political participation. Chapter 5, “You Must Be King of Me: Queens and Rivals in Francis Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck,” analyzes how historical drama responds thematically to the central concerns of narrative intertexts that explore the role of royal marriage in politics. The political history of Bacon and the stage drama of Ford both interrogate the influence of historical queen consorts to signal the import of their own monarch’s relationships to royal female kin; while Bacon’s political history theorizes the value of queenly authority to a male monarch’s right rule, Ford’s drama responds to its narrative source by promoting alternative fantasies of apolitical queenship that also register the contemporary circumstances of Charles I’s early reign. The book ends with a coda that suggests the value of reassessing such perspectives for scholars of narrative and dramatic historiography, gender, and queenship in the early modern period. Telltale Women claims that early modern royal women were central, not marginal, to narrative historiographers’ stories of the English past, and that this legacy of representing queenship was a key site of contest for playwrights reshaping narrative intertexts to respond to the anxieties of their own historical present. Introduction  27

1 A Very Prey to Time Rewriting Elizabeths in Tudor Historiography and William Shakespeare’s Richard III

Elizabeth I’s paternal grandmother and Henry VII’s queen consort, Elizabeth York, provided a fleeting but useful precedent for the reigning queen in 1559. Elizabeth I’s precoronation procession on January 14 included pageants designed to please the new monarch, the first of which emphasized Henry VII and Elizabeth York as the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. An account of the procession printed nine days later parses the pageant as a complimentary comparison of Elizabeth I to her female ancestor: This pageant was grounded upon the Queenes maiesties name. For like as the long warre betwene the two houses of Yorke and Lancastre then ended, when Elizabeth doughter to Edwarde the forth matched in mariage with Henrye the seuenthe heyre to the howse of Lancastre: so since that the Queenes maiesties name was Elizabeth, and forsomuch as she is the onelye heire of Henrye the eight, which came of bothe the howses as the knitting up of concorde, it was deuised that like as Elizabeth was the first occasion of concorde, so she another Elizabeth myght maintaine the same among her subjectes.1

29

Lines delivered by a child appointed to “open the meaning” of the pageant describe Elizabeth York and Henry VII as “two princes that sit under one cloth of state,” and the printed text of the procession refers to the royal couple as “those two princes.”2 Judith M. Richards argues that the pageant presented Elizabeth York and Henry VII as “coequal monarchs” and linked both Elizabeths together as queens with “shared capacities to end ‘all dissention’ from dynastic struggle.”3 The pageant emphasizes Elizabeth York’s right to rule in order to confirm Elizabeth I’s own “eligibility to wear the crown” and to assert the legitimacy of female succession.4 Produced at a time when “everyone assumed that Elizabeth would marry, including the queen herself,” the pageant also stresses the political power afforded to her female ancestor through marriage.5 Thus, Elizabeth York was recursively formed into an appealing precedent for Elizabeth I’s rule through the selective imagining of a princely alliance of co-­rulers. This royal remaking of a queen consort into a joint monarch was rich with possibilities of flattery or imitation for Elizabethan writers, as it demonstrated an appealing vision of the new queen’s familial past, support for her rule, and a precedent for preserving her authority within marriage. For dramatists taking up this story of union during the vogue of history plays in the 1590s, even stronger precedents for women’s political engagement abounded in the Tudor histories that comprised their source materials. In Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III (1543, written ca. 1514–­18), Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (History of England) (1534, written ca. 1513), and Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548 and 1550), historiographers committed to dynastic politics that afforded royal women political agency envision female subjects as model agents and readers of history who inform the authors’ own analyses of national events. More, Vergil, and Hall establish the centrality of these women through narrative techniques privileging women’s perspectives. These histories were likely to have pleased the future queen in their sympathy for women’s political participation, though such narratives are often maligned as the source of historical drama’s exclusion of women as well as the source of that drama’s events.6 Yet when Shakespeare represented the same historical figures in Richard III, he rejected not only 30  A Very Prey to Time

the cue of Elizabeth I’s coronation pageant but also the precedent of his narrative sources to downplay women’s authority while amplifying their vocal mourning. The play makes stark revisions to its sources by casting Henry Tudor as England’s singular savior and eliminating Elizabeth York entirely. The larger exclusion of women from the dramatized world of the Wars of the Roses, of which Elizabeth York’s lack of representation is only one instance, has been adroitly outlined by feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s history plays.7 This chapter locates Richard III’s much-­discussed exclusion of women within the richer context of narrative and dramatic Tudor historiography by reading the play alongside narrative accounts of Elizabeth York’s mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, and Edward IV’s lover, Mistress Elizabeth “Jane” Shore. Narrative historiography under the Tudors portrayed dynastic models of the state, which allowed women with personal ties to the monarchy power as political agents. However, Elizabethan history plays drawing on these narratives, including Richard III, dramatized nationalist models that increasingly saw these personal ties as solely familial and separated them from national concerns. Authorial Agents in Tudor Political History More’s English version of The History of King Richard III was left unfinished ca. 1514–­18, before first appearing, unattributed, in two 1543 printed editions of Richard Grafton’s Continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle. Similar versions of this printed English text—­with incorporated variations based on William Rastell’s 1557 publication of The History of King Richard III in More’s Complete Works—­soon found their way into every major English chronicle history of the sixteenth century, including Hall’s Union and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles.8 Famous for its portrait of a wicked Richard, More’s text is often considered a vehicle of Tudor propaganda and the foremost source of Shakespeare’s stage villain.9 Rarely acknowledged, however, is The History of King Richard III’s prominent depiction of women as participants in political and historical change.10 More foregrounds the important roles that Mistress Shore and Elizabeth Woodville played in the power struggles that defined Richard III’s reign and invites readers to view their actions approvingly in the context of both Richard’s villainy and England’s dynastic governance. A Very Prey to Time  31

The pathos captured in More’s seminal account of Mistress Shore’s life inspired a series of early modern poems, ballads, and plays that highlight her victimization, and critics often observe that More’s depiction of her elicits sympathy for her precisely because she is a victim of Richard’s tyranny who does not take an active part in political history.11 Annabel Patterson, in contrast, identifies the absorption of More’s account into Holinshed’s Chronicles as an indication that the Chronicles’s writers admired female resistance. She argues that More forgives Mistress Shore her “life irregular” because Shore used “her sexual influence to mitigate the ferocity of late feudal despotism.”12 More’s treatment of Mistress Shore extends beyond the forgiveness of the sexual sins Patterson identifies; his assessment of her draws attention away from her sexual role and emphasizes her position as a benevolent royal favorite, placing her into the same political sphere as the royal family and recording her influence as a legitimate aspect of dynastic government.13 More depicts Mistress Shore’s unofficial position as the public’s popular liaison to King Edward as a beneficial part of the process of government, and he interprets Richard’s exploitation of her sexual transgressions as predatory opportunism directed at a political enemy. More certainly elicits sympathy for Shore’s victimization when he describes her imprisonment, financial ruin, and public penance at Richard’s hands: he emphasizes her “countenance & pace demure” and notes her ability to remain “womanly,” “fair,” and “louely” in spite of her famous humiliation (54). Yet More also characterizes her as one of Richard’s primary political targets. The History of King Richard III describes Richard casting about for a premise to confiscate Shore’s fortune and eliminate her influence—­including charging her with witchcraft, which fails to generate a plausible pretext, for “no colour could fasten vpon these matters”—­until he must settle for accusing her of the most obvious of crimes. Richard “layd heinously to her charge, ye thing yt her self could not deny,” and charges her with adultery (54). More uses public opinion to evaluate Richard’s punishment of Shore as a hypocritical guise under the cover of moral righteousness. Onlookers know that her walk of shame results not from her adultery but from Richard’s own desire to neutralize an enemy at court: “pitied thei more her penance, then reioyced therin, when thei considred that ye protector 32  A Very Prey to Time

procured it, more of a corrupt intent than ani vertuous affeccion” (55). The History of King Richard III depicts Shore’s composure during her penance and the public’s judgment of her punishment as important information about Richard’s motives and character as well as about her own. More’s account of Mistress Shore frames her personal sins in terms of their political relevance; he emphasizes both Richard’s exploitative punishment of her and the public good Mistress Shore effects through her intimacy with Edward. Though her private sins do register in the text—­much of the public “hated her liuing, & glad wer to se sin corrected”—­Richard’s “corrupt intent” gains Shore sympathy from the English people that outweighs her recognized transgressions (55). More clarifies that her penance is a staged punishment and a means for Richard to demonstrate he is “clene & fautles of himself ”—­a portrait that clearly doesn’t stick—­in part because he effectively vilifies Richard in the rest of the narrative (54). Reversing Richard’s own slanderous tactic, More identifies Richard’s condemnation of Mistress Shore’s personal actions as a sabotage that taints Richard but generates only pity for Shore. Her personal flaws, unlike Richard’s, are never presented as detrimental to England. More contrasts Richard’s self-­serving exploitation of his own access to Edward IV with Mistress Shore’s benevolent use of her influence. As his mistress, Shore has direct access to the king, and she uses it well: For many he had, but her he loued; whose fauour . . . she neuer abused to any mans hurt, but to many a mans comfort & relief: where the king toke displeasure, she would mitigate & appease his mind: where men were out of fauour, she wold bring them in his grace. For many that had highly offended, shee obtained pardon. Of great forfetures she gate men remission. And finally in many weighty sutes, she stode many men in grete stede, either for none, or very smal rewardes, & those rather gay than rich. (56) More’s praise of Shore locates her intercessory role in Edward’s government as an influential one requiring intellectual and persuasive skill, and he suggests that her interventions are wise, necessary, independent minded, and positive in their effects. Edward’s rule is bettered by the decisions A Very Prey to Time  33

Mistress Shore makes on behalf of his subjects, often in opposition to the king’s initial impulsive desires. More outlines Shore’s position in terms of the public benefits of royal favoritism: Edward’s personal affection for his mistress allows her to mediate successfully between king and subjects as a benevolent intercessor who brings comfort and relief to people by mitigating Edward’s will. More enumerates her intercessory power, identifying the grace, pardon, and remission of forfeitures she achieved for her people. He likewise asserts that she “neuer abused to any mans hurt,” and never sought large rewards, clarifying that her use of intercessory channels is motivated by goodness and service to Edward’s subjects. Rather than depicting Mistress Shore as an apolitical sexual partner of the king, More uses the combined discourses of the good favorite and royal women’s intercession to emphasize her political participation.14 Curtis Perry, discussing the “good favorite” as a late Elizabethan phenomenon, explains that “the upstart nature of the favorite, his dependence upon the king’s judgment rather than upon blood, is an important aspect of his positive social utility.”15 The details about Mistress Shore’s upbringing and demeanor recorded in The History of King Richard III, often seen as part of her anomalous story in an otherwise political history, in fact further position her as a good favorite by emphasizing her nonnoble status and her lack of blood ties to royalty: “This woman was born in London, worshipfully frended, honestly brought vp” (55). More contrasts his condemnation of Richard’s acquisition of the role of protector through blood ties to Edward with Mistress Shore’s benevolent intimacy with the king, an influence enacted through the specifically feminine act of intercession. This distinction between Shore’s positive impact and Richard’s tyrannical abuse displays ambivalence about dynastic government that allowed both blood relatives and personal intimates of the monarch to effect change. While More’s narrative about Richard is concerned with showing readers the tyranny possible through hereditary monarchy, he also describes the positive results of unofficial influence on the sovereign, primarily in his accounts of The History of King Richard III’s female characters. In his segment on Mistress Shore, and, as I will show, in his depiction of Elizabeth Woodville, More indicates that the most beneficial effects of dynastic government 34  A Very Prey to Time

under Edward IV and Richard III are achieved by royal women’s political influence through both personal relationships and familial ties. More further designates Shore’s place as a beneficial royal favorite by assessing her motivations as political. He offers a series of conjectures to explain Shore’s desire to assist Edward’s subjects and accept little in return: “either for that she was content wt the dede selfe well done, or for yt she delited to be suid vnto, & to show what she was able to do wyth the king, or for yt wanton women and welthy be not always couetouse” (56). Without privileging any of the possibilities, More suggests Shore might be motivated by idealistic selflessness, pleasure in success, joy in her abilities, or a simple lack of desire for reward. Elizabeth Story Donno finds that the presentation of alternatives in diminishing logical order and the reductive tone of his third possibility—­that Mistress Shore demonstrates that wantonness and covetousness are not coexisting sins—­suggest that this last option is represented by More as an illogical and far-­fetched explanation.16 According to Donno, one effect of this commonly used either/or narrative strategy, which ascribes many potential motives to More’s characters, is the evocation of “a sense of the complexity of their natures and of the political situation in which they participate.”17 In More’s account of Shore, he creates for Edward’s middle-­class lover an interior psychology and ethical sensibility potentially similar and possibly superior to that of her royal counterparts. Showing what one can do with power is an essential expression of its seductive appeal; when More ascribes this motivation to Shore he indicates that she is potentially subject not to the separate, sexual sins that Richard foregrounds in his condemnation of her, but to the political ambition that repeatedly clutches male participants in history. Because the truth cannot be known, More argues that Shore’s accomplishments must speak for her goodness and be evaluated in the same context of potentially corrupting ambition that can drive the actions of both male and female royalty. Leaving his readers with a plethora of motivations for Mistress Shore, More represents her as a woman influenced by the same political desires as everyone else in The History of King Richard III. He praises her because she enacts her ambition in a morally superior and politically efficacious way, and finds satisfaction in serving the public good. A Very Prey to Time  35

The History of King Richard III further legitimates Mistress Shore’s unofficial mode of political participation when it explicitly claims her as a proper subject for historiography. Critics point to what they see as More’s apology for his digression about this middle-­class concubine—­“some shal think this woman to sleight a thing, to be written of & set amonge the remembraunces of great matters”—­as an indication that early modern historiographers saw the appropriate subject of history writing as royal and male (56). Richard Helgerson, for example, sees Shore’s “unfitness for history” as the source of her enduring pathetic appeal, while Wendy Wall argues that the apology itself names More’s inclusion as a “transgression.”18 Yet More does much to make Mistress Shore “fit” for history when he uses the discourse of the good favorite to include her in the same political struggles over influence that consume Yorkist royalty. Shore’s class status and gender, rather than making her a pitiable anomaly, instead indicates the merits of good favoritism under dynastic government. More justifies including Shore’s narrative in The History of King Richard III and even claims that she is “the more worthy to be remembred” because of the lessons she might teach readers about what qualifies as history (56). Comparing her “good substance,” “gret fauour,” and “gret sute & seking” with the “il dedes” (56) of others, and with her current condition—­“ beggerly,” “unfrended,” “old lene, withered, & dried vp” (55)—­More again asserts the efficacy of her influence on Edward IV: “her doinges were not much lesse, albeit thei be muche lesse remembred, because thei were not so euil” (57). He concludes that Mistress Shore now begs of men who would have had to beg themselves if she had not intervened on their behalf. For More, people—­and history—­forget good deeds in favor of ill ones: “For men vse if they haue an euil turne, to write it in marble: & whoso doth vs a good tourne, we write it in duste” (57). Thus, Shore functions as an index of the moral and ethical sorting mechanisms of history in the making. Mistress Shore’s story becomes part of More’s critique of selective memory, functioning, as Wall notes, as “a sign of human forgetfulness.”19 However, More’s narrative also critiques the content of history and redresses its unfairness. More sees Mistress Shore as a woman excluded from the previous historical record because she lacks the notoriety of bad political decisions, and he 36  A Very Prey to Time

explicitly inserts her back into that record. In doing so, he proposes criteria for evaluating contributions to history that privilege female influence and inclusion as beneficial under a dynastic system of government. The power of Mistress Shore’s story to initiate generic change is visible through its contributions to the domestic and middle-­class tragedies that become widely popular in later centuries. Helgerson concludes that More’s inclusion of Shore’s story—­excused only by the unusual pathos of her life—­has contributed to gendering tragedy but has had little impact within its own genre.20 This view of the Shore story overlooks its effects within Tudor historiography and understands More’s own attitude toward her to be one of reluctant and provisional inclusion.21 As I have suggested, More demonstrates his desire to incorporate Shore into history, and he issues an explicit challenge to its traditional subjects that opens up historiography to women.22 The consequences of this challenge extend to every major chronicle reproducing The History of King Richard III, but they are perhaps most explicit when More’s text takes up, in greater detail, another woman’s participation in Richard III’s reign. Elizabeth Woodville’s representation in More’s texts and in narrative historiography in general suggests that women’s fitness as subjects of history is not simply rejected by early modern historians and only later embraced by domestic tragedy. Rather, historical narratives, as they record the processes of dynastic government, portray royal women’s political participation through their familial and intimate access to the monarch as legitimate, deserving of historical recognition, and worthy of readers’ sympathies. More portrays Elizabeth Woodville, as he does Mistress Shore, by using the narrative techniques of emotional appeals and interjected evaluation to emphasize her participation in history as a political agent. Through additional narrative strategies of invented dialogue and interior perspective, Elizabeth Woodville is ascribed a privileged knowledge of Richard’s aspirations that aligns her character with More’s own authorial voice. More likewise calls attention to Elizabeth’s central role in historical events and her reflexive awareness of her ability to intervene in dynastic negotiations on overlapping familial and political levels. More’s narrative structure moves directly from Edward IV’s death to Richard’s attempts to wrestle power A Very Prey to Time  37

from the widowed queen. Dialogue assigned to Richard indicates that he sees Elizabeth as a formidable enemy with the potential to prevent his manipulation of the succession and to turn public opinion against him. Richard accuses her of “greate malyce towarde the Kynge’s counsayllers” and suggests her intent in taking sanctuary is to “brynge all the Lordes in obloquie and murmure of the people” (25). Richard’s first task is to stir up antagonism toward Elizabeth in order to challenge her influence and control over the princes. More’s villain must work hard to do so, and he is forced to “secretly” use “diuers meanes,” including claiming that she will be held responsible by “all the worlde” for breaking the peace between their kinsmen and leading “all the realm” to “fall on a rore,” in order to convince her that her sons should travel without escorts (16). In contrast to this portrait of Elizabeth’s resistance, More identifies Hastings and Buckingham—­“men of honour” and “great power”—­as easy “to kindle” when Richard set them “a fyre” against the queen (15). By juxtaposing a perfunctory account of the ease with which Richard draws in Hastings and Buckingham with a description of his struggle to persuade Elizabeth, More depicts her as both the strongest impediment to Richard and the most wisely skeptical member of Edward IV’s former court. The council, further demonstrating how easily Richard can persuade everyone except the queen, affirms Richard’s motion to persuade her and her younger son out of sanctuary as “good and reasonable” (27) and shortly agree that the Duke of York can be forcibly removed, “thinking none hurt erthly ment towarde the younge babe” (33). More thus portrays the king’s councilors as dupes who accept Richard’s facile gendered arguments against Elizabeth and utterly fail to suspect the threat he poses. Unlike those around her, such as the lord cardinal, who “trusted the matter was nothynge soo sore as shee tooke it for,” and the councilors who do not question Richard’s motives, Elizabeth rightly predicts that Richard “is one of them that laboureth to destroye me and my blood” (21–­22). Set apart from other Yorkist figures by her opposition to Richard, More’s Elizabeth also demonstrates a belief in her own power to influence the future when she learns Richard has deceived her. Upon hearing of the arrests of her brother and son enabled by her own earlier concessions to 38  A Very Prey to Time

Richard, Elizabeth seeks sanctuary for the rest of her family: “in gret flight and heuines, bewailing her childes ruin, her frendes mischance, & her own infortune, damning the time that ever she diswaded the gatheryng of power aboute the kinge” (20). More gives Elizabeth an interior perspective that makes her acutely aware of the efficacy of her decisions; the distress that More imagines she feels also shows her awareness of Richard’s larger intentions. She assesses her errors and anticipates future danger to her children that others cannot predict, understanding Richard’s seizure of the young king as a crucial moment in his accumulation of power. More conceives of her actions as both personal and political: her maternal fear for her sovereign son and other children is also presented as a dynastic fear for Edward’s heirs and the ruler of her country. More devotes about a fifth of his entire text to Elizabeth’s debate with the lord cardinal (Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury) over her right to sanctuary and guardianship of her youngest son, highlighting her intellectual skill and her continuing awareness of Richard’s intentions. Alan Clarke Shepard argues that Elizabeth’s dialogue in sanctuary exhibits an “empowered female voice” that ably mobilizes legal discourses usually reserved for men.23 Elizabeth uses a hybrid rhetoric that privileges her maternal role and simultaneously positions it as inextricable from her political defense of Edward V’s succession. She invokes the laws of nature, God, and English common law to argue for her maternal, legal, and religious prerogative: “mans law serueth ye gardian to kepe the infant. The law of nature wyll the mother kepe her childe. Gods law pryuelegeth the sanctuary” (39). The core of this debate is familial access to the royal heirs and the implications of that access on the succession. Elizabeth initially argues that motherhood makes her a naturally superior caregiver for her child—­a claim that “no man denieth” (35)—­but her subsequent insistence that the duke is her son but also legally her ward carries significant political consequences: “he is also my warde; for as my lerned counsell sheweth mee, syth he hath nothing by discent holden by knightes seruice, the law maketh, his mother his gardiane” (38).24 This legal defense of her guardianship reads as a veiled challenge: applied to her older son, the underage Edward V, such an argument could undermine Richard’s right as lord protector. Elizabeth’s A Very Prey to Time  39

focus on her maternal and legal authority emphasizes her overlapping political and familial roles of mother and guardian. Elizabeth’s defenses of her guardianship are paired with her distrust of Richard, which she voices to unwilling listeners. Forced to argue with men who refuse to see Richard’s ambition, Elizabeth circumspectly veils her knowledge of his intentions to deliver a warning about how those intentions might backfire: “I merueile greatly that my lord protectour is so disirous to haue [the Duke of York] in his keping, where if the child in his sicknes miscaried by nature, yet might he runne into slaunder and suspicion of fraude” (35–­36). Rather than directly challenge Richard’s motives, Elizabeth claims that she fears “no ferther then ye law fereth,” citing existing law that forbids custody to men who might gain from the deaths of their wards and raising the question of Richard’s fitness as protector (39). The debate ends only when the naive lord cardinal, who “neither beleued, and was also loth to here” the queen’s “biting wordes against the protectour,” grows tired and testily tells Elizabeth she must think that “he and all other also, saue herselfe, lacked either the wit or trouth” to determine whether the Duke of York should be removed from sanctuary (40). More’s characteristic use of irony indicates that in his eyes, Elizabeth is the sole possessor of wit and truth here and in the rest of the narrative. The privileged insights into Elizabeth’s thoughts offered throughout The History of King Richard III sanction her political decisions and intellectual arguments, foster readerly sympathy for her choices, and align her with More’s own authorial voice. Judith Anderson argues that The History of King Richard III’s force and drama comes from its emphasis on an internal, subjective perspective focused on Richard, whereby More “imagines, enters, and inevitably shapes Richard’s thoughts and motives, in addition to interpreting or commenting in a variety of less immediate ways on their significance.”25 Certainly such attention to Richard makes More’s villain a compelling subject. More’s similar approach to Elizabeth’s perspectives ascribes to her an even more compelling historical forethought similar to the author’s point of view. In her discussion with the lord cardinal, Elizabeth incredulously asks, “Troweth the protector (I pray god he may proue a protectour) troweth he that I parceiue not whereunto his painted processe 40  A Very Prey to Time

draweth?” showing More imagines for her a historical recognition (shared with More and his readers) of the extent of Richard’s goals and strategies (38). She also labels Richard’s protested concern for her youngest son the Duke of York a “trifling pretext” (38). Elizabeth makes More’s narrative possible by delivering its perspectives and its key subjects: hers is the only voice in the unfinished History of King Richard III, besides More’s, that expresses the historical Tudor vilification of Richard as a dissembler who uses “painted processes” and “trifling pretexts.” By attributing an awareness of Richard’s evil to Elizabeth, More acknowledges her as a privileged historical source. Thus, he retrospectively claims her as not only a powerful historical figure, but as a model reader of history who informs his own politicized analysis of the events of The History of King Richard III. Elizabeth’s alignment with More through interior perspective is present even when her arguments for sanctuary produce not victory but defeat. After standing “a good while in a great study,” perceiving the nearness of Richard’s men and her inability to arrange for safe transport of her son elsewhere, she “waste it was either nedeles or boteles: wherefore if she shold nedes go from him, she dempte it beste to deliuer him” (41). Having little recourse, Elizabeth evaluates the men around her and decides that while “she fered lest they might bee deceiuid: so was she well assured they would not be corupted” (41). She further reasons that relinquishing her son willingly might make them more accountable for his safety. This is a calculated risk that ultimately fails—­she releases her son hoping the lords are trustworthy, even though she knows they might be misled—­but it underscores the autonomy and wisdom of her decision-­making. She acts out of knowledge gained from experience and observation that positions her as a powerful historical agent. Her internal thoughts assessing those around her align with More’s earlier authorial evaluations of the same men within the sanctuary debate. More grants Queen Elizabeth the benefit of historical rectitude by explaining her responses to Richard as the result of her intelligence and by imagining her as the only character whose historical knowledge precedes his own. Given authorial understanding of The History of King Richard III’s villain and depicted within the narrative as an active opponent to Richard, Elizabeth shows that women’s roles in historiography A Very Prey to Time  41

are neither apolitical nor circumscribed, as later drama often stages them to be. Furthermore, her representation through these narrative strategies also stages women’s affective moral and maternal power, resistance to tyranny, and intersecting personal and political influences as foundational perspectives central to historiographers’ truth telling. The History of King Richard III’s sympathetic representation of Elizabeth as historical agent is not an anomaly in narrative historiography. Vergil’s Latin Anglica Historia, considered the origin of the Tudor myth and the greatest example of royally solicited propaganda about the Wars of the Roses, shares with More’s The History of King Richard III a comparable approach that adopts Elizabeth’s viewpoints and underscores Tudor historical narratives’ willingness to sympathetically represent women’s active, political roles.26 When More and Vergil write about the same events in her life—­ Richard’s attempts to convince Elizabeth of his goodwill toward her sons, her retreat to and the removal of her youngest son from sanctuary—­they overlap significantly in tone and narrative strategy.27 For example, Vergil’s account of Elizabeth’s flight into sanctuary uses interior perspective and ascribes to her privileged suspicions about Richard: “Elyzabeth the quene was much dismayed, and determynyd furthwith to fly; for, suspecting eaven than that ther was no plane dealing, to thintent she might dylyver her other children from the present danger, she convayed hirself with them and the marquyse into the sayntuary at Westmynster.”28 Vergil does not present a long debate and foregoes Elizabeth Woodville’s internal struggle; the Anglica Historia simply reports that Elizabeth’s son is “pullyd owt of his mothers armes” immediately.29 However, Vergil records her refusal to turn over her son as one founded in accurate concerns about Richard that are shared only with the historiographer himself: “but the woman, forseing in a sort within hir self the thing that folowyd furthwith after, could not be movid with any perswations to commyt hir self to the credyt of duke Rycherd.”30 This account of Elizabeth foreseeing the “future” “within hir self ” privileges an inner narrative within the female subject as a source of history as well as a politically shrewd observation of events. “The thing that folowyd furthwith after” is the historiographer’s version of events, and only Elizabeth is given the ability to anticipate and respond to that 42  A Very Prey to Time

future. More’s representation of Elizabeth calls attention to women’s participation in history; Vergil’s significantly shorter but analogous narrative of her likewise shows that historiography often used historical women’s perspectives to foreground their own stories. More and Vergil might be considered unlikely advocates of the voice and influence they both ascribe to Elizabeth Woodville in their narratives of Richard III. Their similar interests in serving successive Tudor governments suggest that their histories needed to satisfy the Tudor dynasty. While stories that emphasized Richard’s tyranny fit the bill, there is little indication that Henry VII’s goal of legitimizing his Lancastrian claim to the English public and other rulers of Europe would have been well-­served by these historiographers’ similar portraits of Elizabeth Woodville. While Henry welcomed the politically expedient narrative of providential union, he had to balance that narrative with suppression of Elizabeth York’s better blood claim, lest her popularity and genealogy lead to claims that she could and should rule in her own right, rather than take up the role of queen consort.31 Both More and Vergil would have been well aware of Henry VII’s vexed relationship with his mother-­in-­law: placed on the throne in part because of her negotiations for his marriage to her daughter, Henry confiscated Elizabeth Woodville’s lands and consigned her to a nunnery in 1487. Ostensibly punishing her for relinquishing her daughters to Richard, Henry’s delay in doing so led early modern and modern historians alike to speculate that he suspected her support for the many pretenders to his throne, who often claimed to be her dead boys saved from the Tower.32 Vergil notes that Elizabeth was deprived of “all her possessions . . . because she had made her peace with King Richard; had placed her daughters at his disposal; and had, by leaving sanctuary, broken her promise” to the English nobles she entreated to join Richmond, a financial punishment by Henry’s council designed to “offer an example to others to keep faith.”33 By the time More and Vergil began their respective histories, the necessity of the story of union with Elizabeth York was counterweighted by Henry VII’s evident distrust of her mother. Given this context, neither historiographer’s representations of Elizabeth Woodville as a privileged authorial voice were directly in service of the particular Tudor myth Henry VII promoted. More A Very Prey to Time  43

and Vergil’s dedication to male Tudor monarchs turns out to be somewhat ambivalent; their support of the Tudor succession was most enthusiastic when directed toward Elizabeth and her female offspring, not Henry or his male descendants. Vergil’s book on Henry VII’s reign in his Anglica Historia reinforces a providential perspective asserting the Tudors as God’s chosen rulers, but it was also somewhat critical of the first Tudor. Describing Henry VII as a good prince, Vergil concludes his book on Henry with a final sentence noting that the king’s virtues were obscured by avarice: “in a monarch indeed it may be considered the worst vice, since it is harmful to everyone, and distorts those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the state must be governed.”34 Vergil locates the majority of his praise of the Tudor dynasty not in its male founder but in the symbol of union manifested by the marriage of Henry and Elizabeth, and in its women. He heartily praises Elizabeth York as “a woman indeed intelligent above all others, and equally beautiful,” and attributes the true success of Henry’s victory to be in the subsequent “divine intervention” that produced the restorative marriage between rival houses.35 When Vergil wrote of other historical female figures of the Tudor family, he did so with more ebullient praise than that provided to male monarchs. He calls Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, a “most worthy woman whom no one can extol too much or too often for her sound sense and holiness of life” and a “woman most outstanding both in her pious love of God and charity to all men, and whose countless virtues each one of us may find it easier to admire than analyse.”36 Even in the foreign queen consort Catherine of Aragon he saw a model of gentle benevolence whose deathbed letters professing loyalty to Henry VIII brought out a sympathetic humanity in her erstwhile husband. Vergil’s narrative of events after the close of the Wars of the Roses reveals a pattern of positive praise for the female figures wielding influence within the Tudor dynasty. More’s representation of Elizabeth Woodville in The History of King Richard III is also linked to his complicated political investment in English dynasty. Critical assessments of gender politics in his popular Utopia, written in 1516, shortly after The History of King Richard III, suggest More is an 44  A Very Prey to Time

unlikely figure for an early modern protofeminist.37 However, his views on women’s education, and the subjects of some of his lesser-­known texts, including his English poetry written in the first decade of the 1500s, suggest that his account of women in The History of King Richard III is not an isolated case but a familiar narrative of women’s influence grounded by both his personal interest and his political associations with the Yorkists and the Tudors. Lee Cullen Khanna argues that More’s attitude toward women in his Latin and English poems varies from “admiring to patronizing, from courtly compliment to empathetic understanding,” and she suggests that such variations in tone and the significant numbers of female characters in his poetry point toward the seriousness with which he approached women as a subject and the complexity of his observations about them.38 More’s “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth,” an elegy written in 1503 upon the death of Elizabeth York, suggests strong parallels to his portrait of her mother in The History of King Richard III. The poem, like so many pieces of The History of King Richard III, is written from the perspective of its queen, and blends the first-­person lament with elements of de casibus tragedy and verse epitaph.39 Both Khanna and Frederic B. Tromly cite the poem’s ability to solicit readers’ sympathies as well as its emphasis on Elizabeth York’s wisdom as part of the poem’s contribution to the elegiac form.40 Khanna notes that the poem’s “admiration of virtue” moves beyond a description of Elizabeth York as the “traditional ideal of the chaste good wife,” because she is portrayed as a “woman of authority and position” who is capable of gaining wisdom through a recognition of her role as God’s servant.41 More’s lamentation for Elizabeth York achieves both the sympathy and complexity Khanna observes, suggesting that The History of King Richard III’s evaluation of Elizabeth Woodville’s authority and influence was never an unusual one for More to make. The poem also suggests a specific evaluation of the Tudor family that helps establish The History of King Richard III’s own relationship to the Tudor narrative of restorative union as one that surprisingly imagines alternative royal authority in the figures of Yorkist and Tudor queens. “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth” devotes four stanzas to the queen’s goodbyes to her children, mother-­in-­law, and sisters. Her servants and subjects are A Very Prey to Time  45

the focus of the final stanza, and their obedience functions as a model for her own piety. Her son Henry VIII is discussed for only two lines—­“Adewe lord Harry, my lovely son, adewe. / Owr lord increase your honour & your estate”—­while her daughter-­in-­law Catherine of Aragon is claimed as her “dowghter” and asked by the queen to “Pray for my sowle.”42 Elizabeth York says a stanza-­long goodbye to her daughter Margaret, recounting her grief at Margaret’s earlier marriage and departure from her; her other daughters and sisters are praised, instructed, and likewise asked to pray. These goodbyes to her extended kin are women-­centered, privileging her matriarchal authority and imagining the Tudor line as one passed on from woman to woman. In her goodbye to her husband, Elizabeth recalls the Tudor legacy as a partnership in which she played a key personal and political role: Adewe, my trew spouse, my worthi lord, The feythfull love, þat dide vs to combine, In maryage and pesybull concorde, Vnto your hondes here I clene resyne, To be bestowed upon your children & myne. Erst were ye fader, now must ye supply The moder’s parte also. Lo wher I lye.43 Elizabeth describes her marriage and children, as well as the peaceable harmony created in their home and realm, as a combined effort over which she always retained some authority. Resigning her faithful love into Henry’s hands, she nevertheless specifies its use: it is meant to be bestowed upon their children, and Henry is instructed to take up the indispensable part of mother that Elizabeth now leaves vacant in order to bestow that love properly. More’s lament imagines Elizabeth York as both the moral and practical center of the Tudor dynasty, and the words he writes for her are counsel for his king, instructing Henry VII to take up Elizabeth’s part as well as his own. More’s belief in Elizabeth York’s wisdom and virtue leads him to position her as that best “parte” of the Tudor line, a perspective that clearly overlaps with his depiction of her mother as the center of morality, wit, and intellect in The History of King Richard III’s account of Yorkist self-­destruction. The poem also shares with The History of King Richard 46  A Very Prey to Time

III a male writer’s adaptation of a woman’s perspective, further indicating the extent to which history writing relied on the voices and actions of its female historical figures as narrators. “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth” is particularly striking in its contrast to More’s prose coronation poem, “On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII,” which marks the death of Henry VII and the ascension of Henry VIII in 1509 and was first published with his Latin epigrams in 1518. More praises Henry VIII by distinguishing the king from his father, who was in More’s eyes a tyrant: “This day is the limit of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom, the end of sadness, the source of joy.”44 He recalls the unjustness of laws, the severity of taxation, and the climate of oppression created under Henry VII and gloriously removed by Henry VIII. Lastly, More devotes a paragraph of praise to Catherine of Aragon, which includes his assessment of public opinion about the role of Henry VIII’s queen: “In her you have as a wife one whom your people have been happy to see sharing your power.”45 More characterizes royal marriage under dynastic rule as a power-­sharing alliance that affords queen consorts political agency; in his poem, the hope the English have for Henry VIII’s new reign is grounded in the political benefits of this power-­sharing arrangement and predicated upon their approval of Catherine as a coruler of sorts. Given More’s dislike of Henry VII and the elder More’s steadfast Yorkist loyalties, it is perhaps no surprise that More might find the silver lining of the Tudor dynasty to be its women, imagining Elizabeth Woodville, Elizabeth York, and Catherine of Aragon as intelligent, compassionate queen mothers and consorts who might effectively participate in dynastic government through their familial ties to the monarch.46 More’s poetry and historiography demonstrate a provisional, rather than propagandistic, endorsement of the Tudor family and its history. This endorsement was rooted in female Yorkists, like Elizabeth Woodville, who provided a benevolent model of women’s unofficial influence in dynastic politics, and Elizabeth York, whose own blood claim to the throne made her a plausible coruler under a dynastic framework that sanctioned queen consorts’ political power. Conceived as potential alternative political authorities in More’s poetry, Yorkist and Tudor women function as model authorities on history who A Very Prey to Time  47

inform his own narration of the past. More, of course, was not the only early modern figure who imagined Elizabeth York as an alternative dynastic authority to her Tudor husband: his foregrounding of Tudor women prefigures the coronation pageant’s rewriting of the story of union to position Elizabeth York as a precedent for female rule. More’s historiography thus offered early modern playwrights ample source material for dramatic accounts that would have dovetailed with Elizabeth I’s recognition and manipulation of the ideological power available in a history of the Wars of the Roses that privileged Tudor women. Mining More’s The History of King Richard III and its chronicle siblings for almost everything except this emphasis on women’s perspectives, Shakespeare instead rejected Tudor narrative historiography’s view of women within England’s dynastic past. Women’s Perspectives in Chronicle History Shakespeare accessed More’s History of King Richard III through later Tudor chronicles that included, modified, and expanded upon More’s text to depict Richard’s reign. Hall incorporated the version of More’s text first printed in Grafton’s 1543 Continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle in all editions of his Union, which was posthumously published by Grafton in 1548 and 1550 before its recall by Mary I’s government in 1555.47 The Union was printed only once more, in 1560, but it was used extensively as a source for many other chronicle narratives of the early modern period. The compilers of Holinshed’s Chronicles, in particular, were heavily indebted to both More and Hall for their depictions of medieval English history: Scott Lucas labels the Union “a major source for the account of English affairs c. 1399–­1509” in Holinshed’s Chronicles as well as an “influential generic model,” noting that “the Holinshed authors relied heavily for material, perspectives, and narrative structure” on the work of Hall.48 While both editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles make some revisions to Hall’s larger account of the Wars of the Roses and use William Rastell’s 1557 edition of More’s History of King Richard III rather than the version of More’s text used by Hall, the Chronicles’s account of Richard III’s reign is so similar to the Union’s that critics generally do not definitively identify one or the other as Shakespeare’s primary source for Richard III.49 48  A Very Prey to Time

The Union, like The History of King Richard III and Anglica Historia, surprisingly depicts Elizabeth Woodville as an active historical agent whose personal and familial relationships enable her positive political involvement in the Tudor succession. However, Hall’s portrait of Elizabeth has often served as key evidence in feminist arguments identifying narrative historiography as a genre that negatively evaluates or excludes historical women. Critics frequently read Shakespeare’s Elizabeth as a more positive rewriting of what they consider a harsh portrayal of her in Hall’s Union, arguing that Shakespeare recuperates her historical character because his queen redirects against Richard III Hall’s accusation of inconstancy, which indicts her as a mother who forgets Richard’s murder of her sons and delivers her daughters to him like “Lambes once agayne committed to the custody of the rauenous wolfe.”50 Attending to the intertextual influence of More’s narrative on chronicle history and Hall’s own portrayal of Elizabeth in the rest of the Union, which shares with its predecessors narrative strategies highlighting women’s political and familial agency, reveals a different story.51 The inclusion of More’s History of King Richard III changes the effect of the Union’s more critical comments about Elizabeth by establishing the bulk of historiographical perspectives about her. While Hall doesn’t directly reproduce the Anglica Historia in his account of the reigns of Edward V and Richard III, he uses it to fill the gaps about Elizabeth’s life left by More’s unfinished History of King Richard III through rewriting and expanding key scenes from Vergil’s text featuring Elizabeth.52 Hall thus takes cues from both historiographers’ interest in Elizabeth’s active decisions and their assignation of authorial knowledge to her, and augments their narratives with his own additional details. Hall begins his account of Elizabeth with positive interjected evaluations, documenting her “beautie & fauor,” “sober demeanure, louely lokyng, and femynyne smylyng” as well as her “toungue so eloquent, and her wit so pregnant” (264). He details Elizabeth’s sexual and intellectual influence over Edward IV as well-­deserved: she “wisely” resists the king’s desire to make her his mistress and thus realizes an even more powerful position as his wife. Elizabeth’s marriage is “profitable to her bloud” (264), a means for the queen to elevate herself and her family through Edward’s preferment, A Very Prey to Time  49

and her recognition and use of that profit is presented as shrewd but not inappropriate. Even Hall’s reputedly negative evaluation of her marriage to the king as a source of great trouble is more ambivalent than critics generally allow. Claiming the common people objected to the preferential treatment given to Elizabeth’s relatives after her marriage, Hall speculates that Edward IV’s early death and the destruction of the Yorkist dynasty might be punishment for either the marriage or the murder of his brother Clarence. Whereas Vergil simply notes that the people “found muche fault with [Edward] in that marriage,” Hall introduces and then evaluates such speculation: “But such coniecture for ye most part, be rather more of mens phantasies, then of diuine reuelacion” (265).53 Describing with similar uncertainty Elizabeth’s possible role in Clarence’s death, Hall notes that the malice between Edward IV and Clarence might be due to “olde grudges” between the brothers or new resentments “set a fyre by the Quene” (326). As with his account of popular opinion holding Elizabeth responsible for God’s punishment of her husband, Hall concludes his provisional indictment against Elizabeth with an even stronger qualification: “the certayntie thereof was hyd, and coulde not truely be disclosed, but by coniectures, which as often deceyue the imaginacions of fantastical folke, as declare truth to them in their conclusion” (326). Thus, the statements Hall makes about Elizabeth Woodville, frequently understood as entirely unfavorable, are actually heavily qualified with reminders that readers should be suspicious of negative information about her. Hall’s provisos about Elizabeth follow narrative historiography’s tradition of hedging bets, but they nevertheless characterize the English public differently than his predecessors did. Unlike More, who reports and endorses the people’s lenient judgment of Mistress Shore as the victim of Richard’s witch hunt, Hall evaluates the public as too quick to judge the royal marriage as a sign of corrupt favoritism and familial access. Though Hall’s text generally defends Elizabeth’s influence through portraying her personal intimacy with the king as a legitimate political mechanism, the public anxiety he consciously refutes is part of what Perry identifies as an emerging redefinition of “the relationship between the king and the nation” that views favoritism with increasing suspicion and concern.54 Hall uses 50  A Very Prey to Time

public conjectures to direct his readers to better evaluate Elizabeth’s role in dynastic politics and to speak back to sentiment critical of queenly favoritism. Hall’s text retains and takes cues from More’s use of narrative strategies, including interjected evaluation and invented dialogue, and adds to these a somatic form of interior perspective to situate women’s perspectives as a legitimate source of history.55 Included less than a paragraph after the close of More’s History of King Richard III in the Union, Hall’s account of Elizabeth’s responses to her son’s deaths is similar to More’s representation of Elizabeth as a sympathetic maternal figure and active agent in history: But when these newes wer first brought to the infortunate mother of the dead children yet being in sanctuary, no doubte but it strake to her harte, like the sharpe darte of death, for when she was first enformed of the murther of her. ii. sonnes, she was so sodainly amasyd with the greatnes of ye crueltie that for fear she sounded and fell doune to the ground, and there lay in a great agonye like to a dead corps. And after that she came to her memory and was reuyued agayne, she wept and sobbyd and with pitefull scriches she replenished the hole mancion, her breste she puncted, her fayre here she tare and pulled in peces & being ouercome with sorowe and pensiuenes rather desyred death than life, calling by name diuers times her swete babes, accomptyng her self more then madde that she deluded by wyle and fraudulente promises delyuered her yonger sonne out of the sanctuarie to his enemye to be put to death. (379–­80) Hall imagines motherly bereavement as a physically painful experience, striking Elizabeth’s heart “like the sharpe darte of death.” Hall’s narrative becomes both a spectacular description of performative mourning designed to elicit sympathy from his readers and an interior account of emotional response to tragedy. Borrowing Vergil’s description of Elizabeth’s physical response, which briefly describes her swooning, crying, shrieking, striking her hair and tearing her breast, Hall’s account of her anguish offers readers access to a historical event through Elizabeth’s perspective. While Hall initially proposes—­and then refutes—­Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and the favoritism he provides to her family as a possible cause A Very Prey to Time  51

for the king’s divine punishment, the Union’s evaluation of Elizabeth’s performance of grief further distances her from such blame. The interior account of her sadness augments Hall’s earlier narrative corrections of an overly critical public’s judgment, providing readers with a compelling affective appeal that counters accusations against Elizabeth. As both More’s and Vergil’s do, Hall’s interior perspective calls attention to the consequences, and power, of Elizabeth’s own individual decisions: paraphrasing Vergil, where Elizabeth “condemn[s] hirself for a mad woman . . . (being deceavyd by false promyses),” Hall shows Elizabeth lamenting her errors in judgment and holding herself responsible, “accomptyng her self more then madde that she deluded by wyle and fraudulente promises.” (379).56 The Union briefly prefigures Richard III’s depiction of appeals to God’s vengeance as the only recourse for Richard’s female opposition when Hall’s Elizabeth identifies God as a necessary vehicle for revenge: she “kne[els] downe and crie[s] on God to take vengeaunce for the disceayttfull periurie” because she “sawe no hope of reuengynge otherwyse” (380). After the deaths of her sons, Elizabeth does not imagine how her own actions might rectify past wrongs or limit future calamity and she self-­consciously acknowledges she has lost the ability to influence the future. Yet Elizabeth’s pleas for divinely directed vengeance have not in fact impeded her desire or ability to enact political change in the larger schema of Hall’s narrative, which includes material about Elizabeth’s negotiations with Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond, for the marriage of Elizabeth York and Henry VII. Dialogue ascribed to Buckingham reveals the unofficial influence Elizabeth retains even after she loses direct access to the court and identifies herself and the countess as the primary dynastic figures capable of defeating Richard: if the mothers of bothe parties and especially the erle hym selfe, and the ladye wyll agre, I doubte not but the braggynge bore . . . shall not onely be brought to confusion as he hath deserued but that this empire shall euer be certaine of an vndubitate heyre, and then shall all ciuile and intestyne war cease . . . and this realme shalbe reduced agayne to quietness renoune and glorie. (389) 52  A Very Prey to Time

While also emphasizing the consent of Richmond and Elizabeth York, Hall indicates that Elizabeth Woodville and the countess have the most prominent role in establishing the Tudor succession. The countess’s messengers propose the marriage to Elizabeth as a means “to bryng your harte to comforte and gladnes,” and “to reuenge ye righteous quarel of you and your children” against Richard; if Elizabeth can simply “agree & inuent the meane” to marry her daughter to Richmond, Richard “should be shortly deposed,” and Elizabeth’s “heire againe to her right restored” (391). The countess’s rhetoric appeals to Elizabeth’s twin political and personal desires: to reestablish her connections to the monarchy and to use that influence for revenge against Richard. In this series of invented dialogues, women’s motives and interventions characterize dynastic notions of personal monarchy as redemptive for both family and country. Hall suggests that only widow-­mothers arranging the succession through the marriage of their children can form a new dynastic line and restore peace to England. Hall also identifies both women’s interventions as the result of an accurate “reading” of the past. Hall asserts the propriety of Elizabeth’s reception of the countess’s proposition by explaining its physical manifestations. He endorses her jubilant response and the subsequent political interventions called for by the countess’s suggestion: “When the quene had heard this frendly mocion . . . lorde howe her spirits reuyued, and how her hearte lept in her body for ioye and gladnes” (391). Her somatic reaction to the proposed union of the houses of York and Lancaster is that of a mother rejoicing for the safety and future of her children and that of a Tudor reader of the past who recognizes the positive dynastic consequences of such a marriage. In the moments Hall most strongly aligns Elizabeth’s emotions with those of his readers and his own narrative voice, he also shows her to be politically efficacious precisely because of her personal and maternal relationships. She promises the countess the support of “all the frendes and fautoures” of her dead husband Edward IV, and she makes a critical demand: Richmond must take “a corporall othe” to marry any of her living daughters (391).57 Barbara Hodgdon sees this demand as a negative critique of Elizabeth’s opportunism, but when read in the context of Hall’s chosen narrative strategies, intertextual revisions, and larger account of the A Very Prey to Time  53

marriage negotiations, it is represented as a prudent and wise attempt by Elizabeth to retain dynastic strength and ensure Richard’s defeat.58 Hall’s account, like Vergil’s and More’s, demonstrates that some historiographers not only looked to women’s perspectives for model agents of history, but also valued and emphasized the personal emotions through which these historical women understood and achieved political action. Even in the narrative report of Elizabeth Woodville’s “wolfish” handover of her daughters, so central to critical assumptions that chronicle history indicts its female figures and that Shakespearean drama redeems them as noble victims, Hall still echoes More’s emphasis on Elizabeth’s active decision-­making and intelligent resistance. Richard, determined to reconcile with Elizabeth through “faire woordes or liberall promises,” sends messengers to excuse his actions and “promes promocions innumerable” (406). According to Hall, Richard is only successful because “men bothe of wit and grauitie so persuaded the queen with greate & pregnaunte reasons, then with fayre & large promises, that she began somewhat to relent & to geue to theim no deffe eare” (406). Though he concedes that Elizabeth is ultimately “blynded by auaricious affeccion and seduced by flatteryne wordes,” Hall describes Richard’s difficulty manipulating her; as it does in More’s text, this suggests Elizabeth’s serious opposition to Richard and his perception of her as a formidable opponent (406). Richard’s seduction strategies, including praise and promises of preferment, evoke the corrupt processes of royal favoritism addressed by Hall’s earlier account of public sentiment toward Elizabeth. Hall condemns Richard’s use of these processes and Elizabeth’s eventual seduction by them to underscore the problems of such alliances under personal monarchy, and his uncertain implication of Elizabeth suggests his concern about the possible abuses of the personal aspects of such politics. These expressions of anxieties about the reach of monarchical authority and preferment can be contextualized by Hall’s own political investments. As Peter C. Herman notes, scholars have begun to reevaluate Hall’s text and “its relationship to early Tudor political culture,” finding that “far from slavishly endorsing the Tudor myth,” Hall’s Union critiques monarchical authority in general and Tudor authority in particular.59 Herman argues that Hall’s narrative valorizes the subtle dissent of the people against Henrician 54  A Very Prey to Time

power.60 However, Hall’s earlier defenses of Elizabeth directed at a public he characterizes as overly suspicious of their queen and his representation of her as a privileged historical and authorial voice suggest at least a residual investment in the processes of personal dynastic power, particularly when enacted appropriately by Tudor women. Sympathetic to Elizabeth’s historical role in ending civil dissension through the formation of a dynastic marriage alliance but wary of dynastic authority, Hall seems fundamentally ambivalent in his authorial evaluations of Elizabeth’s personal access to the monarchy and its effects on England. This ambivalence in Hall’s narrative, at least as it pertains to Elizabeth Woodville, is generally interpreted as an indication of his—­and the historical narrative genre’s—­exclusion of women from politics, as Hall censures Elizabeth for actions he eventually traces to her gender. Yet this representation of Elizabeth might be best situated in the context of Hall’s complicated perspectives about popular dissent and dynastic control, as his sympathy for and indictments of Elizabeth correspond to her ability to successfully use her familial access to the monarchy for the betterment of England. Hall does ultimately characterize Elizabeth’s concessions to Richard as the result of her gender, a misogynistic claim that incriminates female influence but also provisionally defends Elizabeth by asserting her lack of choice: “surely the inconstancie of this woman were muche to be merueled at, yf all women had bene founde constante, but let men speake, yet wemen of the verie bonde of nature wil folowe their awne kynde” (406).61 Her inconstancy is unremarkable because it is characteristic, an assumption of typicality that underlies later critiques of women in Richard III and prefigures those against Edward II’s queen consort, Isabel, made by later chronicle historians, such as John Stow. When she fails to understand the dynastic consequences of handing over her daughters and cedes to the corrupt promise of personal preferment, Elizabeth’s active historical agency is stripped away and she becomes a woman subject to the determinism of her gender. Only when her perspective differs from the ideal historical reader she exemplifies elsewhere does Hall condemn her actions as negative, innate female behavior. Turning to women’s nature as an explanation for Elizabeth’s political error, Hall ultimately critiques her ability to usefully influence dynastic politics A Very Prey to Time  55

through her personal relationships with royalty. Hall’s assessment that Elizabeth is steered by nature rather than agency exists in tension with all three historiographers’ descriptions of her astute political interventions and the effect of invented scenes eliciting readers’ sympathies and aligning Elizabeth’s agency with her narrators’ authorial powers. This tension is perhaps most notable in Hall’s last discussion of Elizabeth, where he first recounts the council decision under Henry VII to forfeit her lands and possessions because she “voluntarely submytted her selfe and her daughters” to Richard (431). Labeling Elizabeth’s voiding of her pact with Richmond a “greuous offence,” Hall nevertheless provides space for an alternative view that finds her punishment by the ruling monarch unduly harsh: howbeyt the sequele thereof well dygested, yt was thought by some man that she deserued not by equytie of iustice so great a losse and so great a punyshment: For surely she dyd not so great hurte or hynderaunce to kynge Henry and hys confederates by her reconciliacion to kynge Richard, but tenne tymes more she proffyted theim and auaunced theyr cause. (431)62 Hall credits a collective public sentiment that evaluates the justness of her punishment based on her active contributions to Henry’s cause and the providential union of royal families that guides his narrative. Unlike his discussion of public response to Elizabeth and Edward’s marriage, Hall’s inclusion of this dissenting view is not followed by a challenge to its veracity. Rather, he outlines the reasons for these objections to Elizabeth’s severe losses, which look to the efficacious help she has provided Henry VII. Hall frames objections to Elizabeth’s treatment by her son-­in-­law as valid public critiques of overreaching dynastic power that has failed to follow equal justice. The Union here more directly challenges the reach of monarchical authority by identifying Elizabeth’s punishment as excessive and her negotiations for her daughter’s marriage during Richard III’s reign—­condemned by the council—­as justified political maneuvering that provided ten times more help than harm to Henry VII. Hall then briefly notes that her “folye and inconstancy” “incurred the hatred and displeasure of many men” and 56  A Very Prey to Time

“for that cause” she lived a “wretched and myserable lyfe” (431) before he identifies her enduring positive legacy, which “cannot be forgotten” (432): the founding of Queens’ College. The Union as a whole privileges female perspectives, political action, and historical impact, and it sympathetically portrays Elizabeth’s mistreatment by two different sovereigns as perversions of monarchical power. It also includes negative evaluations of women’s natural inconstancy and their familial access under dynasty that demonstrate important emerging shifts in early modern historiographers’ depictions of royal women’s political agency, which become even more evident in later chronicle histories making use of similar essentializing discourses. Hall’s ambivalent expansions upon More’s initial portrait of Elizabeth are, with some variation, reproduced in the 1577 and 1587 editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the other influential narrative source for Shakespeare’s drama.63 Both editions of the Chronicles eliminate Elizabeth’s powerful emotional response to the deaths of her children; they also extend her dialogue in the sanctuary debate by including an additional, two-­paragraph passage translated from More’s Latin Historia.64 In this addition not found in Hall’s chronicle history, More’s Elizabeth archly tells the lord cardinal, “if examples be sufficient to obteine priuilege for my child, I need not farre to seeke,” before recounting her first experience in sanctuary after Edward IV’s banishment, where she gave birth to Edward V.65 The 1587 Chronicles, edited by Abraham Fleming, provides additional, sometimes surprising, assessments of Elizabeth. Fleming repeats and then qualifies Hall’s evaluation of Elizabeth’s capitulation to Richard as an example of women’s natural inconstancy: But it was no small allurement that king Richard vsed to ouercome hir (for we know by experience that women are of a proud disposition, and that the waie to win them is by promises of preferment) and therefore it is the lesse maruell that he by his wilie wit had made conquest of hir wauering will. Besides that, it is to be presumed that she stood in feare to impugne his demands by denials, least he in his malicious mood might take occasion to deale roughlie with hir, being a weake woman, and of a timorous spirit.66 A Very Prey to Time  57

Assessing women as both proud and weak, wavering of will, desirous of preferment and timorous in spirit, the 1587 additions expand Hall’s essentializing perspectives to further explain Elizabeth’s actions. But these expansions are intended to lessen the “maruell” of Richard’s conquest of her will by acknowledging that his promises were large and persuasive and to remind readers that she was likely afraid to deny him, setting her natural but objectionable inconstancy alongside additional explanations of acceptable justifications for her actions. In their summative evaluations of Elizabeth, prompted by the council’s punishment, both editions of the Chronicles further modify Hall’s account. The 1577 edition repeats Hall’s assessment of Elizabeth’s grievous fault and briefly mentions the injustice some men found in her punishment without including Hall’s careful reasoning for that opinion. The 1587 edition reinserts explanations for these dissenting judgments, but they are somewhat different from the Union’s focus on her advancement of Henry’s cause: “howbeit, this iudgment was althogither affectionate and parciall in hir behalfe; besides that it was reasonable in great measure (all circumstances considered) for she was not lightlie induced to doo as she did, neither stood it with the frailtie of a woman to withstand the temptations of a mightie man, or rather a reaching tyrant.”67 Fleming’s revisions acknowledge that judgments of Elizabeth’s punishment as too harsh are rooted in partiality toward her, but they also insist that her actions were reasonable and her capitulation heavily coerced, echoing his earlier qualifications of her marvelous inconstancy detailed by Hall. As Kavita Mudan Finn observes, “the later edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, and to a lesser extent the earlier edition, succeed in reframing Elizabeth’s actions to highlight her difficult position.”68 Fleming’s assessment of Elizabeth’s decision-­making does emphasize the extenuating circumstances of what both the Chronicles and the Union label a “heinous crime,” but it is also quite similar to Hall’s in its approach to Elizabeth’s political influence. Pairing her female frailty with her reasoned and agential responses to a “reaching tyrant,” the 1587 Chronicles represents Elizabeth’s actions as simultaneously determined by gender and politically agential. In the tension between Hall’s inclusive narrative strategies and his expressions of anxieties about female influence 58  A Very Prey to Time

and inconstant nature, and in the Chronicles’s ambivalent expansions of these aspects of the Union, we can see initial signs of history writing’s exclusion of women, which only becomes fully realized onstage. Barren Mourning in Richard III As discussed in the introduction, studies of early modern nationhood trace a shift in national self-­definition from a dynastic to national entity, defined by its communal inhabitants and geographical borders. Liah Greenfeld argues that the circumstances of this transition included transformations in social hierarchy and mobility, whereby nobility became increasingly defined not by descent and blood but by personal deeds, behavior, and learning.69 The Protestant Reformation disenfranchised Catholic nobles, and changes in Henry VIII’s government practices replaced informal, personal relationships of preferment with an official elite and a smaller circle of favorites.70 Numerous critics attest to early modern literature’s participation in this cultural change: Helgerson finds “traces” of the “never quite complete passage from dynasty to nation” in the self-­conscious writing of Elizabethans such as Shakespeare.71 Though the change in governmental structures that helped to create this shift began under Henry VII and continued under Henry VIII, many critics who analyze the contested concept of early modern nationalism claim that the rhetoric of national identity solidified under Elizabeth Tudor and understand early modern national consciousness as an Elizabethan phenomenon.72 As this study reveals, historical narratives written under the male Tudors more frequently reflect dynastic models of government, where female members of the reigning dynasty exerted a sanctioned unofficial influence, while history plays written late in Elizabeth’s reign construct national identity as male citizen-­centered and critique the reigning female monarch by reducing women’s power within dynasty as they seek to retell old dynastic stories with a new national understanding of England. This compensatory shift toward national identity under a female monarch was perhaps most visible in historical drama through its treatment of the political dimensions of queenship. The function of royal women’s roles and the politics of queenship in the history plays are perhaps most hotly contested in discussions of A Very Prey to Time  59

Shakespeare’s Richard III. Mario DiGangi compellingly sketches out a “relative feminist neglect of the history plays” written by Shakespeare; as he points out, Richard III is the Shakespearean history play least ignored by feminist inquiry, in part because of the affective power of the interactions between its numerous grieving women.73 Beginning with Madonne Miner’s contribution to the first feminist anthology on Shakespeare, The Woman’s Part, scholars have debated the agency of Richard III’s women.74 Phyllis Rackin and Jean E. Howard’s seminal work on gender in Shakespeare’s history plays, Engendering a Nation, persuasively argues that the women of Richard III are more sympathetically portrayed than in the previous plays of the tetralogy, a shift from history to tragedy that they characterize as both ennobling and disempowering.75 The only other feminist monograph on the history plays, Nina Levine’s Women’s Matters, reaches a different conclusion, asserting that Richard III goes further than the earlier plays of the tetralogy “in allowing women a place in politics” and affording them a limited agency and power even as it endorses a restoration of patriarchy.76 More recently, Patricia Phillippy, Katharine Goodland, and Alison Thorne have positioned Richard III’s scenes of shared female grief in the context of gendered mourning practices and female complaint in the early modern period, an approach that emphasizes the undeniable social force of women’s rhetoric in the play. Phillippy situates the play’s maternal laments within material, ritual practices and argues that they constitute a “repository of communal, corporate memory” and a disruptive force ill contained by either the play’s male villains or its male heroes.77 In her examination of female mourning in medieval and early modern drama, Goodland argues that the women in Richard III “articulate the communal consciousness and catalyze the healing of the kingdom,” a process that allows them a measure of political authority.78 Thorne reads Richard III alongside Henry VIII and King John as plays that reveal their politically troubled worlds to be empowering for their female characters, identifying female complaint as a means to expose and rectify the wrongs of such dysfunctional societies.79 Challenging the communal nature of female grief posited by readings of the play that naturalize motherhood and claim a shared empathy among 60  A Very Prey to Time

Margaret, Elizabeth, and the duchess, DiGangi claims that these female figures “demonstrate competitive self-­interest” and use “the rhetoric of maternity to assert social and political authority in the face of loss.”80 Attention to the collective power of these queens’ shared moments of lamentation has generally teased out greater female agency than prior examinations of the play; it has also at times obscured important distinctions between Margaret, Anne, Elizabeth Woodville, and the Duchess of York, who, as DiGangi notes, all have “distinct histories and political rivalries.”81 Within and beyond these influential studies of the play, feminist approaches to Richard III have, for often compelling reasons, frequently foregrounded Margaret of Anjou and considered Elizabeth Woodville mostly in terms of her relationship to her Lancastrian rival or as part of a community of women dominated by Margaret’s rhetorical agency.82 Phillippy situates Elizabeth’s sorrow over the deaths of her sons as part of a communal lamentation that merges with the cursing of the duchess in act 4, scene 4 to ascribe to “maternal mourning a threatening power over life and death.”83 While Goodland differentiates between the play’s mourning women and finds that Elizabeth is a “politically astute” figure who learns compassion from the other grieving women around her, she concludes that the women communally “embody the memory of the dead—­the collective consciousness of the kingdom—­which insists and intrudes upon the political and moral spheres of human action.”84 Thorne similarly understands Elizabeth’s “stichomythic skirmish” with Richard over his desire to marry her daughter as an act of resistance learned from the play’s other women; she argues that Elizabeth has “absorbed the lesson of [Margaret’s] rhetorical tactics.”85 While these readings rightly argue for the collective rhetorical power of maternal lamentation in the play, attention to Shakespeare’s revisions of Elizabeth Woodville’s queenship in particular reveals the play’s significant rewritings of royal women’s roles. Building upon this prior feminist work on the rhetorical agency of women in Richard III, I consider the play’s theorizing of Elizabeth Woodville’s queenship in contrast to her depiction in historiography. Viewed through both a feminist and intertextual source study perspective, the play’s emphasis on the sympathetic maternal mourning of its queen consort circumscribes women’s A Very Prey to Time  61

political action, replacing that agency with a rhetorical power that is used to articulate women’s own inability to effect historical change. Shakespeare’s Richard III, like its narrative predecessors, emphasizes Elizabeth Woodville’s role as a sorrowful mother and casts women as the moral arbiters of Richard’s tyranny who elicit readers’ sympathies.86 The play diminishes the political dimensions of that maternal role, so clearly emphasized in its narrative sources, and limits both Elizabeth Woodville and the absent presence of Mistress Shore to a familial sphere of influence the play positions as outside of both politics and history. While he reframes for the stage the presence of Richard III’s queens in ways both compelling and haunting, as nuanced readings of female lamentation in the play demonstrate, Shakespeare also clearly reduces the narratives’ legitimizing strategies that ascribe political agency to Elizabeth Woodville. Richard III does not present Elizabeth and Mistress Shore as political agents, as More, Vergil, Hall, and Holinshed do to varying degrees. Instead, the play further modifies its sources to make women self-­consciously voice their own powerlessness to influence history in order to critique women’s participation in dynastic politics. Richard III first provides characterizations of women’s power under dynasty as illegitimate and damaging through Richard and Buckingham. Levine terms Richard’s attacks on Elizabeth Woodville and Mistress Shore a “gendered discourse of nation” that, in spite of “however much the play discredits Richard,” still generates “political effects” onstage through its opposition to “unnatural female domination.”87 Certainly suspect, as they issue from the play’s villain and his accomplice, these challenges to the legitimacy of women’s political interventions nevertheless propose ideological limits to their influence. Mistress Shore never appears as a character, an exclusion that Helgerson describes as a “deliberate debasement” of More’s sympathetic historical figure into an object of “laughing scorn.”88 Richard presents both women as undeserving beneficiaries of corrupt royal preferment who emasculate the monarchy through unfair access to the king, making Edward’s male relatives and lords “the Queen’s abjects” (1.1.106). He uses gendered stereotypes to deflect suspicion onto Queen Elizabeth and Mistress Shore when he tells Clarence “this it is when men are ruled 62  A Very Prey to Time

by women. / ’Tis not the King that sends you to the Tower” (1.1.62–­63) and confides in his brother that “there is no man secured / But the Queen’s kindred, and night-­walking heralds / That trudge betwixt the King and Mistress Shore” (1.1.71–­73). Richard mocks Hastings for “Humbly complaining to her deity” (1.1.76) and sarcastically proposes to Clarence that they “be [Mistress Shore’s] men and wear her livery” in order to “keep in favour with the King” (1.1.80, 79). Labeling both women “mighty gossips in this monarchy” (1.1.83) and ascribing their influence to an unmerited boost in status due to Edward IV “dubb[ing] them gentlewomen” (1.1.82), Richard evaluates women’s unofficial influence as a threat to the realm and his own absolutist ambitions.89 He describes Elizabeth as “the jealous o’erworn widow,” a sexual innuendo that, like his use of “King Edward’s widow” a few lines later, denies her royal title, emphasizes her marriage to John Grey, and locates her motives for political action in the irrational, competitive emotions of an aging and sexually overused woman (1.1.81, 109). When Brackenbury reminds Richard that the king has forbidden “private conference” with Clarence, Richard retorts that “we speak no treason, man” before ironically evaluating Elizabeth: “we say the King / Is wise and virtuous, and his noble Queen / Well struck in years, fair, and not jealous” (1.1.86, 90–­92). Richard’s ironic praise of the queen manipulates narrative history’s assessments of her as noble, beautiful, and savvy to recast her influence as grossly sexual and malignant. While utilizing his blood ties to Edward and Clarence to influence the court, Richard critiques the same interpersonal relationship that benefits his own negotiations when he describes the Yorkist dynasty as an inverted power structure resulting from unfair favoritism toward jealous, sexually available women. In Richard’s misogynistic formulation, Elizabeth and Mistress Shore have undeserved power because Edward has allowed them to unduly affect his rule. Relying on cultural fears about women’s witchcraft to make an unlikely case of conspiracy, Richard lumps “Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch” and Edward’s mistress, “that harlot strumpet Shore,” under the aegis of a specifically female threat when he accuses them of deforming his arm (3.4.75–­76). This famous manipulation, designed to condemn Hastings, identifies Elizabeth’s and Mistress Shore’s power as another reversal of A Very Prey to Time  63

gender hierarchy signaling the dysfunction of Edward’s dynastic rule. After Hastings’s execution—­the goal behind the witchcraft charges—­Richard revises Hastings’s capital crime from that of traitor to lecher: So smooth he daubed his vice with show of virtue That, his apparent open guilt omitted—­ I mean his conversation with Shore’s wife—­ He lived from all attainture of suspect. (3.5.28–­32) By locating Hastings’s crime in his personal affection for Mistress Shore, Richard makes the conflict between Hastings and himself one of personal and moral consequence rather than of political concern. Buckingham also covers over the specious accusations of treason by linking Hastings’s guilt to an irrefutable sexual relationship with Mistress Shore: “I never looked for better at his hands / After he once fell in with Mistress Shore” (3.5.49–­50). Employing rhetoric that casts Hastings, like Edward, as a figure misled by private lust, Richard and Buckingham further condemn women’s personal influence as both cause and symptom of a defective court while denying that such influence even exists as a political mechanism. Buckingham’s public claim of bastardy against Edward V in act 3, scene 7 reiterates the view of Elizabeth that Richard establishes in the play’s opening scene when he calls her “a poor petitioner,” “a care-­crazed mother of a-­many children,” and “a beauty-­waning and distressèd widow” who “even in the afternoon of her best days” takes advantage of the king to make “prize and purchase of his lustful eye” (3.7.166–­70). Buckingham reframes narrative accounts of Edward’s courtship to cast Elizabeth as a vain aggressor responsible for her marriage to Edward, claiming she “seduced the pitch and height of all his thoughts” (3.7.171). In his emphasis on her age and declining beauty, her widowhood, her many other children, and her reduced circumstances, Buckingham assigns grasping, sexual motives to Elizabeth and establishes her unfitness for political participation by identifying her investments in Edward’s Yorkist rule as entirely selfish. In Richard III, these male indictments of women’s access to the monarch challenge the validity of female participation in dynastic politics, while staged representations of Elizabeth Woodville further contrast with prior 64  A Very Prey to Time

chronicle histories over her place in history and her sphere of influence. The play dwells on Elizabeth’s particular awareness of her own incapacity to affect history, a perspective that removes women’s power to witness the past and evaluates the political participation afforded to her in the play’s intertexts as threatening. Shakespeare changes More’s Elizabeth into a complaining voice of the past who insists on the predetermined nature of future events. Her agency, like that of all the characters in Richard III, is circumscribed by the play’s providential account of history. Through this deterministic frame, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth identifies her own position within the play’s fated history as a limited one, and her lamentations articulate vocal grieving’s capacity to paralyze action. In act 2, scene 2, when Elizabeth enters with news about Edward’s death, she anticipates that others might object to her expressions of self-­torment, and she responds to that anticipation with a clear claim to become her own enemy through despair rather than her family’s defender through action: O who shall hinder me to wail and weep, To chide my fortune and torment myself? I’ll join with black despair against my soul, And to myself become an enemy. (2.2.33–­36) Elizabeth’s immediate response to her husband’s death is one that demands her right to sorrow and access to language but also to a condemnatory self-­destruction that expressly eliminates political intervention. Claiming her rhetorical power to wail, weep, and chide, Elizabeth conceives of the effect of that rhetoric as a welcome self-­harm. Repeatedly, she positions her vocal expression of grief as a powerful weapon to level against herself rather than Richard. Her injurious words echo Hall’s account of her physical bereavement following the deaths of her sons, when “ouercome with sorowe & pensiuenes,” she “rather desyred death then life” (379). Shakespeare here expands upon the Union’s description of her “longe lamentacion” by transforming her immediate somatic reaction to news of her children’s deaths into a voice of despair that emerges after Edward’s death and pervades her characterization in the play (380). A Very Prey to Time  65

Elizabeth’s lamentation insistently evokes a desire for death and questions the continuation of life after her husband’s death. She asks why her family remains now that Edward is dead and imagines a quick death for his descendants and dependents, including herself, so that the souls of his relatives, including her own, might follow him: Why grow the branches, now the root is withered? Why wither not the leaves, the sap being gone? If you will live, lament; if die, be brief, That our swift-­wingèd souls may catch the King’s, Or like obedient subjects follow him To his new kingdom of perpetual rest. (2.2.40–­45) Elizabeth’s powerful use of metaphor ironically recalls for audiences the events to come, when the branches of Edward’s tree, his children, will follow him in death after their murder at Richard’s hands. Her words to the duchess and Clarence’s children offer only two options for the future of the Yorkist family: to live in the world of static despair, or to die quickly and follow Edward to heaven. Unlike More’s privileged, knowledgeable Elizabeth, whose actions have potent effects on others, Shakespeare’s queen is righteous but nevertheless fruitless in her resistance to Richard. Elizabeth responds to the news of her kin’s arrests not, as she does in prior historiography, with regrets that highlight the efficacy of her own decisions, but with an assessment of ensuing events as “already” historical: Ay me, I see the downfall of our house. The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind. Insulting tyranny begins to jet Upon the innocent and aweless throne. Welcome, destruction, death, and massacre. I see, as in a map, the end of all. (2.4.52–­57) Narrative historiography generally imagines Elizabeth’s responses to Richard’s actions as struggles to use her political power to change the outcome of events. Shakespeare’s queen speaks prophetically but gives up instantly, 66  A Very Prey to Time

“welcom[ing]” certain disaster. Seeing the end of “all” in an already written map, as one reads recorded history, she seeks sanctuary not as a means of resistance but as an expression of defeat. Elizabeth moves from a political agent and historical scripter to a reader and interpreter not of history itself but of already recorded chronicles. Shakespeare forgoes the rich invented dialogue, ripe for dramatic adaptation, of More’s debate over sanctuary, reducing it to a short conversation among men in act 3, scene 1. The decision to violate sanctuary is made perfunctorily, as the cardinal is dismissed to fetch the duke. Buckingham, as he does in More’s text, assesses Elizabeth’s claim as an “indirect and peevish course” and it is short work for him to convince the cardinal that the young Duke of York “hath neither claimed it nor deserved it” (3.1.31, 51). Richard’s authority is already inviolate. As the cardinal confesses, he is overpowered by will rather than swayed by argument: “My lord, you shall o’errule my mind for once” (3.1.57). Snatching the duke from sanctuary is a foregone conclusion rather than the result of a vividly imagined argument as in The History of King Richard III, and Elizabeth is given no place in its negotiation. Elizabeth is further stripped of power to intervene in ensuing events when the argument More’s queen makes in sanctuary is turned into an elaborate, mangled plea at the Tower gates. Elizabeth questions the lieutenant who denies her visitation to her sons: “I am their mother; who should keep me from them?” (4.1.17). Reduced to a shorthand that neither intelligibly evokes natural nor common law, Elizabeth’s assertion is enlarged by the Duchess of York: “I am their father’s mother; I will see them,” and Anne: “Their aunt I am in law, in love their mother” (4.1.18–­19). The intellectually viable defense used by More’s Elizabeth is transformed in Richard III into a means to demonstrate a morally superior but unrealized maternal right to familial access. Denied the contact with male family members that lends their maternal roles influence, the women’s dialogue emphasizes access to male relatives as the sole source of their power and bemoans the loss of such access. Elizabeth characterizes this loss and its consequences when she instructs her son Dorset to “speak not to me [ . . . ] Thy mother’s name is ominous to children” (4.1.34, 36). Motherhood and matrimony no longer A Very Prey to Time  67

signal legally protected, powerful unofficial influence; they register either unavoidable, unwished death to offspring or unwelcome power to monstrous children like Richard. The play’s women are thus given sympathy only when they position themselves as mourners denied political participation and use their own words to define dynastic familial relationships as impotent, and even destructive, political positions. Shakespeare fixes Elizabeth and her female relatives in history as helpless mourners through their represented action and dialogue; they express grief while acknowledging the inability of such expressions to change the past. The cursing of Elizabeth and the duchess emphasizes female resignation to a vocal but ineffective objection. Elizabeth demonstrates an awareness that this form of truth telling has no impact beyond the women themselves: “Though what they do impart / Help not at all, yet do they ease the heart” (4.4.124–­25). Goodland observes that both women are skeptical about the “cosmic efficacy” and “supernatural power” of vocal mourning, but “recognize its rhetorical and emotional power.”90 Casting lamentation in opposition to action, the play affords Elizabeth rhetorical agency as a means to underscore such divisions and separate women from the realm of political action. When the duchess implores Elizabeth to “go with me, / And in the breath of bitter words let’s smother / My damnèd son,” her desires to smother Richard and limit his power with their articulations of the truth emerge as vain hopes; their agency extends only to their ability to speak about what he has done (4.4.126–­28). As this study’s introduction notes, Richard registers the potential efficacy of their verbal opposition, and he requests noise to drown out their alternative history in an active attempt to mitigate the possibilities of their speech: “Let not the heavens hear these tell-­tale women / Rail on the Lord’s anointed” (4.4.143–­44). As Isabel Karremann demonstrates in her analysis of the ceremony’s role in historical forgetting, Richard III’s scenes of “weeping queens” “offer highly ritualised tableaux of grief which are, however, constantly interrupted and rendered ineffective by Richard of Gloucester; these instances of ‘maimed rites’ (Hamlet) become memorable in the playhouse precisely because they fail to complete their mnemonic work in the play-­world.”91 These moments of recognition, which invite audiences to consider the potential of female 68  A Very Prey to Time

speech through acknowledging Elizabeth as a telltale woman, also compete with the represented action afforded to her; that action ascribes to her a narrative that calls attention to women’s limited agency within history, thus functioning as an instance of required forgetting that removes Elizabeth’s prior efficacy in narrative historiography. Lines added to act 4, scene 4 of the folio expand Elizabeth’s lengthy exchange with Richard, allowing her greater scope to chastise him with the memory of her dead sons. Elizabeth responds to Richard here with another articulation of the limits of lamentation and a renewed desire for death: But that still use of grief makes wild grief tame, My tongue should to thy ears not name my boys Till that my nails were anchored in thine eyes, And I, in such a desp’rate bay of death, Like a poor barque of sails and tackling reft, Rush all to pieces on thy rocky bosom. (4.4.219–­24) Elizabeth acknowledges the gulf between word and action when she positions the “still use of grief,” or constant vocalized despondency, in opposition to a wild grief that might find expression through physical violence against Richard. To avoid the taming of her misery through the mechanism of mournful language, she vows not to name her children until she has anchored her nails in Richard’s eyes. Phillippy observes that this product of a “graphic imagination . . . illustrates the empathetic violence of maternal grief.”92 The violence of Elizabeth’s simile is directed first at Richard, but it turns backward upon Elizabeth herself—­once again aligning her with despair and in opposition to her own soul—­by positioning Richard as the bay against which she will “rush all to pieces” to her death. Imagining the injurious act of tearing Richard’s eyes with her nails as akin to dashing herself, like a boat, against the rocky bosom of a bay of death, Elizabeth both fantasizes the fatal outcome of such a violent outburst and transforms action back into lamentation, into a “desp’rate bay” or cry that will die out against Richard’s hard heart. Elizabeth’s cry thus paradoxically vows, through the very process of a “still use of grief ” that can tame the violence out of anguish, neither to speak nor to act. While giving voice A Very Prey to Time  69

to her sorrow, Elizabeth explicitly frames death as inevitability—­realized in the language of drowning at sea—­and lamentation as inadequate and antithetical to action. In one key scene, often viewed as one of Shakespeare’s most positive departures from his narrative sources, the play complicates Hall’s account of Elizabeth turning her daughters over to Richard.93 Near the end of her conversation with Richard about his desire to marry Elizabeth York, Elizabeth resists his attempts to swear his love to her daughter on the “time to come” (4.4.307). In doing so, the queen also reifies her own fixed place in history: That thou hast wronged in time o’erpast, For I myself have many tears to wash Hereafter-­time, for time past wronged by thee. The children live whose parents thou hast slaughtered, Ungoverned youth, to wail it in their age. The parents live whose children thou hast butchered, Old withered plants, to wail it with their age. Swear not by time to come, for that thou hast Misused, ere used, by times misused o’erpast. (4.4.308–­16) Elizabeth’s lines remind Richard and the audience of her dead sons as well as Richard’s impending fall. However, they also conceive of Elizabeth’s future as one of static desolation; she refers to the living left behind after Richard’s slaughter, but ascribes to those parents of the dead only wailing. The future itself remains off-­limits to Richard’s oath because it has already been corrupted by the past—­it is “misused, ere used”—­and Elizabeth intends to wash the future with tears. Elizabeth’s accusations condemn Richard, but they primarily identify her motherhood as a wailing remembrance of the past that forecloses her participation in future political events. Even as she discusses the living child whose marriage to Henry Tudor she orchestrates in prior narrative accounts, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth is only given voice to speak of her dead children and to describe herself as a withered or barren parent, thus eliding her historical participation in the formation of the new Tudor dynasty through her daughter.94 70  A Very Prey to Time

Elizabeth’s rhetorical rewriting of her own barren history also emerges when her initial demand for living lamentation or brief death after Edward’s demise is met by a cold refusal from Clarence’s children. Elizabeth rejects their denied assistance and asserts her own ability to appropriately mourn her husband: “Give me no help in lamentation. / I am not barren to bring forth complaints” (2.2.65–­66). Situating herself as a mother to mourning, she associates her fertility with a perverse birth of complaints and tears that will lead to death, calling for springs to “reduce their currents to mine eyes, / That I, being governed by the wat’ry moon, / May send forth plenteous tears to drown the world” (2.2.67–­69). Elizabeth denies barrenness only to assert that her only legacy is lamentation, an excessive sadness that finds hope only in a metaphor of bountiful destruction. Elizabeth’s significant rhetorical power is used to explicitly identify her as barren to living children and devoid of political action, as a mother of complaint and the creator of a gulf of forgetfulness that ultimately erases the political agency afforded to her in narrative historiography, leaving her, as Margaret cruelly points out, “a very prey to time” (4.4.100). The account that Shakespeare’s Elizabeth gives of her own motherhood as a “barren” position of mourning is suggestive of another metaphorically barren Elizabeth: Shakespeare’s reigning monarch, Elizabeth I. Katherine Eggert, Leah Marcus, and Levine have all analyzed the first tetralogy’s engagement with Elizabethan succession concerns.95 Reading Richard as the end of a line of succession and a figure of dynastic disruption analogous to Elizabeth I, Eggert sees the “national obsession” with Elizabeth I’s childlessness projected onto him.96 While the play expresses anxiety over the Elizabethan succession, this anxiety is strongest not in a comparison of Elizabeth I and Richard III’s dead ends, as Eggert argues, but through the play’s emphasis on Shakespeare’s royal analogue, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, as a barren mother of dead children and mournful complaint who is particularly unable to impact the progress of history.97 As is well known, Elizabeth I sometimes portrayed herself as a metaphorical mother of England, employing a trope of maternity in her speeches and letters from 1559 until 1563. Her earliest use of the metaphor was a defensive posture designed to quell Parliament’s demands that she marry in order to A Very Prey to Time  71

secure the succession.98 In the 1570s, possibilities of a marital alliance with France generated opposing concerns about the risks of motherhood to a monarch in her forties.99 The prospect of Elizabeth I’s motherhood thus generated anxieties not only about succession, but also about its practical effects on Elizabeth’s life and the future security of her rule. It raised the possibility of a permanently childless queen and an uncertain succession as well as the possibility of a favored monarch dead in childbirth, leaving behind a child ruler and a French Catholic protector.100 The varied responses to the possibility of Elizabeth I’s childbearing revolved around both the uncomfortable necessity of her motherhood to ensure a continuation of the Tudor dynasty and the potential national damage of a foreign marriage extending that dynasty. Richard III expresses such ambivalence about the queen’s overlapping maternal and political importance through its insistence that Elizabeth Woodville’s motherhood both matters and matters not. While the play privileges maternity by casting mothers as morally superior witnesses, it also revises its sources to exclude mothers from Henry VII’s political victory and makes Elizabeth voice her own ineffectiveness in order to downplay her political involvement in the creation of the Tudor dynasty. By repeatedly figuring Elizabeth Woodville’s motherhood as unimportant to securing the succession, Richard III denies the political dimensions of royal maternity and points toward a fantasy of masculine restoration only possible through the dynastic disruption created by Elizabeth I’s childlessness. Shakespeare thus refuses the positive queenly allusions available through narrative histories that detail Elizabeth Woodville’s active role in securing the Tudor succession. Interestingly, he also rejects Hall’s sole anomalous example of Elizabeth’s inappropriate interventions into politics and the moment in the Union that most closely approaches the tenor of the play’s political exclusions of women: Elizabeth’s handover of her daughters and Hall’s attribution of that decision to her inferior female nature. After reminding Richard of his crimes and insisting her daughter cannot love him, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth departs, asking, “Shall I go win my daughter to thy will?” (4.4.346). Some critics read this as an acquiescence to Richard’s desires and pair the entire conversation with Richard’s wooing of Anne as 72  A Very Prey to Time

examples of Richard’s rhetorical force, while others see Elizabeth biding time in order to establish an alliance with Richmond.101 The play recasts Hall’s charge of inconstant female behavior as Richard’s: he unconvincingly dubs the absent Elizabeth a “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman” (4.4.350). When Shakespeare might easily lift an anecdote from Hall that would preserve the playwright’s own emphasis on women’s necessary exclusion from politics, he denies explicit precedent, and, rather than stage Elizabeth’s error, he reframes Hall’s isolated negative judgment of Elizabeth as Richard’s misreading. Elizabeth’s alliance with Richmond’s mother, which Hall privileges as a key factor in the Tudor succession, is eliminated from Richard III and replaced with a personal feud summed up by the queen’s short, petty assessment of Margaret: she tells Stanley that the countess “will scarcely say ‘Amen’” to his prayers on Elizabeth’s behalf, and “notwithstanding she’s your wife, / And loves not me, be you, good lord, assured / I hate not you for her proud arrogance” (1.3.21–­24). Shakespeare’s revisions therefore allude only briefly to Elizabeth’s orchestration of her daughter’s marriage and gloss over her capitulation to Richard: in the play, she neither endangers nor ensures the Tudor dynasty as she does in Hall’s text. Through this manipulation of available narratives, Shakespeare minimizes Elizabeth Woodville’s power to affect the succession in favor of either Richard or Richmond by recasting royal motherhood as apolitical and hints that Elizabeth I’s own failures of motherhood matter little to England’s succession. Richard III’s evocation of Elizabeth I through the historical figure of Elizabeth Woodville—­and the play’s overall attitude toward women’s political participation—­is part of its expression of a new nationalism marked by the exclusion of women and a revision of sources that recorded English history through the stories of its dynasties. John Watkins sees in another Shakespearean history play, King John, a privileging of protonational independence from Continental ties through a critique of interdynastic marriage.102 According to Watkins, this critique “manifests itself in a pervasive distrust of women as the vehicles, and sometimes the negotiating agents of such alliances” and demands the disappearance of female characters, whose prior participation in politics embodies the inadequacies of a dynastic A Very Prey to Time  73

system.103 Jacqueline Vanhoutte likewise finds in King John a challenge to monarchical institutions that allow women access to power, arguing that the play “attributes many of the difficulties associated with the monarchy to its tolerance of female agency.”104 Richard III similarly identifies women’s diplomacy as a failure of the dynastic structure that allowed queens and mistresses corrupting influence. From its early censuring of Mistress Shore’s and Elizabeth Woodville’s political negotiations to its attempts to downplay the importance of Elizabeth’s role in the Tudor succession, the play rewrites narrative accounts to situate women’s power as a key symptom of dynasty’s dysfunction. The play minimizes the fundamental role of maternal marriage negotiations and the political necessity of Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth York, in spite of the fact that alternative histories emphasizing those processes were readily available and appealing to Elizabeth I. Moving women to the margins allows praise of Richmond’s triumph as a masculine victory and paradoxically dynastic solution to the problem of the Yorkist dynasts that nevertheless conceives of England’s future as national and free from female intrusions into politics. The story of union recounted at the play’s end finds Richmond characterizing England’s civil conflict as analogous to an irrational woman, who “hath long been mad, and scarred herself ” (5.7.23). Yet the fallout of dynasty’s female self-­mutilation is metaphorized in terms of its cost to men, in spite of the play’s memorable string of female mourners: “The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood, / The father rashly slaughtered his own son, / The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire” (5.7.24–­26). Richmond’s promise to “unite the white rose and the red” (5.7.19) and produce heirs who will “Enrich the time to come with smooth-­faced peace” (5.7.33) is predicated upon the recuperative power of his masculinity to repair the damage of a (female) civil war. As Vanhoutte says, Richmond’s closing speech and Elizabeth York’s absence “expres[s] a fantasy of generation” without women and “foregroun[d] the primary relationship between Richmond and England, so that their metaphorical marriage and not the dynastic union of the houses of York and Lancaster becomes the source of national redemption.”105 Eggert, however, finds the triumph occasioning such fantasy hollow, since Richmond’s success only 74  A Very Prey to Time

makes way for the “entirely feminine, dynastically disastrous” Elizabeth I.106 The play’s conspicuous exclusion of women does in fact look forward to restorative masculine rule and backward to dynastic catastrophe, but not by bankrupting Richmond’s victory. Rather, the play betrays an unspeakable desire for its own Elizabethan Richmond and assuages concerns about the disruption created by Elizabeth’s childlessness by bankrupting royal motherhood and seeking continuity through a national England. While the Gracechurch pageant envisions the stability of the Tudor dynasty emerging from the Yorkists via Elizabeth York and passing to Elizabeth I, Richard III’s reframing of the beginning of the Tudor line marks it as a masculine and national break from the dysfunctional dynastic system preceding it. The play paradoxically looks forward to the Tudor dynasty’s demise as a masculine redemption, pointing toward James I and a continuity rooted not in the bloodlines of its ruling family but in the community of England.107 When Shakespeare told his story of Tudor genesis, he also created a means to understand the dynasty’s end as a new beginning. In the process, he staged a critique of the access and influence possible under an earlier dynastic system, deployed most strongly against women as efficacious agents of history.

A Very Prey to Time  75

2 Your Hope Is Gone Narrowing the Nation in The True Tragedy of Richard III and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV

In Thomas Churchyard’s poem “Shore’s Wife,” added to the 1563 edition of The Mirror for Magistrates, the titular tragic figure describes her sexual sins and her fall from fortune, bewailing the curse of her own beauty, her youthful forced marriage, and Richard III’s mistreatment alongside her own shame. Shore asks “for leave to pleade my case at large,” but the description of her outsize power over Edward IV is damning rather than exculpatory: I ioynde my talke, my gestures, and my grace In wittie frames that long might last and stand, So that I brought the king in such a case, That to his death I was his chiefest hand. I governed him that ruled all this land: I bare the sword though he did weare the crowne, I strake the stroke that threwe the mightye downe.1 Four more stanzas detail Shore’s intercession on behalf of subjects condemned to death and her power “prest to ryght the poore mans wrong”; these belabored accounts of her frowns, smiles, and speech are presented as evidence that Shore possesses “waye[s] to vse” the king.2 Churchyard’s 77

representation of women’s unofficial influence is a far cry from either Thomas More’s own female-­voiced poetic lament “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth,” with its implicit endorsement of queen consorts’ harmonious and socially productive power sharing, or More’s description of Shore as a politically legitimate and beneficial royal favorite in The History of King Richard III. In Shore’s assertions that she governs the governor, usurps the crown by baring the king’s sword, and strokes that sword to cast the mighty down, Churchyard provides not only a bawdy pun but also a patriarchal nightmare: the king’s mistress controls Edward through a sexual “art” so emasculating it can “make the Lyon meeke.”3 Paul Budra rightly observes that “Churchyard makes Shore’s story less political than it in fact was,” instead emphasizing “the nature of beauty and virtue, specifically chastity” and framing her downfall as a “personal, not a political, tragedy, with sentimental, not political, consequences.”4 But as investigations into the history of “soft power” in queenship studies have shown, personal and political divides are highly permeable, particularly in dynastic families, where the private relationships of mothers, wives, and mistresses always held a public dimension: royal women with unofficial influence were integral to the politics of a dynastic king’s reign. The self-­ mocking rhetoric Churchyard assigns Shore’s wife still reverberates with the threat of her authority over the king. The reframing of Shore’s political power into sentimental tragedy reveals anxieties about the inversions of gender hierarchies possible through malign female power and lays bare the mechanisms by which women are excluded from the political sphere. As Budra notes, the isolation of Shore’s poem into an individually popular excerpt and its initiation of the genre of the woman’s lament dismisses her from “the argument of history” and demonstrates how “stories of historical women were formally excluded from the discussion of power.”5 The exclusionary mechanisms of “Shore’s Wife,” whose female narrator wields rhetorical agency to critique her own historically held political power, are also evident in history plays that draw on Churchyard’s poem for portrayals of Mistress Shore. Churchyard’s poem was an influential intertext for two stage plays, the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III (published 1594) and Thomas Heywood’s two-­part Edward IV (written 1599, published 1600) that, like 78  Your Hope Is Gone

Shakespeare’s Richard III, are adaptations of the narrative historiography of Richard’s reign found in the works of Thomas More, Polydore Vergil, and Edward Hall.6 “Shore’s Wife” was the most lucrative individual poem anthologized in the Mirror, and it had a substantive afterlife, as Budra and others note, beyond its initial inclusion in Baldwin’s verse historiography that shaped both the genre of poetic lament and non-­Shakespearean history plays about the Wars of the Roses.7 J. Dover Wilson identifies Hall’s Union as the primary chronicle source for The True Tragedy, though most source studies of the play focuses on its unique use of the Mirror, primarily in regard to its development of Mistress Shore as an onstage character.8 Philip Schwyzer traces The True Tragedy to a wide range of sources, including the chronicles, the Stanley ballads, and the Mirror, and he argues that the play’s anonymous author is “conscious of discrepancies between the textual sources.”9 Reasonable guesses date The True Tragedy’s composition in the late 1580s or early 1590s.10 Most discussion on the play’s composition date focuses on its role as a possible source for Shakespeare’s Richard III. George B. Churchill first argued that Shakespeare used The True Tragedy, a claim seconded by Wilson and solidified by Geoffrey Bullough.11 More recently, Brian Walsh and Dominique Goy-­Blanquet have made arguments for the play as one of Shakespeare’s sources, and while many critics concur that The True Tragedy is the earlier play, there is no clear critical consensus about its role as source for Richard III.12 While Schwyzer posits that Shakespeare’s play can be seen “meditating on and refuting the understanding of historical drama” presented in The True Tragedy, he still finds that “there are few definite signs of borrowing in either direction.”13 Edward IV’s most recent editor, Richard Rowland, considers Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles and John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London its primary chronicle influences.14 The additions of topographical detail from London-­centered chronicles or the Tanner of Tamworth story from popular ballad traditions generally dominate debates of the play’s source materials, but the play’s representation of royal women emerges from its revisions to the historical narratives of More, Hall, and Holinshed previously discussed in chapter 1. The play’s inclusion of the Shore story is indebted to More’s History of King Richard III and “Shore’s Wife,” and while Rowland does not treat it Your Hope Is Gone  79

as source material, The True Tragedy is an important dramatic intertext for Edward IV’s treatment of queenship. All six early modern quarto editions of the play—­which print the two parts together—­flag Mistress Shore’s inclusion on their title pages: “as also his love to fair Mistress Shore, her great promotion, fall, and misery, and lastly, the lamentable death of both her and her husband.”15 Central to Edward IV’s initial promulgation, Mistress Shore’s story has also governed most critical interest in the play.16 As their use of Churchyard’s poem suggests, The True Tragedy and Edward IV mark the emergence of Mistress Shore as a significant onstage presence. Critics observe that both plays expand Mistress Shore’s role as a sympathetic and repentant figure from brief accounts of her in earlier works initiated by More’s History of King Richard III.17 For example, Richard Helgerson finds that Edward IV’s emphasis on the pathetic affect of Mistress Shore, her victimization by the monarch, and her love for her husband, Matthew, makes the play a “‘domestic’ tragedy” quite different from Shakespeare’s Richard III.18 He contrasts those plays, like The True Tragedy and Edward IV, that devote attention to Mistress Shore as a figure “who mediated between king and people” with Shakespeare’s histories, which focus “almost exclusively on the succession, maintenance, and expression of royal power.”19 Mistress Shore’s presence onstage also signals to some an alternative national identity to that portrayed in the Shakespearean history play.20 Wendy Wall sees Edward IV’s inclusion of Mistress Shore as a nomination of “the housewife as representative of national values” and of the politicization of domesticity.21 Similarly, Kavita Mudan Finn sees Edward IV’s displacement of the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth in favor of Shore as a “shift in audience interest from the actions of royalty to those of middle-­class London citizens” indebted to the influence of the Mirror.22 Building upon these valuable analyses, which rightly identify Mistress Shore as an important touchstone for thematic contrasts that complicate the history play genre and its expressions of nationalism, I situate dramatic adaptations that stage her character within a larger view of early modern historiography’s varied representations of women’s political participation. Setting The True Tragedy and Edward IV alongside Richard III as dramatic adaptations of the narrative historiography of More and Hall reveals 80  Your Hope Is Gone

not key differences but strong similarities between Shakespeare’s brief report on Mistress Shore and these plays’ more expansive portrayals of her. This chapter argues that The True Tragedy and Edward IV develop the rhetorical agency of Mistress Shore in order to domesticate royal women’s political agency, including that of Elizabeth Woodville. As they critique the influence possible for women under a dynastic system, these plays challenge the legitimacy of women’s participation in politics, history, and even dynastic motherhood. The True Tragedy and Edward IV depict women’s access through the unofficial proximity available to queen consorts, royal mothers, and female favorites as illegitimate, and either vilify or nullify the political dimension of these women’s interventions. These plays thus demonstrate how the dramatic construction of an imagined populist national community is achieved at the expense of royal women, an exclusion that reflects critically on Elizabeth I’s own rejection of marriage and motherhood. Examined within the context of historical drama’s varied adaptations of women’s agency, the expanded presence of Mistress Shore in these plays paradoxically stages an effacement of queenly power. Condemning Politics in The True Tragedy The True Tragedy announces both its debts to and its differences from narrative historiography with a mocking reprisal of More’s explanation of Mistress Shore’s worthiness as an agent and subject of history. The hypocritical Lodwicke, who conveniently forgets Shore’s assistance to him as soon as she is publicly punished by Richard, vows to “shun her company” and retreat to his own chamber, where he will “set downe in heroicall verse, the shameful end of a King’s Concubin, which is no doubt as wonderfull as the desolation of a kingdome.”23 The reference to “heroicall verse” sends up Churchyard’s poem, and in doing so foregrounds the play’s debt to its verse source. These lines also jab at More’s defense of Shore’s story as appropriate historical material. Lodwicke’s assertion that her shameful end is equally “wonderfull” to the desolation of a kingdom does not actually assign these respective downfalls the same historical value, but rather uses the term trivially to underscore their differences.24 Lodwicke’s ironic statement shows him to be one of those individuals More predicted would evaluate Shore Your Hope Is Gone  81

as “to sleight a thing, to be written of & set amonge the remembraunces of great matters” (56). Lodwicke denigrates the inclusivity of narrative history, even as he describes the process of recording history as inextricably bound up in written as well as performed modes of historiography. In his failure to remember Shore’s use of her access to Edward on his behalf, Lodwicke also strategically denies the political dimensions of that access and misrepresents it solely in terms of a sexual relationship with the king. When he ironically compares Shore’s “shameful end” to the destruction of kingdoms, he simultaneously belittles her story as one of private lust with no national importance and introduces the play’s concern that women will wield illicit control over men who legitimately shape the country’s future. Lodwicke’s statement offers a useful summary of the play’s oppositional stance to narrative historiography’s more laudatory view of women’s political power.25 While Lodwicke’s lines distill the play’s chastisement of women’s political involvement, his cruel treatment of her is never condoned. Instead, his ill treatment is part of the play’s rewriting of Mistress Shore as a victim rendered sympathetic through her self-­identification as a repentant sexual sinner who once enjoyed disproportionate control over the king. Lodwicke is one of three men to whom Mistress Shore appeals for help after Richard forces her to do public penance and forbids assistance. One after another, Lodwicke, an unnamed Citizen, and the serving man Morton enter onstage, where Mistress Shore prefaces her appeals with a description of the help she provided each man while Edward’s mistress. Forbidden by Richard’s proclamation from “releev[ing] her nor pittie[ing] her,” they default on the onstage promises of assistance they made to Mistress Shore earlier in the play and treat her with disdain (1012–­13). Cued by Richard’s own cruelty and framed by reminders of her kindness, these rejections are presented as immoral. The play has not, however, staged the intercessions the men describe; Mistress Shore first speaks with these characters early in the play when Lodwicke brings her news of the king’s death along with his promise that the “little land which you beg’d for me of the King, / Shall be at your dispose” (279–­ 80). The Citizen and Morton enter arguing over an unresolved debt before declaring those they owe Mistress Shore, who tells them all “I thinke I shalbe driuen to try my friends one day” (316). Mistress Shore’s good works 82  Your Hope Is Gone

achieved through intercession—­and the returns she expects for them—­are enumerated primarily to foreshadow the imminent betrayals of Edward’s subjects, whose promises are made suspect even as they are uttered, placed as they are following a petty argument between Morton and the Citizen, who responds to Edward’s death with a self-­interested outburst: “O sir! is the King dead? / I hope he hath giuen you no quittance for my debt” (302–­4). Lodwicke, who agrees that he “cannot deny” that his lands have been restored by Shore’s intercession, nevertheless refuses to “hurt [him] selfe” by the “releeuing of her,” and flees home to disingenuously record her history (1073–­74). The unnamed Citizen whose son has likewise been saved by Mistress Shore shows a comical lack of appreciation that underscores the ungrateful meanness of those she implores: “thou didst saue the life of my sonne, why if thou hadst not, another would: and for my part, I would he had been hangd seuen yeeres ago” (1125–­28). Like Lodwicke before him and Morton after him, the Citizen doesn’t initially recognize Mistress Shore—­he thinks she is a beggar—­but he nevertheless deploys an ironically appropriate sexual insult, calling her an “arrant queane” (1108). When Shore asks the Citizen if he remembers Edward’s mistress, he is not surprised to find that the unrecognizable woman before him is “a sprig of the same bough,” since “so idle a huswife could not be without the acquaintance of so noble a strumpet” (1113–­15). The accusation of “arrant queane” directly reminds audiences of Mistress Shore’s infidelity, speaks to her illicit place in the king’s bed, reads her adultery as a social as well as sexual climbing, and suggests that her stolen “queenship” through her sexual affair with Edward IV is an aberrant attempt at political influence. The linkage the Citizen makes between the idle “huswife” he sees and the noble strumpet she references likewise recalls Mistress Shore’s intended place—­as housewife to her husband—­and incriminates her private errors even as it reads, again, her adultery as a desire for a dynastic place alongside the monarch. When the beggar woman is revealed to be Mistress Shore herself, the Citizen swears to a neighbor observing the exchange that he “would not for twentie pounds have given her one farthing,” and then berates her (1120). Finally driven to “beg of a seruingman” (1145), Shore turns to Morton, who chastises her as “a foole, and euer thy owne enemy” (1151) but then admits Your Hope Is Gone  83

that he “cannot do what [he] would” to help her because of the watching eyes of Richard’s Page (1153). Both the Citizen and Morton disavow their half-­hearted desires to help Mistress Shore when they realize others are watching. They admit their debt to her and reveal their own guilty consciences when they make excuses for their lack of assistance. The repeated failures of Shore’s former friends show her betrayed by cowardly men afraid of Richard and highlight the sinfulness of their behavior instead of her own. Richard, who has not only punished her too severely but also prevented her debtors from helping her through spies asked to “take notice of them that releeues her,” is also indicted for his cruelty (1014). But this sympathetic portrayal of Mistress Shore is dependent upon an exposure and critique of her foolishness, her “idle huswifery,” and her harlotry; such sympathy is solicited from audiences or proffered by other characters only after Mistress Shore is rendered politically powerless. Many of the play’s characters understand Mistress Shore’s “arrant queanship” as publicly disruptive. Lodwicke attempts to nullify Shore’s political relevance even as he derisively characterizes that relevance as threatening to the kingdom. Morton and the Citizen, for the benefit of their observers, characterize their rejections of Mistress Shore in terms of the public harm they believe her adultery has wrought. Morton, who has the greatest sympathy for Shore, still calls her the “Kings enemy” (1156). The Citizen, hoping to impress upon his watching neighbor his loyalty to Richard, berates Shore with questions identifying the personal and public consequences of her sins: “Why minion are you she that was the dishonour to the King? The shame to her husband, the discredit to the Citie?” (1121–­23). The Citizen characterizes Shore’s relationship with Edward IV as personally shameful, but his words blame her for the harm she has done to the city of London and the Yorkist dynasty. Edward becomes her passive victim rather than a powerful coercer, a perspective retrospectively at odds with his own actions. The Citizen’s sentiments are prefigured by Mistress Shore herself, who also describes her own actions as privately harmful to her own family and publicly harmful to her nation. Shore calls herself “a dishonor to the King,” and a “shame to thy countrey” as well as “the onely blot of defame to all thy kindred” (1019–­21). This language of dishonor 84  Your Hope Is Gone

blames her for sexual indiscretions that appear to have consequences for both king and country; Edward and England suffer because they fall under the power of a woman who should not have it. Mistress Shore’s acute regret for her behavior links her sexual sins to damaging political influence. While Mistress Shore’s account of her plight includes compelling critiques of her own relatives and friends, who “should have preferd discipline before affection” (1022) in raising her, and general lamentations about fortune’s wheel and the inconstancy of men, it primarily situates her as a penitent: she asks God to “forgiue all my foule offence” (1186) even though she admits she has “done wickedly in this world” (1188). Within these expressions of guilt are important self-­indictments of both her adultery and her political power. Her wistful statements about her power during Edward’s reign memorialize her beneficial interventions on behalf of others, but they most strongly emphasize the disorder of a “woman on top.” In swaggering hindsight that delivers a bawdy joke at her own expense drawn directly from Churchyard’s poem, she reminisces that “if I had spoken, he would not have said nay. For tho [Edward] was King, yet Shores wife swayd the swoord” (1086–­88). Before Edward’s death, she boasts to her maid of the king’s inability to refuse her detrimental requests: “For what was it his grace would deny Shores wife? / Of any thing, yea were it halfe his reuenewes, / I know his grace would not see me want” (217–­19). This assertion reiterates the problems her unofficial influence poses: Edward’s love for his mistress prevents him from denying her anything she might ask for, including half of the realm’s revenues. Her boasting is immediately followed by an expression of self-­interested concern about Edward’s health, wherein she claims that “if his grace should die . . . those that are my foes will triumph at my fall” (220–­22) but that if he escapes death, “Then will I feather my neast” (224). In Mistress Shore’s own assessments of her influence, the fate of the nation hangs on her own selflessness and judgment, qualities the play repeatedly insists—­sometimes through her own dialogue—­that she does not possess. Lodwicke, as he describes the reversals of Mistress Shore’s fortune, likewise emphasizes the arbitrary force of her influence and its troubling inversion of gender hierarchies: “Is this she that was in such credit with the Your Hope Is Gone  85

King? Nay more, that could command a King indeed?” (1072–­73). These examples of Shore’s command over the king indicate both her initial power at court and her loss of it: once she is defined as Richard’s enemy, Lodwicke is emboldened to negatively reevaluate her historical importance from the perspective of the new monarch’s interests. Shore’s access, created by personal affection and the king’s sexual weakness, is perceived as both ineffective and threatening because the use she makes of it is inward looking, centered on her familial needs and an individual sense of power, and opposed to the best interests of the English nation. Her ability to drain the national coffers while Edward was king is undisputed in the play; the description of this ability functions as a cautionary tale about allowing intimate favorites of the king to affect national interests while pursuing their own. After Lodwicke, the Citizen, and Morton betray her in turn, Richard’s Page—­a mouthpiece for his tyrannical master—­heaps insults on Shore that further reframe her representation: he rebuts Shore’s assessment that Richard “hath undone me” by redirecting the blame to her “wickedness and naughtie life” (1168–­70). He repeatedly calls her a prostitute, saying she “is fulsome and stinkes,” recommending she “fall to thy old trade againe” (1165) and wishing that “all whoores were so served, then there would be fewer in England then there be” (1179–­81). The Page’s indictment, like Lodwicke’s, is delivered by a suspect character, and it similarly encapsulates The True Tragedy’s larger representation of her. When Mistress Shore reminds the Page, and the audience, that “I haue done open penance, and am sorie for my sinnes that are past” (1171–­72), he mockingly calls her a “holie whoore,” neatly summarizing prevailing post-­More representations, including The True Tragedy’s, that value her repentance over her political agency (1174). Shore responds by pointing out the Page’s hypocrisy: “Why hang thee, if thy faults were so written in thy forehead as mine is, it would be as wrong with thee” (1175–­76). This defense figures the Page’s mercenary actions on Richard’s behalf as another form of whoredom and underscores Shore’s expository function: she speaks the truth about her own failures and doesn’t flinch from others’ incriminatory assessments, but she also calls attention to male failures of principle. Thus Mistress Shore identifies herself as “a mirrour and looking glasse,” not for other fallen women but “To all her enemies” (256–­57). Shore’s 86  Your Hope Is Gone

enemies are the historical enemies of England and the Tudor myth, but this opposition to Richard III does not actually position Shore as a friend of either state or myth in the play so much as it heightens Richard’s villainy. The True Tragedy’s representation of Mistress Shore as a “holie whoore” is recuperative to the extent that it asks audiences to sympathize with her for the betrayals she has suffered, the inordinate punishment meted out by Richard, and her obvious contrition. As Marissa Greenberg’s analysis of “the social efficacy of tragic emotion” in Heywood’s Edward IV shows, stage adaptations of the conventions of the complaint genre, like those visible in The True Tragedy, produce models for audience response to scenes of women’s infidelity.26 Audiences, according to Greenberg, are invited to emotionally identify with repentant sinners even as they are also required to repudiate the sexual corruption they see onstage, and if relevant, produce their own confessions. This affective response, solicited by the play’s staging of Mistress Shore’s repentance and the varying reactions of her fellow characters—­ which range from pity to cruelty—­often leads to critical views that tacitly equate such sympathy with agency. In fact, such stagings, bound up as they are in the “gendering of tragic effect,” efficaciously predicate the bestowal of audiences’ sympathies upon a successful performance of contrition and self-­ condemnation that polices female playgoers, implicating them “as offenders, unhealthy parts of an urban body in need of purgation.”27 The confessional condemnations that Greenberg identifies as prerequisites for affective sympathy—­so visible in the staging of Mistress Shore’s repentance—­have additional effects on historical drama’s depiction of women’s political participation. The True Tragedy rewrites Mistress Shore’s history in part to let her vocalize a self-­critique of female access to the monarch in terms that transform political agency to an illegitimate misuse of sexual power. Drastically different from the sympathy expressed in More’s account of her beneficial political interventions as a royal favorite, Mistress Shore’s sympathetic characterization is achieved by her exposures of male cruelty and hypocrisy, her own rhetoric of remorse, and her assessments of her dalliance with Edward as nationally harmful. Though not an example for all “wicked women,” as The True Tragedy’s title page of the 1594 quarto professes, Mistress Shore is an example of a woman previously threatening to England made docile through Your Hope Is Gone  87

victimization and self-­censure. She is recuperated only through a recursive self-­evaluation of her historical influence as destructive, the promise of her utter removal from politics, and her transition into a passive, repentant victim of a wicked tyrant and her own sexual licentiousness.28 As with Mistress Shore, The True Tragedy rewrites prior narrative accounts of Queen Elizabeth Woodville in ways that engage and then disarm audiences’ sympathies. Numerous characters offer reports criticizing Elizabeth Woodville’s political decisions as illegitimate and harmful to her children, kin, and nation. Scenes where the queen herself appears represent her sympathetically as an ineffective mother whose inability to protect her children from Richard’s tyranny nevertheless indicates that even natural mothers should not be responsible for their children when succession is at stake. The text rewrites rather than removes More’s sanctuary scene, but in doing so it transforms Elizabeth’s resistance into a mishandled, speedy acquiescence to her enemies. The True Tragedy also includes at the play’s close an encomium for Elizabeth I delivered by Elizabeth Woodville that exhibits the difficulties involved in simultaneously praising a female monarch and promoting a vision of the nation consolidated in England’s citizens through the exclusion of royal women. Oral reports of Elizabeth Woodville’s potentially harmful political influence pervade the play. Richard directly informs his audience that he must “strengthen [himself] by the controuersie that is betwixt the kindred of the King deceast, and the Queene thats liuing,” though Elizabeth’s described resistance is never shown (433–­35). Edward V describes the authority of his mother when he tells his maternal relatives, who are anxious about dissolving their military strength on his journey to London, that: my mother hath written, and thinks it conuenient that we dismisse our traine [ . . . ] my unckle of Gloster may rather thinke we come of malice against him and his blood: therefore my Lords, let me here your opinions, for my words and her letters are all one: and besides I my self giue consent. (492–­98) Edward indicates that Elizabeth’s letters have the power to command him, but her power is not presented, as in More, as either wisely used or 88  Your Hope Is Gone

well-­intended. While the justifications found in her letter—­practical matters of lodging and the possible impression of hostility toward Richard—­are drawn from More, the play omits the pressure Richard places on her in More’s account. This omission, and the omissions of her interior deliberations and awareness of her own errors, makes Elizabeth solely responsible for a bad decision that other male Yorkists might not have made. Her wishes work against the desires and wisdom of her own male kin, who object to what they see as a disastrous order that leaves the king vulnerable. Elizabeth’s brother Rivers speaks up “boldly” to urge caution in “discharg[ing] the company”: he cites the uneasy truce between Lancastrians and Yorkists and Richard’s power in Wales as grounds to reject the queen’s command (506, 503). Her son, Lord Grey, is less resistant than Rivers, but his words represent him as compelled rather than persuaded to agree with Elizabeth. Even as Grey gives voice to the power of Elizabeth’s letter—­“the Queene hath willed that we should dismisse our companie, and the King himself hath agreed to it, therfore we must needs obey”—­he suggests that such power is wielded unwisely (523–­26). In their grudging concessions to her authority, the queen’s male relatives are distanced from responsibility, and reports of Elizabeth’s political authority dramatize her misuse of it. More’s narrative shows Elizabeth’s recognition of her own error in agreeing to disband the king’s train as a sign of her superior knowledge. The True Tragedy, however, follows her male kin’s disapproval of her orders with a scene that foregrounds her even greater misuse of maternal and political authority. Elizabeth Woodville’s retreat to sanctuary is presented as a wordless tableau, with only the stage direction, “Enters the mother Queene, and her daughter, and her sonne, to sanctuarie,” positioned between two scenes staging the arrests of the queen’s male relatives (586–­87). During those arrests, Richard accuses Grey of acting with unlawful authority, while Grey insists, “we haue authoritie from the mother Queene” (738–­39). His assertion of Elizabeth as an equal, alternative authority to Richard is rejected, and he is hauled off to prison and execution as the scene shifts to a conversation between the queen and her children. Elizabeth’s dialogue with the young duke and Elizabeth York articulates the limits of her power as dowager and queen mother through a lamentation Your Hope Is Gone  89

over the loss of male kinship: “Ay me poore husbandles queene, & you poore fatherlesse princes” (792). Similar to the Tower gate scene in Richard III, where Yorkist women enumerate their destructive familial positions, Elizabeth points out that the removal of her ties to male kin leaves her bereft of basic maternal privileges as well as her former royal power. The remainder of the scene likewise critiques the efficacy of her actions as both political agent and mother. While the children try to comfort their mother, she recounts “dreadful” nightly dreams that foreshadow impending factionalism and claims “without God’s grace, I fall into dispaire with my selfe” (810). Enclosed in sanctuary, Elizabeth is made a sympathetic mother only as her authority is undercut by her own expressions of helplessness and despair. The extent of Elizabeth’s circumscribed position is further clarified when, in an inversion of her maternal position, her children attempt to protect her from the bad news of a Messenger, instructing him to “vtter it to vs, that our mother may not heare it” (817). At the cardinal’s arrival, shortly after she hears of her relatives’ arrests, Elizabeth instructs him to “shoote thine arrow, and hit this heart that is almost dead with griefe alreadie” (841–­43). The True Tragedy’s Elizabeth is resigned to Richard’s rule and its effects on her family; she has accepted that it will be the very death of her as well. In representing Elizabeth as a mourner who prematurely (and inaccurately) grieves her own fate, the play renders her own historical accounting suspect and strips her of the foreknowledge afforded her in the intertexts of More, Vergil, and Hall. In the scene where the cardinal brings the young duke out of sanctuary, Elizabeth makes a powerfully affective assertion of maternal protection that marks her most sympathetic moment. When the cardinal demands her son, Elizabeth refuses to comply: “No my Lorde, and thus persuade your selfe, I will not send him to be butchered . . . No, you shall rather take away my life before you get my boy from me” (861–­62, 873–­74). While The True Tragedy follows More in demonstrating Elizabeth’s awareness that the cardinal has been sent to persuade her to turn over the duke, it omits all of the rhetorical arguments More writes for her. Elizabeth instead offers a simple refusal: she vows to die rather than turn her son over to what she knows is certain death. However, this moral fortitude dissipates, and Elizabeth responds to the cardinal’s following platitudes—­“if I could persuade 90  Your Hope Is Gone

you, twere best to let him go” (879–­80)—­with an immediate concession: “But for I see you counsel for the best, I am content that you shall have my son, in hope that you will send him safe to me, here I deliver him into your hands” (881–­83). Traces of More’s Elizabeth remain, including her hope that her assent will make the cardinal more disposed to protect the duke, but dialogue articulating Elizabeth’s reasoning is eliminated. Her maternal fear of Richard is presented, as in Shakespeare, as instinctive rather than rational—­she dreams that Richard will butcher her family—­but her resolve buckles inexplicably, without a hint of More’s interior perspective, which shows her affect to be a self-­conscious display intended to bind the cardinal’s loyalty to her son. Critics find Elizabeth’s acquiescence in this scene puzzling. Churchill describes the departure from More as a “lack of art” resulting in an abrupt transition without purpose: “the Queen is made to pass from a determination to give up her life rather than her son, to a consent to resign him, without any argument or conflict between.”29 Finn observes that the “queen’s role is occluded” by the playwright’s omission of “all but the barest details of her confrontation with the cardinal.”30 Taken with the play’s consistent reports of Elizabeth’s mishandling of her political authority, the scene appears integral to representing Elizabeth’s failures as queen mother. Elizabeth’s maternal power fails miserably, imprisoning her as a victim of her own ill-­conceived attempts at political intervention. The sanctuary scene relies on Elizabeth’s grief to elicit sympathy for her as one of Richard’s victims, but it renders incoherent her “content[ment]” to deliver the Duke of York, and contradicts her vow to protect her son with her own life. Elizabeth’s maternity is staged as wholly private, devoid of the political dimensions that are both intrinsic to medieval queenship and evident in narrative accounts of her reasoned resistance to the cardinal. The play further reframes Elizabeth’s maternity as private and powerless when the naive Duke of York tells his brother that if Richard “will send vs to our louing mother againe . . . I doubt not but our mother would keepe vs so safe, that all the Prelates in the world should not depriue her of vs again” (1262–­64). This dialogue between Elizabeth’s young sons reminds readers and audiences of the queen’s behavior in the sanctuary scene, which has been Your Hope Is Gone  91

rewritten in the play as a cowardly betrayal of her child. The duke expresses faith in his mother’s protection just after Terrill orders their deaths and immediately before they are murdered, cueing audiences to see the duke’s assurances as misplaced. While the duke’s words are meant to underscore the boy’s innocence, they are also unusual in their specificity, as they pinpoint Elizabeth’s earlier inability to stand up to even one prelate on behalf of her children. The changes made to narrative sources show how evaluations of Elizabeth’s political agency as illegitimate can be manipulated to create irony as well as sympathy, as they implicate Elizabeth and recast her savviest defenses of her family in More into her greatest failures in The True Tragedy. After she relinquishes her youngest son to the cardinal, Elizabeth doesn’t return to the stage again until after Richmond’s victory, when she comes back to deliver her daughter to Henry Tudor and to praise Elizabeth I. Yet reports of her suspect influence by male characters emerge even in the play’s account of the famous union of the houses of York and Lancaster. Peter Landoys, swearing his allegiance to Richmond, predicates the earl’s success upon Elizabeth’s participation in the arrangement of Richmond’s marriage to her daughter: For if Queene mother do but keep her word, . . . And by this marriage ioyne in unitie Those famous Houses Lancashire and Yorke, Then England shall no doubt haue cause to say, Edwards coronation was a ioyfull day. (1675–­82) This report of Elizabeth’s alliance with Richmond highlights her involvement as potentially problematic rather than beneficial: the fate of the Tudor dynasty and the historical evaluation of Edward IV’s reign hang on Elizabeth’s suspect ability to keep her word, already undermined by her previous default on her vow to protect her son. While history confirms that Elizabeth does keep her promise, the play undermines Elizabeth’s known contributions to the formation of the Tudor dynasty by reports that characterize her as capricious and previous staged scenes that show her ineffectiveness and deference to Henry Tudor’s enemies. 92  Your Hope Is Gone

The True Tragedy’s anonymous author again chooses to report, rather than represent, Elizabeth’s influence when the play turns to Richard’s wooing of Elizabeth York. As shown in the previous chapter, the basis for dramatizations of Elizabeth Woodville’s role in Richard’s proposal to Elizabeth York is Hall’s otherwise nuanced representation of her. In this segment, Hall explains Elizabeth Woodville’s historical decision to relinquish her daughters as a result of her female inconstancy, and, to a lesser extent, of Richard’s success in using “auaricious affeccion” and “flatteryne wordes” to “blyn[d]” and “seduc[e]” her (406). Richard III’s staged wooing scene between Richard and Elizabeth rejects Hall’s anomalous critique through lines that leave Elizabeth’s responses to Richard ambiguous. The True Tragedy, however, compresses Hall’s account of Elizabeth’s resistance and avoids Shakespeare’s indefinite staging by relying on report rather than dialogue. The True Tragedy’s report of the wooing scene begins when Lovell brings word to Richard of his conversation with Elizabeth Woodville: My Lord very strange she was at the first, But when I had told her the cause, she gaue concent, Desiring your maiestie to make the nobilitie priuie to it. (1585–­87) By labeling Elizabeth’s response as “strange,” Lovell indicates her resistance to a marriage between her daughter and Richard.31 Initially unwilling, for reasons obvious to readers and audiences familiar with the history of Richard’s reign, Elizabeth again inexplicably and swiftly concedes to Richard. The process of persuading Elizabeth as recorded in Hall and as staged by Shakespeare is replaced by Lovell’s report: all The True Tragedy’s Elizabeth needs to agree, it seems, is an explanation of “the cause” of Richard’s request.32 Elizabeth appears as easily convinced here as she was in sanctuary; she does not need to be flattered and persuaded by the seductive Richard, as Hall’s narrative demands. This pattern of ineffectual resistance and quick acquiescence is widened to include her daughter when Richard asks for Lovell’s account of Elizabeth York’s response to the proposal: “Why my Lord, straunge, as women will be at the first. / But through intreatie of her mother, she quickly gaue consent” (1589–­90). Lovell’s lines, which repeat the language of Elizabeth Woodville’s Your Hope Is Gone  93

reported response just a few lines earlier, reduce both women’s objections to a token resistance: though “strange” is often applied to cold, chaste, and adamantly resistant sonnet beloveds, here the permanence of that resistance is undercut by the women’s quick reversals. Elizabeth York professes objections that neither man believes and that Lovell dismisses as typical of women. Both imitative of and encouraged by her mother, Elizabeth York’s reported reply evokes similarities between them. Characterizing both women’s refusals as coyness further nullifies their legitimacy and represents the Yorkist Elizabeths’ objections to Richard as insincere. This inclusion of Elizabeth York’s reported agreement is curious, because it implicates Elizabeth I’s favored female ancestor in a play intended to praise the reigning sovereign. The play unsurprisingly deflects some blame away from Henry Tudor’s future wife by accentuating Elizabeth Woodville’s culpability. The princess’s quick agreement does not come from her own failure to withstand Richard but from the “intreatie” of her mother. This blame is further deflected at the play’s close, when the young Elizabeth consents to marry Richmond because she “must in dutie yeeld to her [mother’s] command,” a declaration that helps identify her marital obligations (to either Richard or Richmond) as the result of obedience to her mother rather than personal choices that might sully or strengthen her role in the creation of the Tudor dynasty (2111–­12). While Shakespeare stages Elizabeth Woodville’s consent to Richard with intentional uncertainty—­she leaves asking, “Shall I go win my daughter to thy will?”—­The True Tragedy reports the outcome of this hypothetical persuasion of her daughter (4.4.346). Later reports of Elizabeth Woodville’s support for Richmond suggest that Lovell’s description of her consent to a marriage between her daughter and Richard is either factually wrong or evidence she has lied to him; Tudor history, of course, confirms its inefficacy either way. The play’s staged report of Elizabeth Woodville’s persuasion of her daughter minimizes the possibility that she strategically defers Richard’s desires, instead prioritizing vivid details of her compliance that—­regardless of their veracity—­position her maternal control over Edward’s daughters as potentially dangerous to the emerging Tudor dynasty. Staging some events taken from More that Shakespeare only reports, such as the sanctuary debate, and reporting others that Shakespeare stages, such as this wooing 94  Your Hope Is Gone

scene, The True Tragedy’s adaptive choices depict Elizabeth Woodville’s political power as illegitimate and her fallible maternity as both privately harmful to her children and publicly damaging to England. The True Tragedy’s critique of women’s influence under dynastic rule is further complicated when it intersects with the nationalist praise of the Queen’s Men’s own influential female patron, Elizabeth I. As Scott McMillin and Sally-­Beth MacLean have shown, the formation of the Queen’s Men as a traveling troupe in 1583 had a political purpose: to promote Elizabeth’s rule, moderate Protestantism, and a centralized nation.33 According to Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin, the Queen’s Men plays “often promote a coherent English nationalism.”34 The most explicit expressions of this agenda appear in the final prophecies of the Queen’s Men plays Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The True Tragedy.35 Rather than ending with a focus on Richmond as a masculine, nationalist savior whose presence critiques the failures of queenship under dynastic rule, as Richard III does, The True Tragedy focuses its final praise on Elizabeth I. This emphasis leads critics to see the play’s nationalist fervor consolidated around the monarch, particularly in its final moments.36 However, the play’s nationalist ideology is, like that of many late-­Elizabethan history plays, also an exclusionary one, revealed even in the play’s praise of its female monarch. The True Tragedy employs a series of peripheral characters, including a messenger and Elizabeth York, to praise the Tudor dynasty and flatter Elizabeth I. The Messenger first idealizes Henry VII by comparing him to Solomon, and then recounts the reign of Henry’s male progeny. Elizabeth York steps in briefly to provide a spare account of Mary Tudor: “a Mary did succeede, which married / Philip King of Spaine, she raigned fiue yeares, foure moneths, / and some odde dayes, and is buried in Westminster” (2189–­ 92). Elizabeth Woodville then delivers the final thirty-­two lines about the “Worthie” Elizabeth I, “that lampe that keeps Faire Englands light” (2193, 2203). Elizabeth I is conventionally praised for her defeat of the Antichrist, the subjection of Turkish and Christian princes to her demands for peace, and her high standing among European nations.37 The choice of Elizabeth Woodville to deliver the lengthiest praise for the reigning sovereign is unusual: as Finn asks, “the primary question is Your Hope Is Gone  95

why these particular characters are given the epilogue.”38 As Elizabeth I’s coronation pageant suggests, Elizabeth York, not her mother, was the female Yorkist ancestor with whom the queen allowed comparison. Given the play’s extended critique of Elizabeth Woodville’s dangerous authority and inadequate maternal protection, one Elizabeth’s praise of another could solicit uncomfortable comparisons at odds with the Queen’s Men’s political goals. In The True Tragedy, Elizabeth Woodville is vilified as a pseudo-­ruler in her son’s minority and recuperated only as a victimized mother whose ambivalently sympathetic portrayal hinges upon her failures to protect her children and the exposure of the problems within a dynastic system that allows women to make political decisions for minor male relatives. The play’s final praise of Elizabeth I is necessarily complicated by these prior depictions of Elizabeth Woodville, and the pairing of these women indicates that such praise might convey veiled criticism of Elizabeth I. If, as Jennifer Roberts-­Smith proposes, the same young­adult apprentice played both the queen mother and Mistress Shore, then the associations between the play’s most problematic female figures and the reigning queen were likely deepened considerably for an early modern audience.39 As queen speaks for queen, an unusual assessment of Elizabeth I’s future emerges: “This is that Queene as writers truly say, / That God had marked downe to liue for aye. / Then happie England mongst thy neighbor Iles, / For peace and plentie still attends on thee” (2196–­200). In this typical formulation assigning Elizabeth eternal life and God’s favor, England remains peaceful and happy because God has singled Elizabeth I out for immortality. But as Kristin M. S. Bezio notes, “the hyperbolic suggestion that she would ‘liue for aye’ is either wishful thinking or pandering so transparent that it cannot help but draw focus.”40 In the last few lines of the play, this insistence on the necessity of Elizabeth’s ongoing life grows more stringent and registers its own impossibility: Ieneua, France, and Flanders, hath set downe, The good she hath done, since she came to the Crowne. For which, if ere her life be tane away, God grant her soule may liue in heaven for aye. 96  Your Hope Is Gone

For if her Graces dayes be brought to end, Your hope is gone, on whom did peace depend. (2219–­24) While the conventional trope of Elizabeth I’s impending immortality in heaven assures the queen’s reign will live on, the last words directly connect Elizabeth’s physical death with the end of peace for England. These lines paradoxically express hope for her spiritual afterlife while describing the consequences of her physical death on the nation. Nowhere in this lengthy encomium is the hope that Elizabeth might live on through her progeny, either natural or metaphorical, or that England might be protected from disaster by another ruler. As Walsh observes, “the possibility of her death is presented as an unmitigated catastrophe.”41 The True Tragedy’s end, while undoubtedly praising her, also reminds audiences of the direst consequences of Elizabeth’s failure to produce or choose an heir. While Queen’s Men plays are most often seen as propagandistic in their praise of Elizabeth, some critics acknowledge their more complicated attitudes toward the monarch. Tara Lyons identifies a critique of Elizabeth I’s nonreproductive body in another Queen’s Men history play of the 1590s, The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Lyons argues that male birth fantasies and maternal rhetoric in The Troublesome Raigne complicate the play’s advocacy of allegiance to Elizabeth I and imply that “a monarch’s reproduction of royal heirs is vital to her role as mother to the people.”42 Writing on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, another Queen’s Men play, Walsh finds that its final prophecy “implicitly suggests that England has no future” beyond Elizabeth.43 Though often read as the play’s key moment of queenly praise, Friar Bacon’s last speech alludes to Elizabeth I’s childlessness and functions for Elizabethan audiences as “an elegy for the twilight of the Tudors, the ruling house whose extinction was well within sight for the English.”44 In The True Tragedy, similar concerns about the monarch’s reproductive failures arise even in the play’s most explicit praise of the sovereign. Thus we find in the encomium’s strange shift from effusive praise to dire warning “a voice struggling to articulate a conundrum for Elizabeth’s loyal subjects: how to broach the inevitable succession question, and how to face the political realities it will entail.”45 The play’s articulation of the Elizabethan Your Hope Is Gone  97

succession crisis is sharpened into a veiled critique of Elizabeth through the encomium’s delivery by the actor playing Queen Elizabeth, who quite possibly also doubled as Mistress Shore, and the play’s overall characterization of women’s influence. Both women are vilified for their political meddling and intimate access to the king: the play highlights Elizabeth Woodville’s own dereliction of maternal protection and reminds audiences of the fallibility of royal mothers responsible for royal heirs, while characters’ and audiences’ sympathies for Mistress Shore are predicated upon her self-­condemnation of her own political influence as nationally harmful. According to Greenberg, the “affective scenes of female infidelity and repentance” in Edward IV are tailored to “move guilty playgoers to confession and reformation,” and in doing so justify the civic function of the theater.46 In The True Tragedy, very similar affective goals steer audiences to bestow pity upon Shore and Elizabeth and to acknowledge these figures’ sexual or maternal derelictions through the lens of their failed attempts at political influence. The True Tragedy’s policing of female playgoers through its solicitation of affective response conflicts with the encomium’s surface praise of the country’s female sovereign. This clash of perspectives is heightened by expedient casting that links Elizabeth I, Mistress Shore, and Elizabeth Woodville together and the stage convention of an encomium that powerfully implicates its female audience members even as it asks them to respond to its staged women with a mixture of censure and pity. If the staged sexual and social infidelities of the London housewife Mistress Shore were designed to move the ordinary female playgoer to self-­recognition, confession, and reform, as Greenberg attests, then the play’s particular accounting of the maternal and queenly failures of Elizabeth Woodville perhaps function as a similar mechanism of indictment, adamantly delivered through the encomium’s passive-­aggressive praise and aimed at its royal female audience. Viewed in the context of the play’s larger critique of women’s political involvement and delivered by another Elizabeth whose characterization underscores royal women’s failures to protect monarchical succession, the encomium’s staging choices and allusions to approaching national catastrophe blame Elizabeth I’s own inability to ensure dynastic continuity on her gender 98  Your Hope Is Gone

as well as her childlessness, locating the problems of dynastic rule in the bodies of women represented as essentially and always unfaithful to either spouse or nation, and unfit either to mother or govern. Though the encomium creates an implicit connection between Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth I, The True Tragedy also attempts to draw more conventional comparisons between the reigning queen and her other namesake ancestor, Elizabeth York. Finn sees “hints of agency” that “are never truly developed” in the “more prominent role” assigned to Elizabeth York, who is made a character in The True Tragedy, but this expansion of Elizabeth’s stage presence, like that of Mistress Shore, further critiques queenship.47 As mentioned above, Elizabeth York delivers a few brief lines about Mary Tudor’s rule in the epilogue, and reports of her consent to Richard’s proposal at her mother’s urging are mitigated by her proper expressions of duty to her family through marriage: “for when our aged father left his life, he willed vs honour still our mothers age: and therefore as my dutie doth command, I do commit my selfe to her dispose” (2112–­ 14). The princess’s narrative of allegiance announces the hierarchical order of familial ties behind the unofficial sharing of power between her royal parents. It also associates royal marriage with the honor of one’s elders, both dead and alive, and praises the submission of a daughter to her father’s will and her mother’s (flawed) judgment. In her most substantive appearance, Elizabeth York pleads on her father’s deathbed with Lord Hastings and Lord Marcus, asking them to “submit your selues to each other” (110), “to mitigate your wrath, / And in friendly sort, imbrace each other” (115–­16). This intercession is staged as politically ineffective but characterologically important. It is dismissed by both Edward, who calls it “folly to speak” (118) to the feuding nobles, and Hastings, who responds to her request only to chastise Marcus’s own rejection of the princess’s “curtuous words,” and it is only the king’s anger toward the two men that effects their tenuous peace (124). Elizabeth’s failed intercession suggests her replacement of her conspicuously absent mother during Edward’s death scene, where her father’s praise and instruction establish a prescriptive vision of her future queenship. Comforted by his daughter as he dies, Edward laments leaving her “in a world of trouble” Your Hope Is Gone  99

(179), demands her obedience to her brother, and reminds her “As thy selfe art vertuous, let thy praiers be modest / Still be bountifull in deuotion” (183–­84). Edward’s instruction values feminine attributes of obedience, virtue, modesty and devotion that sometimes obscure the more political duties of both queens regnant and consort, and the brief representation of Elizabeth York in the play has little in common with the coequal monarch of Elizabeth I’s coronation pageant. Elizabeth York’s cumulative portrait in The True Tragedy is of a virtuous princess who models obedience and devotion to her royal kin, positioning her in contrast to the represented authority of both Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth I. The play’s brief sketch of Elizabeth York as a submissive daughter and future wife and mother locates her virtue in those positions that audiences and readers knew Elizabeth I would never, at this late date, occupy. The encomium itself directly links Elizabeth I and Elizabeth York in its moments of conventional praise for the female queen: as Goy-­Blanquet notes, Elizabeth I is “fused with her namesake” as “the meanes that ciuill wars did cease” (2206).48 But the encomium’s warning about the national tragedy resulting from Elizabeth I’s death is also prefigured by similar language about Elizabeth York spoken by her mother. Elizabeth Woodville offers her daughter to Richmond with a prayer for her everlasting life: “And we pray all, that faire Elizabeth may liue for aye, and neuer yeeld to death” (2117–­18). These lines anticipate the ending’s focus on temporal death even as they forget the necessity of couching concerns about Elizabeth I’s death in terms of her heavenly immortality. Elizabeth Woodville shares an earnest prayer for the continuation of her daughter’s physical life, even as audiences and readers understand it to be about both a queen long dead and a queen perhaps soon to be dead. This plea heightens the effect of the encomium’s censure of its childless queen through its impossible appeal for everlasting life on earth and the important differences between the two women. In the play’s two moments that most directly associate Elizabeth I with Elizabeth York, it reminds readers of a civil war stopped by marriage and a marriage celebrated for the dynastic line it will generate. Certainly, this is not the fruitful comparison modeled by the coronation pageant in 1559, but a contrast between how Elizabeth York might live forever (through 100  Your Hope Is Gone

her progeny) and how Elizabeth I might not. The True Tragedy, possibly performed at court before Elizabeth I, could have fruitfully drawn on self-­conscious parallels between Elizabeth York and the reigning queen, especially at its end, when it presents Elizabeth York’s betrothal to Henry Tudor and assigns Yorkist women the task of recording their history. But the play identifies the heart of the union of York and Lancaster as a duty to marry on the part of a princess evocative of Elizabeth I. It holds up Elizabeth York as a model of queenship rooted in traditional female virtues that belie the political dimensions of both queens consort and queens regnant; in doing so it also emphasizes that Elizabeth I could not in fact follow such a model of marriage and reproduction. In accentuating Elizabeth I’s differences from Elizabeth York, the play stresses comparisons between the reigning monarch and Elizabeth Woodville that remind audiences of both queens’ failures to safeguard the succession. The True Tragedy’s account of royal women revises its narrative sources to alternatively condemn and nullify women’s political participation in dynastic succession, in spite of—­ or perhaps because of—­England’s own reigning female monarch. Women’s Self-­A bnegation in Edward IV Other than a shared interest in staging Mistress Shore, Thomas Heywood’s two-­part Edward IV seems to have little in common with The True Tragedy, and even less with Richard III. The play’s first part dramatizes the bravery of middle-­class London citizens during the Falconbridge rebellion, and the second part is so focused on the tragedy of London citizens Matthew and Mistress “Jane” Shore that some critics have resisted calling it a history play.49 Critical readings of Edward IV often follow Helgerson’s analysis of the play as a citizen-­centered Henslowe playwright creation, approaches that typically contrast Heywood to Shakespeare.50 Jean E. Howard, while she challenges Helgerson’s reading of the play as more socially inclusive than Shakespeare’s histories, concurs with both Helgerson and Wall when she notes that Edward IV “trivializes” and “marginalizes” the monarch, even while the play conveys a “sense of the absolute deference owed a king by his subjects.”51 This marginalization of the monarch in favor of London’s populace produces a consensus opinion that Edward IV displays a Your Hope Is Gone  101

nationalism rooted in the geography and the inhabitants of England rather than in its sovereign.52 In spite of this particularly citizen-­centered national consciousness, Edward IV shares with Richard III and The True Tragedy similar revisions to its narrative sources’ depictions of royal women: like its dramatic predecessors, the play characterizes the royal abuse of power that victimizes England’s people as inappropriate preferment and personal affection under a dynastic structure. The play’s populist nationalism discourages royal women’s personal access to the monarchy and minimizes the political dimensions of queenship. Edward IV elides the political agency of royal wives and mistresses and then reassigns Elizabeth Woodville and Jane Shore submissive, self-­censorious rhetorical perspectives that define their roles as wholly private ones, a redefinition portrayed as essential to the development of an English national identity. As the play transfers citizens’ nationalist allegiances away from the monarch, it also displays a preoccupation with erasing the dynastic inclusions of royal women deemed responsible for dynasty’s disastrous effects. In 1600, with the death of Elizabeth I imminent, Heywood’s play emphasizes the importance of the English public, rather than its monarch, to national identity, and displaces the legitimate political interventions of royal women in its intertexts through the sinful, punished figure of Jane Shore. As in The True Tragedy, Mistress Shore is a victim of Richard’s tyranny and betrayed by her friends, and her plight is intended to elicit a provisional affective sympathy. The play also ostensibly widens her representation, dramatizing her fall to Edward’s overtures and staging some of her benevolent actions while his mistress. It shows her public penance during Richard’s reign, invents for her a sorrowful and betrayed husband and devoted citizens who sacrifice their lives to sustain her, and finally ends with a shared, pitiful death for Jane and her long-­suffering Matthew. Her portrayal has garnered attention from feminist critics interested in situating the play’s view of domesticity within its well-­known promotion of a new citizen-­centered national identity. Lena Cowen Orlin interprets Jane’s struggle to obey both her husband and her royal lover as an irreconcilable dilemma instigated by conflicting domestic and political authorities. This dilemma breaks down an early modern system of analogy that often conflated the household with 102  Your Hope Is Gone

the monarchy, but the play ultimately asserts “the necessary priority of royal absolutism, here expressed in the emblematic terms of royal power over a female body.”53 Alternatively, Wall sees the play’s emphasis on Jane as a critique of royal abuse, and its promotion of domestic history as an alternative, citizen-­centered means of documenting England’s past.54 Finn situates her analysis of Shore more broadly, in the context of the play’s interest in “the problematic position of women, not as political creatures, but as powerless victims of ruthless men.”55 Most persuasive is Howard’s reading, which documents the play’s simultaneous censure and praise of Jane, seeing in her criminalization and rehabilitation “the complex ideological work of refashioning dangerous female sexuality and agency into an acceptably selfless version of femininity” that helped define the emerging nation as a locus of male privilege and female exclusion.56 These assessments of the play’s staging of domesticity, victimization, and royal absolutism direct my attention to the relationships among Jane Shore, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York, who together vocalize both models for female virtue and cautionary tales about queenly power that in combination insistently narrow the scope of women’s political participation. Reading the play’s censure of Jane’s sexual transgressions and praise of her remorse alongside its vilification of the Duchess of York and its revision of Elizabeth Woodville shows how Edward IV valorizes domesticity, not simply as political valence or abject victimhood, but as a means to restrict royal women’s influence and proximity to the monarch in a citizen-­focused nation. Heywood begins his play with an argument among the royal family that highlights anxieties over female involvement in politics. He draws on More’s account of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and the Duchess of York’s specific objections to it, invented dialogue that More justifies including in The History of King Richard III because it sheds light on Richard’s strategies: he “rehersed this busines about this mariage somwhat the more at lenght” in order to clarify “how slipper a grounde the protector builded his colour, by which he pretended King Edwardes children to be bastardes” (66). Heywood’s staging of this event, on the other hand, pits two modes of female behavior against each other. The result is a revision that uses dramatic form to allow Elizabeth Woodville rhetorical agency but Your Hope Is Gone  103

nevertheless reduces her political efficacy, emphasizes her wifely submission, and displaces the acuity More gives her to Edward’s vilified mother, the Duchess of York. The scene’s opening follows More, with the Duchess of York challenging Edward’s judgment and spelling out the repercussions of his marriage, asking him “Is’t possible your rash, unlawful act / Should not breed mortal hate betwixt the realms?”57 The duchess argues that royal marriage is a diplomatic concern with political effects: she reminds her son that the French king, and the kingmaker Warwick, sent to France to secure Edward’s marriage to the Princess Bona, will be insulted by Edward’s impulsive love-­match. Edward’s defenses articulate paradoxical perspectives about the political relevance of marriage alliances and the potential power of a queen consort. He first justifies his choice of an English subject as his wife: “All true subjects shall have cause to thank God, to have their king born of a true Englishwoman. I tell you, it was never well since we matched with strangers” (1e4.1.39–­42). Edward critiques foreign marriage by alluding to the disastrous union of Henry VI and the “stranger” Margaret of Anjou, and concludes with a jesting question for his attendants—­“heard you ever such a coil about a wife?”—­that neutralizes the importance he initially ascribes to royal marriage and undermines the duchess’s concerns (1e4.1.54). Heywood adds to More’s account of the duchess’s objections and Edward’s irreverent responses a demonstration of animosity between the duchess and Edward’s male followers. These courtiers successfully diminish the validity of her concerns by characterizing them as, in the words of Sellinger, “a woman’s humour” (1e4.1.61). The duchess sees deceptive flattery in Edward’s lords, calling Sellinger a “minion and a flatterer” (1e4.1.125), accusing them all of being “spaniels of the court” who “fawn and sooth your wanton king,” and warning of the negative effects of favoritism offered to courtiers who provide only praise (1e4.1.74–­75). Edward’s followers cannot directly silence her intervention, but their own advice reduces its legitimacy as counsel. Sellinger tells the king, “If you resist this tumour of her will, / Here you shall have her dwell upon this passion / Until she jade and dull our ears again” (1e41.62–­63), and suggests that Edward should pretend to be sorry rather “Than thus be wearied with a woman’s chat” (1e4.1.72). Heywood alters an otherwise near paraphrase of More’s invented dialogue 104  Your Hope Is Gone

by adding male expressions of anxiety about maternal participation in royal politics and explicit examples of favorites rendered useless by sycophantic praise or illegitimate by gendered stereotypes. Heywood further departs from The History of King Richard III’s invented dialogue by crafting a verbal defense for Elizabeth Woodville where More’s narrative affords her none: A spotless virgin came I first to Gray; With him I lived a true and faithful wife. And since his high imperial majesty Hath pleased to bless my poor, dejected state With the high sovereign title of his queen, I here protest, before the host of heav’n, I came as chaste a widow to his bed, As, when a virgin, I to Gray was wed. (1E4.1.84–­91) This explanation of Elizabeth’s courtship differs from More’s account, where her eloquent denials “rather kindled his desire than quenched it” (71). Heywood’s Elizabeth ignores the duchess’s political concerns, reduces her own agency in the story of her courtship while emphasizing Edward’s, and judges her own fitness for queenship in her ability to fulfill domestic and sexual obligations that are presented as identical to those previously expected of her as the wife of a private citizen. She denies political ambition by claiming she doesn’t value her promotion in rank, telling the duchess, “you cannot so basely think on me, / As I do think of these vain, worldly titles” (1e4.1.116–­17). Edward’s court approves Elizabeth’s responses: Sellinger calls her “the mirror of her kind” (1e4.1.120) and a “saint,” and he chastises the duchess: “you blaspheme / To wrong so sweet a lady” (1e4.1.123–­24). Heywood’s play thus uses the rhetorical agency of Elizabeth and the voices of Edward’s courtiers to disapprove of female interventions into politics by discrediting the duchess, reducing the historical agency afforded to Elizabeth in The History of King Richard III, and praising her disavowal of the political gains of royal marriage. The opening scene positions Elizabeth as a model queen because she denies an interest in politics and censures the duchess’s speech about the Your Hope Is Gone  105

national importance of marital alliances. This contrast is echoed in the play’s second part, in an extensive original scene where the queen meets her husband’s mistress. While Edward campaigns in France, Elizabeth’s son Dorset summons Jane from doling out pardons to citizens and drags her before the queen. Dorset’s anger is rooted in the disparate power of Edward’s queen and his mistress: “My mother can do nothing, this whore all!” (2e4.9.131). His words register Jane’s power as an unfair, illicitly secured preferment that cuts the queen off from her rightful access to Edward. Jane admits that she is “ashamed to see her majesty,” and begs Dorset to “say you saw me not” (2e4.9.108–­9) before she professes her fear of the queen’s violence: “She will slit my nose, / Or mark my face, or spurn me unto death” (2e4.9.116–­17). Stage directions indicate that Mistress Shore “falls down on her knees before the Queen, fearful and weeping,” an appearance that leads Elizabeth to remark upon her beauty in an aside, “Now, as I am queen, a goodly creature!” (2e4.10.1). Elizabeth first mockingly calls Jane “Queen Shore,” “Empress Shore,” and “your grace, your majesty, your highness” (2e4.10.13–­14) and entreats her to trade places so that she might kneel while Jane sits in her throne: Lord, I want titles, you must pardon me. What, you kneel there, King Edward’s bedfellow, And I, your subject, sit? Fie, fie, for shame. Come, take your place, and I’ll kneel where you do: I may take your place; you have taken mine. (2e4.10.15–­19) Elizabeth’s anger is initially directed at Jane’s usurpation of both her place in Edward’s bed and her official status as queen; she first explains Jane’s transgression in terms of its effects on her public role. Jane responds with a hyperbolic account of her sin, noting that “to tell the wrongs that I have done your highness / Might make revenge exceed extremity” (2e4.10.25–­26). Excessively performing her shame, Jane insists on enumerating the gravity of her crimes rather than begging for leniency: “Let them expect for mercy whose offence / May be but callèd sin. O, mine is more!” (2e4.10.32–­33). It is this abject, physical supplication and Jane’s deference to her queenship that softens Elizabeth’s resentment. As Jane lies “prostrate as earth” and 106  Your Hope Is Gone

encourages Elizabeth to “inflict what torments you shall think most meet,” the queen grows sympathetic, and Elizabeth’s language ceases to focus on her own public humiliation (2e4.10.34–­35). From this point on, Elizabeth’s substantial rhetorical power is directed toward recasting the dispute between the two women as a personal rivalry for Edward’s affection. Elizabeth first silences Dorset’s calls for her to physically harm Jane, and then asks her to consider the personal feelings of a wronged wife by imagining that “thou were a queen, /And I, as thou, should wrong thy princely bed, / And win the King, thy husband, as thou mine: / Would it not sting thy soul?” (2e4.10.45–­48). Demanding that Jane imagine herself in the queen’s shoes, Elizabeth then flips the question to ask, “Or if that I, / Being a queen, while thou didst love thy husband, / Should but have done as thou hast done to me: / Would it not grieve thee?” (2e4.10.48–­51). These converse examples heighten the play’s comparisons of Elizabeth and Jane as two similar models of private queenship and assess Jane’s marriage to Matthew as emotionally similar to Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward: queen or subject, the adultery perpetrated against them stings and grieves alike. Finally, Elizabeth directly compares her own feelings to those of “the meanest woman that doth live,” who “if she like and love her husband well, / She had rather feel his warm limbs in her bed, / Then see him in the arms of any queen” (2e4.10.52–­55). Such an argument highlights the personal nature of her objections to Edward’s relationship with Jane, and frames her anger and hurt as that which any married woman might feel. Moved by Jane’s supplication, Elizabeth returns to the exemplary behavior exhibited in her conversation with the duchess: she speaks as a citizen’s wife rather than a royal consort, and her generalization of her grief—­as that which Jane might also feel if Elizabeth were to seduce Matthew—­replaces her initial view of Jane as a political rival. While their conversation reduces court factionalism to a woman’s private feud—­what Finn calls a “domestic conflict” between wife and mistress—­it also demonstrates Jane’s superior virtue, achieved by her submissiveness and disinterest in political gain.58 While the play’s first scene demonstrates Elizabeth’s exemplarity through her own self-­identification as a “true and faithful wife” explicitly uninterested in the political dimensions of her queenship, Your Hope Is Gone  107

this scene reveals Jane’s even greater virtue. Though she is an adulteress, Jane’s submission demands a recognition of worth that the queen herself cannot deny in spite of her own jealousy; in an aside, Elizabeth encapsulates the play’s praise of Jane, even as doing so usurps her own position: “Now, before God, she would make a gallant queen!” (2e4.10.8). Orlin argues that Jane “assumes her public identity as a second queen” in the play because of her “acts of beneficence” and dispensation of “justice and mercy.”59 Yet in this scene with Elizabeth, Jane fulfills a fantasy of domesticated queenship not through good works but through her exhibition of submissiveness. She becomes a “second queen” in direct contrast to the momentarily dominant Elizabeth, who has previously expropriated the duchess’s virtue through her own disavowals of political ambition. Jane’s curious representation as a better female exemplar than the jealous Elizabeth and the interfering duchess suggests the play’s promotion of a queenship defined by domestic submission and stripped of its political dimensions. In spite of the play’s repeated contrasts that favor Jane over Edward’s queen consort, praise of and sympathy for Jane are dependent upon her continual self-­criticism, which Howard understands as a strategy of recuperating her character into a properly repentant female sinner.60 From the moment Jane becomes Edward’s mistress, she imagines the power of her position as solely a means to repent for that very role: “Well, I will in; and ere the time begin, / Learn how to be repentant for my sin” (1e4.19.115–­16). But the play also employs Jane’s self-­censure to emphasize the value of women’s marital behavior above all other actions, including political ones, a valorization of marital duty that extends to the play’s queens, particularly Elizabeth Woodville. Jane exhibits this self-­criticism when she yields herself up to Elizabeth’s anger, and the ensuing conversation demonstrates how Jane’s rhetoric of remorse is used to frame and contain the political agency of the play’s other women: Even what you will, great Queen. Here do I lie, Humble and prostrate at your highness’ feet. Inflict on me what may revenge your wrong; Was never lamb abode more patiently 108  Your Hope Is Gone

Than I will do. Call all your griefs to mind, And do even what you will, or how likes you; I will not stir, I will not shriek or cry, Be it torture, poison, any punishment. Was never dove or turtle more submiss, Than I will be unto your chastisement. (2e4.10.75–­84) Elizabeth’s defense of her own domestic virtue is offered as a positive alternative to the duchess’s ambitious meddling, but Jane Shore trumps the queen’s expression of ideal wifely behavior with no defense at all. She exhibits complete subjection, and is rewarded by the queen’s correction, rather than her own: Elizabeth rushes her with a dagger, only to “stab” Jane with kisses and apologies. The scene ends as both women try to efface themselves in favor of the other, having seen the error of their jealousies and mutual distrust. When Edward returns, Jane kneels and pleads for her own banishment from court and Edward’s renewed affection for Elizabeth: O, let not my bewitching looks withdraw Your dear affections from your dearer queen, But to requite the grace that she hath shown To me, the worthless creature on this earth, To banish me the court, immediately. (2e4.10.137–­41) The queen immediately kneels alongside Jane, telling her husband, “Nay, then, I’ll beg against her, royal Edward. / Love thy Jane still; nay more, if more may be;” before kissing her (2e4.10.144–­45). Edward’s befuddled delight at this rapprochement is immediately followed by Jane and Elizabeth’s shared but futile intercessory attempts to secure Edward’s pardon for Stranguidge and his men: he denies both women outright, declaring “My word is passed. Not one of them shall live” (2e4.10.170). Heywood thus imaginatively reconciles two court factions by representing their dispute not as a struggle for influence but as an individual sexual rivalry that can be happily resolved by women’s selflessness. The scene also perversely reframes queenly intercession: it first stages Jane’s supplication to Elizabeth Your Hope Is Gone  109

as self-­flagellation, and then affords first Jane and then Elizabeth intercessory power that they willingly wield to urge their own mistreatment and marginalization at the hands of the king. This spectacle decisively underscores their inability to use intercession for political purposes, suggesting such power is better directed toward resolving women’s domestic disputes. Though traces of the political stakes remain in Elizabeth’s attention to the reversals of power created by Edward’s favor to Jane, this encounter presents their concerns as “woman’s chat” and levels judgment against women’s political interventions. As the play further develops the “gallant queen” Jane’s self-­effacement, Edward IV pushes its definition of ideal femininity beyond submission to servitude, a model it insists upon for women of the royal court as well as for female citizens of the nation. Throughout the play, Jane’s assessments of her own sinfulness and desire to surrender to punishment become a virtuous masochism that solidifies audiences’ sympathies for her but iterates her sin as deserving of death. As Nora Corrigan notes, Heywood’s play diverges from the ballad tradition by replacing “the public shame that constitutes [Shore’s] punishment” with an “internal sense of guilt,” a “self-­condemnation” that defines her character.61 In her interview with the queen, Jane tells Elizabeth, “In this bright crystal mirror of your mercy, / I see the greatness of my sin the more, / And makes my fault more odious in my eyes” (2e4.10.111–­13). Near the play’s close, Jane accepts Richard’s proclamation forbidding his subjects from assisting her, not as a sign of his cruelty or the changeability of fortune, as in The True Tragedy, but as an appropriate punishment: “God’s will be done. I know my sin is great, / And he that is omnipotent and just / Cannot but must reward me heavily” (2e4.18.114–­16). These words show the extent of Jane’s censure, as they risk making the tyrannical Richard III an instrument of God’s judgment. When two officers deliver her sentence, she laments that such a visible display of public penance cannot do more to remove her sin: “And would to God / The King as soon could rid my soul of sin, / As he may strip my body of these rags” (2e4.18.199–­200). Throughout this spectacle, Jane repeats a refrain of “welcome” to the insults of poverty, friendlessness, and hunger brought on by Richard’s proclamation. Edward IV’s Jane never defends herself as her counterpart does in The True Tragedy, 110  Your Hope Is Gone

and her effusive expressions of shame heighten her affective appeal. Made selfless, virtuous, and remorseful, Jane becomes a tragic example; nevertheless, the play stages a mode of punishment that obscures the political participation of a royal mistress and makes her historical importance visible only through the lens of a domestic treason. Jane’s prodigious contrition is reinforced by the suffering of her husband, Matthew, who like Jane calls attention to the disastrous domestic consequences of her affair and directs audiences and readers to view her character only in the context of her betrayal of him. Jane’s citizen-­hero husband is unique to Heywood, who departs from prior sources in portraying their marriage. More and Churchyard both suggest that Jane’s early marriage to a man she didn’t love led to her infidelity; Heywood intensifies her error by making Matthew a central character who mourns the loss of his wife and identity through Jane’s adultery. Early in the play’s first part, Matthew watches as Jane reads petitions and secures pardons, making asides about the wrong that she cannot redress—­her unfaithfulness—­before he reveals himself in order to shame her for cancelling her “bill” of “obligèd faith” to him (1e4.22.74). Matthew’s asides interpret her intercessory interventions on behalf of citizens within the context of his own dishonor: he watches Jane converse with Aire and Palmer and remarks “all this good doth but gild o’er thy ill” (1e4.22.38). Matthew claims that she cannot ameliorate her transgression against him as she can help Aire obtain a pardon for his son: “Thou canst not say to me so. I have wrong” (1e4.22.44). Jane’s virtuous use of power is continually outweighed by her husband’s assertions, directed at the audience, that her influence over Edward is ineffectual where it truly matters most; in righting the wrong made by a king who uses royal prerogative to steal wives from subjects. Jane’s masochistic self-­chastisement is eroticized into a fantasy of female servitude when it turns to her desire for punishment from Matthew. She accepts Matthew’s indictment and rejection of her—­“Thou wast a wife, now thou art not so” (1e4.22.78)—­and vows to “refuse the pleasures of the court” and accompany Matthew “not as a wife, / Yet as thy slave, since I have lost that name” in order to “redeem the wrong I have done thee / With my true service” (1e4.22.102–­6). Later in the play’s second part, when she Your Hope Is Gone  111

is cast out of London by Richard, penniless and near death, Jane expresses this sentiment again, telling Mistress Blague: O were he here with me to lead this life, Although he never used me as a wife, But as a drudge, to spurn me with his feet, Yet should I think, with him that life were sweet. (2e4.15.66–­69) Both Jane and Matthew acknowledge that she has lost the title of “wife” that bars them from repairing their marriage. Yet Jane’s imaginative reconciliations accept this loss and radically reconceive their relationship. The companionate marriage Heywood invents for them demands female slavery and physical punishment in order to remain a vital category of definition for London’s citizens and a cornerstone of collective English identity. This reframing of women’s roles within the English nation is not only present in the play’s central female character, Jane, but also contributes to the play’s view of royal women, like the duchess and Elizabeth, who are repeatedly compared to Jane and each other in order to redefine their queenship as wholly private. After Jane offers herself as a slave to Matthew, she turns to the possibility of monetary compensation, promising to redress her wrong against him by using her influence over Edward to make her husband wealthy: What is’t with Edward that I cannot do? I’ll make thee wealthier than e’er Richard was, . . . Ask what thou wilt: were it a million That may content thee, thou shalt have it, Shore. (1e4.22.115–­20) Jane’s sentiment here is similar to her counterpart’s in The True Tragedy, where her boasts about emptying the monarch’s coffers underscore concerns that such misuse of Edward’s affection has damaged the state. However, what Heywood’s Shore understands to be power over the monarch is rendered futile by the play’s privileging of companionate marriage. Matthew reminds her that Edward’s intrusion into their marriage cannot be made right through the king’s favor: “I have lost what wealth cannot return . . . The loss of thee 112  Your Hope Is Gone

was more / Than ever time or fortune can restore” (1e4.22.123–­26). Jane’s beneficence as Edward’s favorite is invalidated by her marital betrayal, and her good works are overshadowed because she is unable to free Edward’s people from the consequences of his tyranny, manifested in his own sexual desires and interference in his subjects’ domestic lives. Unable to even steer the king from her bed to his queen’s, Jane can amass riches with a simple request, but she has no power over her own situation or the sufferings inflicted by the king. Edward’s violation of the Shore marriage is a symbolic violation of his relationship with his subjects, as it shows his intrusion into the domestic space where only a husband should rule. Matthew Shore asks the play’s central question: “O what have subjects that is not their kings?” (1e4.22.112). When the property that subjects must share is their wives, the position of royal mistress loses political legibility and becomes instead a sign of both the king’s tyranny over his male subjects and the necessity of excluding female subjects from civic participation. Jane’s citizen advocacy is given more attention in Edward IV than in any other account: her intercessions are based on politically informed decisions and given dramatic urgency, as when she arrives onstage bearing the king’s pardon for Stranguidge’s men, about to be hanged. Her feud with Rufford, a man who publicly shames her like many characters in The True Tragedy do, is initiated when she denies his request for help with his suit to export corn on the basis that it is bad for the poor of England: “I have torn your bill; / And ’twere no shame I think to tear your ears, / That care not how you wound the commonwealth” (1e4.22.64–­66). As Greenberg notes, “Heywood shows his female protagonist suffering pangs of conscience for her adultery and attempting reparation through service to her city and nation.”62 Attentive to national concerns, Jane’s actions are nevertheless framed as ineffective attempts to mitigate the sin of her infidelity. Her motivations are neither ambition nor altruism as suggested by More; instead, they are solely devoted to absolving shame, even while the play insists that such absolution is impossible. It is Jane herself who announces the failure of her good deeds to remove her sins—­“all the coals of my poor charity / Cannot consume the scandal of my name” (2e4.9.34–­35)—­a rhetorical agency that reduces her political power in its presentation of her purely Your Hope Is Gone  113

personal motivations for her good works. Whereas More’s understanding of her possible motives characterizes Mistress Shore as both potentially ambitious and morally superior to Richard in her benevolence to England’s people, Heywood represents Jane as unable to accept rewards because her actions are merely repentance. In a scene that stages More’s account of her refusal to accept compensation, she rejects money from Thomas Aire: “No. Without gifts, God grant I may do good. / For all my good cannot redeem my ill; / Yet to do good I will endeavour still” (1e4.22.35–­37). Though she claims to do good in spite of its inability to redeem her, the emphasis on her error positions her assistance to others as a self-­imposed, and self-­ interested, penance. This description of her actions as attempts at moral cleansing reveals her political interventions as driven by personal desires to wash away sin and reconcile with her husband; Jane thus denies the national importance of her citizen advocacy through her own narrative of regret, even as her good deeds are shown to be valuable to others. In Edward IV, the political acumen and civic participation of women matter only as signs of personal honor or sites of domestic reparation. While The True Tragedy’s Mistress Shore readily evaluates herself as a shame to her country, Edward IV’s Jane, who elsewhere gladly accepts and even amplifies the blame heaped upon her, responds virulently to a similar charge of “traitor” made by Mistress Blague: “When was it ever seen Jane Shore was false, / Either unto her country, or her King?” (2e4.18.144–­45). As in her savvy knowledge of the national consequences of exports, Jane here shows interest in her country’s well-­being. Her insistence that she is faithful to her king and country is notable for its singularity in a play that otherwise reduces Jane to a masochistic penitent. Yet this rousing defense of what she sees as her participation in a national community underscores the greater importance of another kind of falseness: the play conceives of her as a traitor to the commonwealth’s political interests because she is a traitor to the sanctity of its private homes. It thus suggests that the distinction she defends—­between falseness to her husband, which she admits, and falseness to her country, which she denies—­matters little to the national identity that guides interpretation of the Shores’ tragedy. In a play that reimagines English nationhood as located in the citizenry rather 114  Your Hope Is Gone

than the monarch, sexual transgressions against male citizens like Matthew Shore are portrayed as damaging to the commonwealth. Edward IV’s revisions of events highlighted in The True Tragedy transfer Jane’s verbal defenses to other characters in order to deepen her abjection and remorse. Heywood, like The True Tragedy’s anonymous author, gives Jane Shore fair-­weather friends and uses their betrayals as examples of their egregious hypocrisy. Her dearest friend, Mistress Blague, who has previously counseled her to become Edward’s lover, takes the place of Lodwicke, Morton, and the Citizen, rejects Jane in a cowardly fashion, calling her a “wicked liver” and a “strumpet quean” (2e4.18.148, 205), and reneges on her vow to protect her because, she reasons, Shore herself has failed to honor marriage vows. Rufford, earlier denied help because Jane deemed his request to export grain as detrimental to England, returns to taunt her at the end of her life. He speaks lines reminiscent of the Page’s in The True Tragedy: “Faith, wench, I’ll tell thee what: / If thou dost think thy old trade out of date, / Go learn to play the bawd another while” (2e4.20.116–­18). And like the Page, Rufford is corrected with a charge of hypocrisy. Heywood’s Jane does not defend herself directly, as she does in the earlier play; instead her words are reformed into a defense delivered by Aire: “If all thy faults were in thy forehead writ, / Perhaps thou wouldst thyself appear no less, / But much more horrible than she doth now” (2e4.20.123–­25). Heywood thus transfers Jane’s self-­defense in The True Tragedy to the mouths of upstanding male characters. Like Jane’s acceptance of Richard’s punishment as God’s will, this revision values penitence. By including the “voices of not only the fallen woman but also those who attend her fall,” Heywood brings on and offstage audiences together in their pity for Jane, and “sympathy and pardon emerge as appropriate responses to Jane’s fall and repentance.”63 Sympathy for Jane’s character emerges not from a rejection by friends as in The True Tragedy, but from a harsher rhetoric of self-­abnegation that allows others to defend her. Edward IV also redirects specific language from The True Tragedy to provide for Jane better friends who receive greater punishment for their loyalty: Aire goes to the gallows for defying Richard’s proclamation, and Jane’s servant Jockey is whipped. Mistress Blague, however, is also punished Your Hope Is Gone  115

harshly even though she regrets her betrayal of Jane. Thrown out of London by Richard for her early friendship to Jane, she is then denied succor from Aire and Jockey for mistreating her. These revisions adhere to Edward IV’s insistence on a Jane who must always frame her plight in the context of private transgressions rather than political upheaval. She forgives both Mistress Blague and Richard, and finds their treatment of her as well-­deserved because of her own sexual errors. While her counterpart in The True Tragedy and her supporter Aire in Edward IV both see Jane as a mirror that exposes the faults of villainous male figures, Heywood’s Jane describes herself as a looking glass of a different kind: “that whoso knew me, and doth see me now, / May shun, by me, the breach of wedlock’s vow” (2e4.20.54–­55). Following Churchyard’s poem, Jane becomes an example for wives rather than for hypocritical political enemies. The play’s explicit moralizing, which locates the central lesson of her tragedy in her husband’s pain, obscures the historical importance of her civic participation as Edward’s mistress. As Howard and Jesse M. Lander have persuasively shown, Edward IV uses the Shore legend to promote an English nationalism located within a collective, fraternal citizenry that excludes female citizens from national politics through its valuation of domesticity.64 When read in the context of other women proximate to the monarchy, Jane’s story does not so much expose the political importance of domesticity as it underscores the need to domesticate women’s political interventions within this concept of nationalism. As Jane’s own submission to punishment and desire for servitude is fetishized as womanly virtue and Elizabeth Woodville is rewritten within this same conception of apolitical femininity and queenship, we can see the play’s investment not only in censuring Jane’s infidelity but in more subtly censuring the political engagements of royal wives, mistresses, and mothers. When Jane’s self-­indictments are generalized to include warnings about women’s nature, her character models a punitive discourse adopted by the play’s royal women to valorize such self-­abjection as an idealized female quality. After Matthew Shore and his compatriots successfully protect London from the Falconbridge rebellion in the first part of the play, Edward celebrates at the mayor’s home in a fateful visit that initiates the king’s desire for Jane. During this interaction, Edward censures Matthew for refusing 116  Your Hope Is Gone

the knighthood that would have given Jane the title of “Lady” that the king thinks she deserves. As Elizabeth Woodville does earlier, Jane denies any ambition for worldly titles. Moreover, she frames this denial in terms of a correction to popular wisdom about women’s nature: my poor and humble thoughts Ne’er had an eye to such unworthiness; And though some hold it as a maxim That women’s minds by nature do aspire, Yet how both God and Master Shore I thank For my continuance in this humble state—­(1e4.16.95–­100) Jane’s earnest correction of this “maxim” that women aspire to higher status is itself one of many sentiments she must eventually abandon, as when she vows to Matthew that she “will be thy honest, loyal wife. / The greatest prince the sun did ever see / Shall never make me prove untrue to thee” (1e4.8.26–­28). Jane, of course, shortly bends to both Mistress Blague’s disingenuous counsel that Jane and her kin will “Be all advanced to worldly dignity” (1e4.19.34), and Edward’s outright command—­“Thou must, sweet Jane, repair unto the court” (1e4.20.103)—and her protestations of disinterest in titles and professions of faithfulness generate dramatic irony that explicitly implicates all women as either self-­interested schemers or unaware of their own essential weakness. Even Mistress Blague ascribes her own later betrayal of Jane to women’s changeability: “once I loved her [ . . . ] But now I am of another humour; / And women all are governed by the moon, / Which is, you know, a planet that will change” (2e4.18.212–­15). Matthew Shore, whose asides are repetitive, citational reminders of Jane’s errors, also laments female weakness: “O world! He shall deceivèd be / That puts his trust in women, or in thee” (1e4.22.129–­30). While sometimes addressing the unfairness of Edward’s intrusion into his marriage, Matthew primarily interprets Jane’s adultery as a failure natural to her gender: “O, see weak women’s imperfections” (2e4.9.175). In the previously discussed conversation between Mistress Shore and Queen Elizabeth, both women similarly contextualize their own actions in terms of women’s inferiority. Jane “plead[s] my women’s weakness” and Your Hope Is Gone  117

Edward’s “strength” (2e4.10.27) as the cause of her fall, while Elizabeth reconciles with her by admitting that she might also have failed to withstand Edward’s advances: “Alas, I know thy sex, / Touched with the selfsame weakness that thou are” (2e4.10.99–­100). Jane explains her infidelity as the natural outcome of male superiority triumphing over female inferiority, and like Matthew, essentializes her sexual sinfulness as a female characteristic. Elizabeth follows suit; both women reject alternative narratives that might have revealed agency, ambition, and even desire in order to embrace the rhetoric of women’s weakness that produces their reconciliation. In their commiseration over women’s essentialized weakness as the source of their errors, Elizabeth and Jane point to the implicit illegitimacy of their conflated access to the monarch. Heywood thus writes for his female characters a willing sacrifice of political agency in exchange for audiences’ sympathies. Edward IV modifies its narrative sources to critique women’s presence within dynastic monarchy through essentialized discourse about gender, femininity, and adultery, staging the potential pitfalls of the monarch’s royal prerogative, and displaying the source of England’s national consciousness not in its monarchy, but in its people. The play’s account of Edward’s relationship with Jane Shore as a predatory violation that harms rather than helps the people closest to her suggests that while still endorsing royal authority, the play also argues for a new mode of royal governance. Such governance might not rely on personal affection and preferment from the king but on officially codified positions of access and a national narrative that appropriately values the English public as its heart. By positioning Edward as peripheral to the national heart of England, Edward IV demonstrates the problems of dynastic power that fails to fully reward or protect its citizens. In the process of valorizing the suffering of English male subjects and critiquing the mechanisms of dynastic monarchy, the play marginalizes the power of royal mistresses, mothers, and wives by fantastically defining feminine virtue as wholly private, already sinful, and eagerly self-­flagellant. Heywood’s play ends before the Earl of Richmond can wrest England from Richard III’s tyranny, and thus leaves us no clear image of Henry Tudor’s famous marriage to Elizabeth York or its importance for Elizabethan audiences. Perhaps, in 1600, Henry Tudor’s victory and marriage 118  Your Hope Is Gone

could no longer function successfully as a sign of Elizabeth’s blessed rule. As her reign neared an end, Heywood chose not to dramatize the Tudor dynasty’s origin but to stop his play in the turmoil of Richard’s rule, his attention turned toward the dying Jane Shore. Reconciled with Matthew on the brink of death, Jane delivers a final rumination that joyously welcomes her fate because it restores her to her role as his wife: O dying marriage! O sweet married death! Thou grave, which only shouldst part faithful friends, Bringst us together, and dost join our hands. O, living death! Even in this dying life, Yet, ere I go, once, Matthew, kiss thy wife. (2e4.22.102–­6) By reframing the reality of her imminent starvation into a sweet, longed-­ for remarriage, Jane’s speech alters the terms of her death in a manner reminiscent of the women’s scaffold speeches examined by Frances E. Dolan. Finding possibilities for women’s transgressive speech and agency on the scaffold, Dolan traces the paradoxical process by which “women are constituted as subjects who think, speak, and act on the condition that they are represented as transcending bodily suffering and death.”65 Afforded a rhetorical power akin to that of a martyr on the scaffold facing an unjust fate, Jane uses that power to disavow the corporeal pain of death and instead praise it as life-­giving in its mimicry of a marriage ceremony. The grave that joins their hands officiates a second wedding with Matthew, one that emerges from his forgiveness and her imminent erasure into a bygone cautionary tale about “the breach of wedlock’s vow.” Jane’s eagerness for death, and her rhetorical shaping of it as a second, more valuable life measured by its perfect chastity, extends her self-­effacement to its final end point. Edward IV uses Jane to generalize women’s weakness and to replace royal women’s political participation with the valorization of women’s servitude within marriage, a valorization that celebrates slavish drudgery and public penance, desires spousal punishment, and embraces death. By insisting on the foremost importance of private companionate marriage for all women, including its queens, Edward IV stages women’s exclusion from

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politics and national identity and implicitly excludes England’s sovereign ruler Elizabeth I from its vision of ideal queenship. The True Tragedy and Edward IV, like Richard III, reveal cultural anxieties about women’s influence under dynastic structures through their drastic rewritings of narrative accounts that depict women’s legitimate participation in the affairs of the state. The complex revisions of Elizabeth Woodville and Mistress Shore in dramatic accounts of Richard’s reign suggest that playwrights repeatedly struggled to reconcile concerns about women’s unofficial access to the monarchy under dynastic rule with the presence of a female monarch whose own reign ushered in a concept of English nationhood dependent upon the exclusion of women from court influence. However, it was not just the story of Richard III’s dynastic tyranny or the royal women and female favorites of the late Yorkist regime that dramatists reimagined from their narrative precedents to critique their aging queen and caution against female dynastic power. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II modifies the chronicle history material of an earlier period in England’s medieval past in ways markedly similar to Shakespeare, Heywood, and the anonymous author of The True Tragedy. Reckoning with an even more complex historical record about Edward II’s queen consort, Isabel, Marlowe likewise affords sympathy to royal women only when they are relegated to the private sphere and vilifies them when they attempt to participate in dynastic rule. He achieves the same eclipse of royal women’s agency through different means, confirming the striking pattern of adaptation already established here.

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3 From a Noble Lady to an Unnatural Queen Imagining Queen Isabel in Chronicle History and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II

At the close of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, the dead king’s widow and the new king’s queen mother, Isabel (called Isabella in the play), is sent to the Tower by her son upon suspicion that she has participated in her late husband’s murder. The young Edward III publicly rehearses rumors of her role in Edward II’s death and balefully invokes a future trial and potentially greater punishment: Mother, you are suspected for his death, And therefore we commit you to the Tower Till further trial may be made thereof. If you be guilty, though I be your son Think not to find me slack or pitiful.1 The play’s restoration of appropriate monarchical rule is primarily signaled by Edward III’s rejection of Isabel’s maternal claim over him, a rejection that foregrounds the problems of personal influence explored in the play and one that is achieved by a sharp break from Marlowe’s chronicle history sources. Edward III’s pronouncement is a notable revision that gestures toward a harsh punishment, perhaps even execution, not found in the 121

play’s sources. In the narrative historiography of Edward II’s reign, Isabel’s house arrest is described by Richard Grafton and Raphael Holinshed as a perfunctory appeasement of Edward III’s counselors mitigated by her son’s friendly visitations and by John Stow as a financially punitive confiscation of her wealth.2 But Edward’s threat that he will not pity her hangs darkly over the remainder of Edward II, and Marlowe here presents Isabel’s imprisonment as an interim step toward something more ominous that will occur beyond the temporal confines of the play itself. Isabel responds to her son’s speech with her own articulation of a future punishment and ascribes to Edward a desire for her death: “Nay, to my death, for too long have I lived / When as my son thinks to abridge my days” (25.83–­84). A moment later she welcomes what has been presented onstage as a presumptive death sentence, “Then come, sweet death, and rid me of this grief ” and exits the play, her final, inaccurate prediction hinting at an imminent death imposed by England’s new king (25.92). This is an effective moment of stage drama, one that provides a restoration of order to a beleaguered England through the promising initial actions of a king impervious to the emotional demands of kinship, able to reject his undeserving mother in spite of her tears, and markedly different from his weak father, who was notoriously influenced by his private ties to Piers Gaveston and the Hugh de Spencers.3 It is also a weighty manipulation of the historical record, as the historiography that comprises Marlowe’s narrative intertexts about this episode of English history tells a different story about Isabel’s punishment. While the historiographers writing about Edward II’s reign reveal a surprising diversity in their interpretations of the purpose and consequence of her historical punishment—­her land confiscated, she was incarcerated under house arrest until her death—­Marlowe alone hints that Isabel faces deserved death at the hands of her own son.4 Readers eager to emphasize Marlowe’s artistry register this historical revision as a dramatic technique, a bit of evidence that further establishes historical drama as literary art in contrast to baser narrative source material.5 Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, in their study of the sources of Marlowe’s plays, observe that the historical Isabel “got off much more lightly” and see Marlowe’s “alteration of history” as confirmation of Philip Sidney’s 122  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

famous point that “a poet, unlike a historian, may mete out the justice which real life often fails to deliver and so make men fear to be tyrants.”6 Examined in the context of his modifications of narrative historiography, however, Marlowe’s punitive suggestion is not a means of distinguishing dramatic art from history or rectifying the injustices of the past, but part of a pattern of adaptation that constructs—­through the careful selection and rejection of available historiographical accounts—­Isabel’s political influence as deserving of the disciplinary measures he invents for her. Marlovian critics concur that his sources for Edward II were primarily the second editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and Stow’s Annals of England (1592).7 Rarely mentioned in source studies of the play is Grafton’s 1569 A Chronicle at Large, a more prominent intertext for Marlowe’s Edward II than previously acknowledged.8 Like the chronicle historians I have examined in preceding chapters, Holinshed, Stow, and Grafton all use narrative strategies common to the genre—­interjected evaluation, invented dialogue, and interior perspectives that include somatic responses—­to depict Isabel as a political agent of history. Though they share techniques—­and in some cases, common origins—­these texts comprise two contrasting traditions of representing Edward’s queen in narrative historiography. The earlier history of Grafton, strongly indebted to the fourteenth-­century French writer Jean Froissart, constitutes a chronicle tradition that endorses Isabel’s political involvement on behalf of the English nation. An alternative tradition of representation, more critical of Isabel’s queenship, is exemplified by the later chronicle histories of Holinshed and Stow. Emerging from perspectives about Isabel initially shared with Grafton’s historiography, the competing censorious view of Isabel epitomized in Stow’s 1592 Annals of England was the product of a process of revision across multiple editions of two different chronicle histories. This process of revision, visible to varying degrees in the texts of both Holinshed and Stow, reveals an evolution of queenly representation within narrative historiography of the sixteenth century culminating in competing accounts of Isabel’s political power and influence from which later playwrights and historians adapted their texts. Marlowe and Elizabeth Cary, whose work is the subject of chapter 4, skillfully draw from and respond to both the more well-­known tradition of representing From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  123

Isabel found in his most prominent sources, Holinshed and Stow, and the alternative depiction of her found in Grafton’s often-­ignored intertext. The two narrative history traditions exemplified by Grafton and Stow recount, with differing emphases and in some cases omissions or additions, Queen Isabel’s political interventions in the reign of Edward II. Married to Edward at age twelve, the French daughter of Philip IV emerges as a central figure in English politics around 1325, when she travels to France and returns early the next year with a small army. Historiographers vary in their accounts of her motivations for going to France, but her armed return, with her son Edward and Roger Mortimer, is generally described as a response to the undue influence of Hugh de Spencer the Elder, Earl of Winchester, and his son, Hugh de Spencer the Younger, on King Edward. Isabel’s ensuing military triumph resulted in her pursuit, capture and execution of both Spencers, the imprisonment and deposition of Edward II, the coronation of her son as Edward III, and her joint rule, with Roger Mortimer, during her son’s minority. Chronicle histories vary in their assignations of responsibility for the assassination of Edward II, their evaluations of Isabel’s adulterous relationship with Mortimer, and their understanding of her punishment by Edward III. Within the basic contours of these events, historiographers diversely frame Isabel’s actions, motivations, political skill, treatment of her enemies, reception by others, and culpability for the death of her husband. Though they use shared narrative strategies, the chosen foci of each historiographer reveal differing attitudes toward the political interventions made by dynastic queens, and differing conceptions of the role of royal women under the reign of an ineffective and occasionally tyrannous male sovereign. This chapter reads Marlowe’s simultaneously pitiful and unnatural queen in the context of these rich and varied historiographical traditions; I argue that his Isabel emerges as the product of a skillful navigation of available intertexts that is strongly invested in prescribing appropriate queenly behavior as removed from politics, and in censuring queenly attempts at civic participation. Marlowe borrows from Grafton—­who privileges Isabel’s emotional responses—­a focus on the queen’s private grief. He simultaneously rejects Grafton’s view of her as a national heroine, choosing instead to initially position Isabel as a sympathetic victim devoid 124  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

of political concerns. In addition, Marlowe selects from the narrative tradition of Holinshed and Stow hints for the unnatural queen of his play’s second half, who manipulates her status and access to male monarchs to the detriment of England and thus deserves the greater punishment he imagines for her. Marlowe’s revisions of historiography’s royal women are strikingly similar, in process and effect, to the adaptive practices of his fellow playwrights. Like Shakespeare, Heywood, and the anonymous author of The True Tragedy of Richard III, Marlowe coherently revises his sources to transform yet another politically minded queen from chronicle history into first a private victim of betrayed love, and ultimately, into a cautionary tale about the dangers of royal women’s influence. Marlowe thus critiques queenship in many of the same ways his contemporaries do, manipulating the historical record to stage Isabel as an example of the problems of royal women’s political participation. The Chronicle Histories of Froissart and Grafton Richard Grafton’s 1569 A Chronicle at Large is notable in its detailed portrayal of Isabel, which frequently highlights her interior perspective, affective and somatic responses, and political legitimacy. Like the narrative histories of the Wars of the Roses discussed in earlier chapters, it includes interjected evaluation that privileges its featured queen’s virtuous behavior. Isabel is first mentioned at her marriage to Edward, when Grafton notes that “as saith Froisart” she “was one of the goodlyest Ladyes in the worlde.”9 Grafton’s praise is crafted as a concurring opinion with the historical authority of Jean Froissart, whose chronicle Grafton engages with throughout his account, at times interpolating John Bourchier’s (Lord Berners’s) 1523 translation of Froissart’s fourteenth-­century Chroniques into his text verbatim.10 Froissart’s text is notable for its depiction of Isabel, which Claire Sponsler calls “an account of female empowerment” that “casts Isabella in an atypically active part” nearly unprecedented in medieval accounts of queenship.11 Sponsler’s view of Froissart’s Isabel is rarely extended to readings of Grafton’s text, even though the Berners translation Grafton relies upon to frame his interjected praise of Edward’s queen fully retains Froissart’s emphasis on Isabel’s active queenship.12 In fact, through his process of historical selection and his use From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  125

of Berners’s translation of Froissart, Grafton crafts a portrait of the queen as not only active and politically empowered but also as a model of good governance and sovereign authority. A Chronicle at Large assigns Isabel extended interior perspectives to fashion her as a potential dynastic alternative to Edward and justify her rebellion against her husband. The most prominent example emerges in Grafton’s account of Isabel’s journey to France, which initially introduces two different strands of thought on her departure. The first is that Edward “sent ouer the Queene his wife the French kinges sister to entreate an agreement and peace betweene them, as sayth Fabian,” and the second, which Grafton endorses, is a more complicated story, whereby “Sir John Froissart in his historie, sheweth the cause of her goyng to be otherwise” (204). Grafton’s narrative, which has up to this point drawn in part from Robert Fabyan’s 1559 Chronicle, shifts here to interpolate, with some distinctive revision, Froissart’s material about Isabel. Where Fabyan simply notes that the King of France welcomes Prince Edward and his mother and “caused him to tarye . . . lenger than kynge Edwarde was pleased,” Grafton includes and modifies Froissart to craft a vivid episode focused on Isabel’s clever escape to France.13 Grafton credits Froissart with the most accurate “cause of the Queenes goyng into Fraunce,” and Grafton’s version largely adheres to Berners’s translation in its view of Isabel’s grievances and actions. Grafton adds to his source text a more developed interior perspective that underscores Isabel’s well-­founded suspicions about her enemies and her concern for the realm of England: When the Queen (sayth he) perceyued the pride of the Spencers and howe they preuayled with the king, and had caused him to put to death the greatest parte of the nobles of his realme of Englande, and also that they bare towarde hir a sower countenaunce, and she fearing least they should haue put something into the kinges head, that might haue beene to the peril of her lyfe, was therefore desyrous to be out of this feare, and pitiying also the miserable gouernement daylie practiced and used agaynst the whole state and communaltie of the Realme in all kinde of tyrannies and cruelties, by theaforesayde Spencers. (204) 126  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

Grafton’s extended account of Isabel’s logical fears, represented as both personal and political because they encompass fears for her life, son, and kingdom, is a common dimension of chronicle history’s depiction of queens besieged by villainous enemies like Richard III or the Spencers. By representing her thought processes, which include discernment, fear, desire, and pity, as reasoned acknowledgments of her dire situation, Grafton privileges her intersecting political and personal concerns as those of an intelligent and legitimate political agent who might rectify the wrongs of Edward’s abuse of authority. Adding to Froissart’s already notably developed portrayal of Isabel’s valuable political involvement, Grafton invents for her additional interior thought processes and links them to the concerns of the nation. Her perception of the danger the Spencers pose is rooted in their attitude toward her, but it also acknowledges their power over the king, their destruction of a great swath of the aristocracy, and their daily misgovernance, which has produced a series of tyrannies and cruelties against England itself. Thus, Grafton frames Isabel’s thoughts as those that England’s reigning monarch should possess, but does not: care for the nation’s nobility, its queen, and “the whole state and communaltie.” In addition to interior perspectives that privilege Isabel’s awareness of the Spencers and proffer her care for the commonwealth as a sovereign-­like attribute, Grafton also presents her affective responses and her welcome reception by an international community as further proof of the personal and political legitimacy of her impending rebellion. Grafton modifies Berners’s margin description of this episode—­which describes Isabel’s complaint to her brother—­relabeling it “The Quene was honorably receaued in Fraunce” (205) to emphasize a national and familial reception. As he traces her journey to the court of her brother King Charles, Grafton notes how “she was most ioyfully receyued” at each location (204). Grafton conveys Isabel’s tearful reunion with her brother through a special emphasis on her interior feeling: she has “no great ioye at her heart, but that she was so neere to the king her brother” (205). Isabel is in turn solicited kindly by Charles, who holds her right hand and demands “gently of her estate and businesse” (205). She answers him “right sagely,” and at his request describes “all the vilanyes and iniuries done to her by Sir Hugh Spencer” (205). Throughout this sibling From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  127

reunion, Isabel repeatedly attempts to kneel and supplicate herself before her brother, which Charles refuses: “she woulde haue kneeled downe two or three times . . . But the king would not suffer her” (205). These moments of attempted supplication illuminate the symbolic practices of the “new model of intercessory queenship” that, according to Paul Strohm, became increasingly important following “the decline and deinstitutionalization of queenly power in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”14 Strohm identifies this model as petitionary, casting “the queen as one seeking redress rather than one able to institute redress in her own right,” and intercessory, limiting “its objectives to the modification of a previously determined male resolve” through a “regrounded role” that affords queens power “premised on exceptional vulnerability.”15 Isabel’s emotive recounting of her tribulations influences her brother through a display of vulnerability and dependence upon the redress he can offer: Charles listens to “his sisters lamentation, who with teares had expressed her heauie case,” and comforts her with familial reassurances and a promise to provide “some remedy” (205). Isabel’s petitionary supplication is also represented as irregular: it does not appeal to a sovereign husband but to a wider international kinship, and it seeks redress for her own wrongs as well as those of all of Edward’s subjects. Grafton belabors the rejection of her kneeling; it functions as a sign of her astute use of affect to generate sympathy and is evaluated by her brother as beneath a queen who is both his kin and equal, and who should not need to display such vulnerability as a petitioner on an international stage. As discussed in the introduction, the ambiguity surrounding the uses and effects of intercessory models of queenship—­which relied on expectations for feminine behavior and a symbolic distance from the king’s own power—­made it a particularly malleable expression of queenly authority. Grafton’s description of Isabel’s petitionary behavior at the French court acknowledges the power of the queen’s affect and personal relationship with Charles—­both central aspects of successful intercessory queenship—­but it also foregrounds the public nature of her requests and the anomaly of her position in opposition to her husband. Charles’s discomfort with Isabel’s petitionary performance in Grafton’s text suggests that performance does not fully align with the international community’s 128  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

view of her own sovereign power. Grafton traces Isabel’s attempted use of intercessory practices that minimize her authority in order to access the redress she seeks; through his description of the French court’s reception of those practices and his assessments of Isabel’s legitimate autonomy, he restores their more radical political dimensions. Isabel is figured here as a wronged member of Charles’s royal family, a woman who requires personal consolation as well as diplomatic and financial support from France. Her bodily experience of sorrow and grief is recorded as a valid reaction to her current predicament, and the French response to her affect emerges as a fitting familial and international intervention. The French court’s initial honorable reception of Isabel, which befits her status as a queen and acknowledges both the power of her kinship networks and her just grievances, is matched by aristocratic support from England’s nobility that depicts Isabel’s political interventions as welcome to Edward’s subjects. The remaining English barons unharmed by the scourge of the Spencers’ tyranny “assembled themselues together, and with one accord, wrote over into France to the Queene of England,” promising that “they would all drawe to her, and obey unto her and her sonne Edward, and ayde them with all their power, as they were bounde to doe of duetie” (206). Speaking as one mind, they profess loyalty and obedience to the queen’s authority, urging her to raise an army and return to England. The language of duty used to articulate the barons’ relationship with Isabel positions her as a dynastic figure imbued with the power to command and the will of a coalition of the remaining barons, who find under the rule of Edward they are kept in “such feare and awe that they could beare no rule, nor be heard with the king by reason of their authoritie” (206). Grafton thus details Isabel’s sweeping support from the French court and the English barons to depict her ensuing rebellion as one of necessity and justice. Grafton further accentuates Isabel’s broad international support through the queen’s interactions with Sir John of Hainault. Through compelling interjected evaluation of Sir John and invented dialogue between Isabel and the Hainault knight, Grafton positions both historical figures as brave, just embodiments of royalty and nobility. In doing so, Grafton licenses Isabel’s intertwining personal and political motivations for her eventual From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  129

invasion of England and further presents the queen as a potential model of dynastic power. Fleeing once again, this time from France to Hainault upon the secret advice of her cousin Robert Artois, who risks his life to inform her of her brother’s betrayal, Isabel receives assistance from Sir John, the Earl of Hainault’s brother. Isabel’s invented dialogue—­taken from Froissart—­identifies the courtesy, honor, and gentility of Sir John as contrasts to the betrayal and malice of the Spencers: Then the Queene sayde, sir I finde in you more loue and comfort then in all the worlde. And for this that you haue sayde and affirmed unto me, I thanke you a thousand times: and if you will do this that you haue promised, in all curtesie and honour I and my sonne shall be to you for euer bound, and the whole realme of England shall consider your great curtesy and gentlenesse, and it is right that it should so be. (208) Isabel’s speech expresses not only fitting gratitude but a promise of reciprocity, a bond between ruler and servant that requires sovereigns to appropriately value the devotion of their subjects and allies. It is a bond that Edward II has conspicuously failed to honor, and Isabel’s dialogue positions her as the dynastic figure who best understands this reciprocity. Her words also marry Isabel’s cause to that of England, positioning her as a quasi-ruler whose challenge to the villainous counselors surrounding her husband is an act of bravery the nation will recognize and repay. Isabel speaks as a sovereign figure, promising that England will rightly value Sir John’s contributions. Indeed, Grafton later details how well the queen keeps her promise, to Sir John and her hired army as well as to the faithful English soldiers who flock to her cause and the nobility who pledge obedience to her. This segment of A Chronicle at Large invokes the queen’s reception by an international community as well as her befitting gratitude for those who assist her in her affliction. Not only Sir John but the queen herself becomes a clear contrast to the Spencers and to Edward II, who is guilty of devaluing the contributions and advice of his barons and failing to reward them properly. Grafton depicts Sir John’s responses to Isabel through further use of somatic affect and interjected evaluation that legitimate the queen’s cause as 130  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

well as the affective bonds that undergird her international support. When Isabel “who was right sorrowfull, declared (complaynyng most piteously) unto him with wepying eyes her miserable case,” she produces a similar physical and emotional response in her champion, who pities her so much that “water ran out of his eyen” and he promises to sacrifice his life to restore her estates (207–­8). Sir John, described by Grafton as a “courageous and lusty knight,” is represented as a heroic figure who will not “chaunge his purpose” to assist the queen even though the “enterprise was right high and perilous” (209). He instructs his brother the Earl of Hainault—­as well as Grafton’s readership—­on the chivalric values of the nobility in a speech to the court: “all knightes ought to ayde, to their powers, all Ladyes and domeselles, chased out of their awne Countries, being both without counsayle and comfort” (209). Sir John emphasizes the royalty of Isabel as a quality that makes her part of a larger dynastic community and her queenship as a position that demands support. She is “so highe and noble a Lady,” “daughter to a king, and descended of a royall king: we be of her bloud, and she is of oures” (209). In Sir John’s recognition of the injustice of Isabel’s treatment by Edward and the Spencers—­“I beleue verily that wrongfully and synfully this Lady hath bene chased out of England, and also her sonne” (209)—­he promotes a convincing view of her plight that extends upon Grafton’s own interjected evaluations. The narrative voice of Grafton’s history valorizes Sir John as a chivalric ideal of a knight who cannot be bribed like Charles; readers are invited by interjected praise of Sir John to accept his judgments of Isabel. The extended emphasis Grafton devotes to Isabel’s actions in France and Hainault portray her affective and somatic responses as entwinements of the personal and political; they produce sympathy for her as a private individual, and in the support they solicit from international male figures, they license her coming invasion of England as a justified, principled rebellion that might restore order to the nation. When Grafton’s historical narrative recounts Isabel’s return to England and her defeat of the Spencers, it positions her as a victorious rescuer of her people who is sanctioned by God and overwhelmingly supported by both the aristocracy and the citizenry of the nation. As Gwynne Kennedy notes, Grafton “depicts Isabel’s victory as a blessing to a relieved people,” From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  131

in keeping with a narrative that “makes no reference to anger, vengeance, or hostility in the queen’s character.”16 A providential tempest sends their boat off course and away from certain defeat in battle, a sign of God’s “secret and most wonderfull worke” and mercy, and the English barons, when they realize the queen has landed in England, “appareled themselues in all haste” to come to her son Edward and crown him king (210). After the Earl of Lancaster joins Isabel, countless members of the aristocracy “came from one part and other, Erles, Barons, knightes, and Esquiers, with so many people that they thought themselues out of all perilles, and their power still encreased as they went” (210). The power of Isabel’s forces, amassed from a wide coalition of England’s elite, is described as unquestionable, and King Edward flees to Bristol when he hears “howe the Barons and Nobles of the realme resorted unto her with great powers from al partes” (210). Grafton records Isabel’s baronial support as a national rallying around the queen that is a commensurate and necessary reaction to her arrival in England. A Chronicle at Large notably includes Isabel’s great welcome by the citizens as well as the nobility. Tracing her triumphant pursuit of the Spencers through England, Grafton follows Froissart in noting that “the Queene and all her companie” were greeted enthusiastically: “in euery towne where they entered, they were receyued with great feast and honour, and alwayes their people encreased” (212). In Hereford, “the Citizens receauved her very honorably with great solemnitie” (213), and in London, she is “very honorably and ioyfully receaued” (214). Even when Grafton details the London execution of Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, which other accounts record as an episode of mob violence, his narrative emphasizes the larger fault of the Spencers and the bishop’s betrayal of Isabel. The citizens, “who had an euill opinion of him, for bearying with the Spencers, whom the people hated as euill as the Devill, and also for betraiying of the Queene and the Prince,” capture and execute Stapleton, send his head to Isabel, and “promise that they would obey whatsoeuer shoulde please the Queene and her sonne to commande them, and that the Citie was quiet and at their commaundement” (211). The historical account of the violence in London during this period of 1326 is belied by Grafton’s depiction of the citizenry, who in his telling act only against the queen’s enemies and then 132  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

quietly await her command.17 The common people’s violence is blamed on the Spencers’ misrule, and it is immediately transformed into obedience to Isabel. Grafton observes that through the assistance of Sir John and the English nobility, Isabel’s rightful position is restored: “Queene Isabell conquered agayne all her estate and dignitie, and put unto execution her great enemies, to the great comfort and reioysing of the greatest part of the realme” (213). Isabel’s victory is achieved through the support of men Grafton depicts as honorable and welcomed by a grateful English citizenry, and it is figured here as a restoration of order and justice to the realm. Framing Isabel’s victory as a restoration of her right and a rectification of the wrongs done to England by her enemies, Grafton also depicts her as a ruler who embodies justice and relies on good counsel. Her punishment of the Spencers emphasizes a collaborative, transparent due process that relies upon the collective wisdom of the aristocracy Edward II has perilously ignored. This view of Isabel’s just treatment of the Spencers is markedly different from the later historiography of Stow who, as I will show, indicts her for a unilateral cruelty against her enemies and a lack of due process. In Grafton’s history, when the elder Hugh Spencer is arrested, he is publicly charged by the marshal of Isabel’s army, Thomas Wage: openly he red and rehersed their deedes in wrytyng: and turned him unto another auncient knight, that he should prove him guiltie, and to shewe his opinion what was to be done with those persons, and what iudgement they should haue for such offences. Then the sayd knight cousayled with others, that is to say, with the Barons and Erles, and knightes there present, and then he reported their opinions and iudgementes. The which was, that they had well deserued death for their diuerse and horrible deedes that they had committed. (212–­13) Isabel’s decision to execute the Spencers is a dispassionate and collective decision, made publicly with the help of England’s peers and based on the evidence of the Spencers’ actions. The execution of Spencer the Younger is likewise represented in Grafton, though less extensively. He “was brought foorth before the Queene and all the Lordes and knightes. And before him in wryting was rehersed all hys deedes, unto the which he would make no From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  133

maner of aunswere. And so was he then iudged by playne sentence” (214). Grafton includes here the details and language of something like a judicial process: the written charges are read publicly, the accused is given an opportunity to defend himself, and a judgment and sentence are produced. A Chronicle at Large belabors Isabel’s fair punishment of her enemies as a sign of her good collaborative governance. This view of Isabel as a ruler who embodies the qualities of monarchy lacking in Edward II is extended through her rewarding of faithful service and listening to wise counsel. She discharges her army and pays her men well for their efforts, calls a parliament at the suggestion of her advisers, and participates in the consensus decision that Edward III must be crowned king “so that he would take about him, sage, true, and good counsalle, and that from thencefoorth the realme might be better gouerned” (215). Grafton thus identifies the problems lately afflicting England as the bad instruction of the Spencers and the goals of the queen’s faction as a restoration of good governance. The accord with which Isabel and the nobles band together to oppose the Spencers is extended to their fair treatment of Edward II; Grafton notes that “[i]t was also agreed” by Isabel, her parliament, and her son that “the olde king his father should be well and honestly kept as long as he lyued, accordyng to his estate” (215). Depicting Isabel as a central political actor in a justly conceptualized and achieved invasion of England, Grafton stridently demonstrates that her intersecting personal and political motives are honorably centered on the common good, and her actions are just, wise, and largely participatory. Her government, unlike Edward’s, is rooted in a reciprocity with England’s aristocracy and a value for order, counsel, and decency extended to one’s political foes. Grafton’s extensive inclusion of Berners’s translation of Froissart offers the most thoroughly positive and sympathetic account of Queen Isabel in narrative historiography. Closely following his translated French source, Grafton strays from it only briefly to soften, in both language and historical narration, the rare moments when Froissart critiques Isabel. These modifications are most visible in Grafton’s account of Isabel’s role in Edward II’s death and her punishment by her son, which all the chronicle histories and Marlowe’s play address in some way. Grafton lays the crime of Edward’s 134  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

murder squarely at Mortimer’s feet, never mentioning or associating Isabel with the letters Mortimer sends to Edward’s captors hinting that they should kill the deposed king. Grafton’s narrative, as it tells the story of Mortimer’s fall and execution, alludes to Isabel only briefly, and skeptically conveys Froissart’s report of her affair: “sayth he (it was openly reported) that Isabell the kinges mother was with childe by Mortymer” (222). Isabel is mentioned only once more in connection to the listed charges against Mortimer, drawn from Fabyan, the fifth of which was “that he was more secret with Quene Isabell the kings mother, then was to Gods pleasure or the kings honour” (223). Grafton minimizes the claims of an adulterous relationship between Isabel and Mortimer, and never links her to Edward’s death. Even the punishment Isabel receives from her son Edward III is depicted as softly as possible here, instigated by the advice of his counsel and tempered by the comforts to which Grafton’s narrative voice indicates she is due: [Edward III] commaunded that the Quene his mother should be kept close in a Castell, and to haue appointed to attende upon her certaine Ladies and damoselles, and knightes and Esquires according to her estate, and certaine landes were assigned wherewith to maintayne her noble estate during her lyfe: But speciall commission was geuen, that she should not departe out of the Castell, onlesse it were to see such sportes as sometime were shewed before the Castell gate for her recreation. Thus this Lady led there her lyfe meekely, and once or twice a yere the king her sonne came to visite and see her. (223–­24) Isabel’s house arrest is mitigated by attendants, financial support, courtly recreation, and visits from her son, suggesting that her punishment is a perfunctory one. Grafton never weighs in on her guilt or innocence regarding the report of adultery, but his detailed description of the appropriate comforts provided for her and her amiable relationship with Edward III resonates with his thorough praise of her as the early heroine of the narrative. He once again alleviates the harshness of Froissart’s language, replacing his source chronicler’s more adamant “but in no wyse, she shulde nat depart out of the castell” with the more neutral “special commission was geuen that she should not departe out of the Castell” (224).18 Grafton’s manipulation From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  135

and extension of his own source material reveals a pattern of investments in Isabel as a sympathetic figure and a legitimate political agent whose interventions into dynastic politics promise to restore national order and offer valid counterpoints to the misgovernment of Edward II. In spite of the different, selective uses of historical material about Isabel made by a number of chroniclers that result in very different depictions of her, Grafton’s use of interjected evaluation, interior perspective, and invented dialogue, also found in Froissart, is not anomalous to early modern chronicle histories’ depictions of queenship in general and Isabel in particular. As I demonstrate in the following section, the chronicle historians most influential to Marlowe after Grafton—­Holinshed and Stow—­provide both contrasts to Grafton’s influential version as well as complicated continuities. Attention to the dynamism of these chronicles reveals two divergent traditions in historiographical representation of Isabel, one actively legitimating her political agency, culminating in Grafton’s selective revisions of Froissart, and one that moves toward rendering her motivations illegitimately passionate, culminating in Stow’s 1592 Annals of England and eventually, Marlowe’s stage play. As divergent in their sympathies for Isabel as they are, these traditions still share a great deal in their representative strategies and conception of Isabel as a politically powerful figure, and reveal much about the selective processes of chroniclers, playwrights, and political historians looking to Edward II’s reign for narratives with promising topicality. Examining these contrasts and continuities can help us better understand the remarkable varieties of queenly representation available in chronicle histories, later drama’s modifications of its sources to stage queenship, and finally, as I examine in chapter 4, Cary’s use of both genres’ intertextual models in her own narrative history. The Chronicle Histories of Holinshed and Stow Holinshed’s Chronicles is the most well-­known chronicle history frequently used by dramatists, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, writing history plays for the early modern stage. Understanding the Chronicles’s intertextual historiography of Edward II’s reign requires attention not only to the portrait of Isabel found in the expanded 1587 version Marlowe likely used, but to 136  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

the way in which that edition revised the 1577 Chronicles’s portrayal of her. As numerous scholars acknowledge, the text’s authorial attribution is a misnomer; the construction of Holinshed’s Chronicles was a collaboration among a consortium of chroniclers, and the 1587 expanded edition was the result of editor Abraham Fleming’s extensive revisions, which vastly increased the scale of the text, the superiority of its printed presentation, and the presence of moralizing commentary throughout.19 Among the newly recruited historians who contributed to the 1587 edition was chronicler John Stow, whose own 1580 and 1592 histories were important sources for both Marlowe and Cary, and whose famous feud with Richard Grafton shaped Stow’s own representative choices about Isabel and likely prevented Grafton from participating in the development of the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s text.20 Most assessments of Isabel’s vacillating representation in the Chronicles ultimately evaluate her portrayal as negative or neglected.21 I build upon such approaches, which rightly acknowledge Isabel’s characterization as ambivalent, by situating that characterization in the context of the diverse chronicle histories of Edward II’s reign and the effect of substantive revisions surrounding Isabel’s political involvement made to the 1587 edition. By considering the features of chronicle historiography Holinshed shares with Grafton in his portrayal of Isabel, as well as the elements of composition and revision that distinguish the Chronicles as part of a different, more condemnatory tradition of representing the queen, I reveal an additional pattern of change in the depiction of queens within historical narratives. The Chronicles’s ambivalent account of Isabel marks a transitory moment in the changing depictions of queenly participation from chronicle history to stage drama: from chronicle history’s frequent investments in royal women’s perspectives and licensing of their political action found in Froissart and Grafton to the more gender-­biased and censorious texts of Stow, which are taken up and extended by Marlowe as part of stage drama’s critiques of women’s civic participation. Diverging in its chosen historical details—­it eliminates many aspects of Isabel’s journey to France and Hainault and devotes greater attention to the queen’s progression through England—­Holinshed’s Chronicles nevertheless From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  137

shares with Grafton’s Chronicle at Large the common narrative strategies of interjected evaluation, interior perspective, and invented dialogue that approve Isabel’s political interventions.22 The Chronicles initially evaluates Isabel’s participatory role in monarchical governance as appropriate and unfairly squandered by Edward and ascribes to her wise, privileged knowledge of her enemies. The text also assigns her public language that frames her cause as communal, and uses the invented dialogues of her supporters to corroborate her national interests. Finally, the Chronicles reiterates and even extends Grafton’s depiction and interpretation of Isabel’s final punishment. The Chronicles’s inceptive presentation of Isabel’s crucial role in Edward’s reign, in both the 1577 and the 1587 editions, is as Barbara Kiefer Lewalski notes, as a mediator and faithful counselor to her husband.23 The text observes that Isabel “euer sought to procure peace, loue, and concord betwixt the king and his lords,” associating her with behavior that stands in sharp relief to Edward’s embittered animosity toward his peers.24 As the Chronicles reports the Spencers’ rise to power, it laments that the “queene for that she gaue good and faithfull counsell, was nothing regarded,” underscoring Edward’s mistreatment of his queen as akin to his mistreatment of his nobles, who should also be allowed to offer wise counsel to their monarch (1587 332). While Holinshed’s Chronicles is more critical of all aspects of the rebellion against Edward than A Chronicle at Large, these interjected evaluations, which praise the queen for her legitimate political influence and indict Edward for failing to allow her access to his sovereign ear, echo Grafton’s fuller articulations of the justice of Isabel’s rebellion against her husband. Holinshed’s text, like Grafton’s, also privileges Isabel’s thought processes as she considers, from France, the possibility of reconciliation with her husband: Which (as the proofe of the thing shewed) seemeth to be most true, for she being a wise woman, and considering that sith the Spensers had excluded, put out, and remooued all good men, from and besides the kings councell, and placed in their roomes such of their clients, seruants and freends as pleased them, she might well thinke that there was small hope to be had in hir husband, who heard no man but the said Spensers, which she knew hated hir deadlie. (1587 336–­37) 138  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

Isabel’s consideration of her predicament here—­she is aware of her enemies’ personal and unfounded animosity toward her and rightly wary of trusting her overly influenced husband—­follows her counterpart’s in A Chronicle at Large. Moreover, the Chronicles’s interjected evaluation within these lines licenses Isabel’s wisdom and positions her response as one of critical discernment that the historiographers remind us is proved correct: “as the proofe of the thing shewed.” Isabel’s perspective links her exclusion to that of the barons; like them, she is barred from providing counsel to her husband and denied the rightful access she should have under a dynastic model. Holinshed’s Isabel fosters a conscious self-­presentation as a savior of England reminiscent of Grafton’s view of her: she “marched forth to seeke the aduersaries of hir and of the realme, as she bruted it” (1587 338). Devoting extended attention to the rival royal factions’ dueling public proclamations, the Chronicles links Isabel’s proclamation to the cause of the nation and blames her enemies for its “present trouble”: “The queenes proclamations on the other part willed all men to hope for peace, the Spensers publike enimies of the realme, and the lord chancellor Robert Baldocke, with their assistants onlie excepted, through whose means the present trouble was happened to the realme” (1587 338). The queen’s first letter to the mayor of London reiterates this perspective, and attributes the goal of their landing in England as “onelie for the honor of the king and wealth of the realme, meaning hurt to no maner of person, but to the Spensers” (1587 338). The Chronicles depicts a queen who voices her own investments in political action as communal and national; however, it stops short of interjected evaluation that might produce a narrative perspective—­like that achieved in Grafton’s text—­that concurs with Isabel’s self-­presentation. While the Chronicles does not provide the frequent interjected evaluations that endorse Isabel as a national savior in Grafton’s Chronicle at Large, it does foreground the voices of others who depict her as such. A prominent feature in Holinshed, not previously found in Grafton, and later modified for censorious effect in Stow’s Annals of England, is the Bishop of Hereford’s speech to the Englishmen joining Isabel’s army. Hereford’s From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  139

praise of Isabel assigns to her just motives very like those Grafton previously imagined for her: Declaring that the queene and hir sonne were returned onelie into England, to the intent to persecute the Spensers and reforme the state of the realme. And sith then that they now were come in maner to an end of the tyrannie of most naughtie men, and of the danger that might growe dailie thereof, he exhorted them with patient minds to beare the small trauell that remained in pursuit of the enimies; and as for reward, they might looke for all things by the victorie, and the queenes liberalitie, whose loue was such toward the common-­wealth, as she onelie applied all hir endeauours and doings to the aduancement thereof. (1587 339) The Isabel of Hereford’s speech is a committed public servant, invested in reform and the expulsion of tyranny, a bestower of rewards to her supporters, and a political force acting for the common good of the realm. Hereford’s speech is not an evaluative narrative voice, but it is the public response of the queen and her faction to the outpouring of baronial support that produces her army of English soldiers. Holinshed’s narrative is less interested than Grafton’s in representing Isabel’s interiority and evaluating her mistreatment as a legitimate political justification for her rebellion, but it does document her sweeping national support and affords her moral superiority through her interest in the welfare of the nation. A final valuation of Isabel shared by both Grafton and Holinshed emerges when the Chronicles turns to Isabel’s punishment by Edward III, which Marlowe so inventively constructs as a looming off-­stage death. The Chronicles largely reiterates Grafton’s narrative, framing her house arrest in a manner that mitigates its punitive realities and positions her continued relationship with her son as evidence of her minimal complicity in the events surrounding Edward II’s death. As in Grafton, Edward III confiscates his mother’s lands and revenues and limits her international travel, but generously provides for her financially. Added to Grafton’s perspective is an ascribed palliative motive for Edward’s infrequent visitations to his sequestered mother: she was “appointed to remaine in a certeine place, and not to go elsewhere

140  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

abroad: yet the king to comfort hir, would lightlie euerie yeare once come to visit hir” (1587 349). Holinshed’s punished Isabel is, like Grafton’s, still worthy of the attentions of her son, who honors the maternal relationship that his counterpart in Marlowe’s play disavows. The similar narrative strategies used by Grafton and Holinshed to privilege Isabel’s perspectives reveal more common ground between these historiographers than is usually noted, and demonstrate that diverse historical narratives relied upon similar and coherent techniques of representation invested in valuing queenly political involvement. Yet the Chronicles also contains significant differences in approach to Isabel that are amplified through subsequent revisions. The 1577 Chronicles never directly situates Isabel as a national rescuer nor Edward as deserving of deposition, as Grafton does, though it frequently claims the well-­being of the realm as one of the queen’s motivations. Mitigating her powerful and legitimate queenly participation are alternative articulations of Isabel’s motivations as vengeful and a developed account of her adulterous relationship with Mortimer that ascribes him undue power over her. The 1587 edition advances this competing view of the queen through additions that represent Isabel’s power as potentially harmful to the nation, blame her for Edward II’s death, evaluate her behaviors as overly passionate, and associate those behaviors with an essentialist view of women’s nature. Whereas Grafton crafts the story of the queen’s arrival in France, her brother’s reception and betrayal, and her support from the Earl of Hainault with vivid drama and a marked focus on Isabel’s affective responses and desire for justice, Holinshed glosses over these events, reporting Charles’s banishment of his sister dispassionately and the earl’s assistance with skepticism. The Chronicles never ascribes to Isabel a desire to escape the Spencers and solicit aid from her brother. Rather, she “willinglie tooke upon hir the charge” of entreating peace with her kin, and, after being “ioifullie receiued,” she quickly mediates an accord (1587 336). Edward summons her home shortly after, and Isabel tarries, a delay explained by a plethora of potential causes: she is stayed by her brother, perhaps, or she “had no mind to returne home, bicause she was loth to see all things ordered out of frame

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by counsell of the Spensers,” or “whether (as the manner of women is) she was long about to prepare hir selfe forward” (1587 336). This introduction of multiple possible explanations from competing sources, including the specious and perhaps laughable one that she is taking her time packing her bags, is a distinguishing feature of Holinshed’s text. So is the moralizing commentary that follows, added by Fleming to the 1587 edition, which laments “that such diuision should be betweene a king and his queene” (1587 336).25 The 1587 Chronicles drastically revises Holinshed’s prior 1577 account of Isabel to attribute such division to women’s nature, which is first driven to bad behavior by evil counsel and female fancy: But (alas) what will not a woman be drawne and allured unto, if by euill counsell she once assaulted. And what will she leaue undoone, though neuer so inconuenient to those that should be most deere unto hir, so hir owne fansie and will be satisfied: And how hardlie is she reuoked from proceeding in an euill action, if she haue once taken a taste of the same. (1587 336) Women, according to this reflection, are the most susceptible to bad advice and their own whims, and cannot be dissuaded from evil once they are exposed to it. It is an ill-­fitting statement, not easily mapped onto the historical example of Isabel’s desire to remain in France or the text’s previous accounts of her political motivations, which remain the same as in the 1577 edition. Fleming’s moralizing evaluation is an abstraction that becomes further distanced from the historical subject it references through a commonplacing citation drawn from classical drama. The Chronicles concludes its aphoristic assessment of women with a Latin quotation, “reported by the comedie-­writer,” identified as Plautus: Malè quod mulier incœpit nisi efficere id perpetrat, Id illi morbo, id illi senio est; ea illi misera miseria est: Si bene facere incœpit, eius eam citó odium percipit, Nimisq, pauca sunt defessa, malè qua facere occœperint; Nimisq, pauca efficiunt, si quid ocœperint benefacere; Mulieri nimiò malefacere melius est onus, quàm benè. (1587 336) 142  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

[What wickedness a woman undertakes, unless she is able to complete it, It is a disease to her, it is old age, it is the most miserable of miseries. If she begin to do well, soon hatred of it takes hold of her. Very few who have begun wickedly are tired, And very few complete if they have begun to do good. For a woman it is by far a better burden to do evil than good.]26 In this reference, women’s stamina for wickedness far outweighs their stamina for goodness. Wickedness becomes an insatiable emotional desire and produces an attendant visceral hatred of goodness; women are here subject to the whims of their basest emotions. Felicity Heal and Henry Summerson cite this addition to the 1587 text as a prominent example of Fleming’s frequent use of classical sources to underscore his evaluations of historical figures and his invitations to readers to interpret history in particularly censorious ways.27 This memorable commentary is perhaps the most frequently cited quotation about Isabel from Holinshed; while its inclusion in the later edition does, as I will show, strongly influence Stow, Marlowe, and Cary, it reads individually like an anomalous and grafted-­on exegesis.28 Read alongside the rest of the 1587 Chronicles’s additive evaluations of Isabel, it suggests a progression toward narrative and dramatic representations of queenship that use essentialist arguments about gender and deny the political legitimacy and agency afforded to queens elsewhere in early modern historiography. Ambivalence about Isabel’s political legitimacy is deepened through other passages in both editions of the Chronicles that advance personal grudges as her strongest motives for rebellion. After detailing Edward’s proclamation demanding Isabel and his son return or be declared enemies to England, Holinshed again calls attention to multiple explanations, noting that historians vary in their accounts of Isabel’s motives, some indicating she planned to return to England while “others write, and that more trulie” that a displeased Isabel, frustrated that her husband “suffered himselfe to be misled by [the Spencers’] counsels,” planned her homecoming “not to be reconciled, but to stir the people to some rebellion, whereby she might From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  143

reuenge her manifold iniuries” (1587 336). The death of Edward’s brother the Earl of Kent, an event that precipitates Edward III’s break from Mortimer and the queen, is brought about in both editions “through the malice of the queene mother” (1587 348). Both wronged against and vengeful, Isabel is represented ambivalently, suffering from the collateral damage of Edward’s misrule while simultaneously confirming early modern views about women’s wickedness. Concerned, as is A Chronicle at Large, with Isabel’s interior thought processes and motives, the Chronicles nevertheless uses language of vengeance and injury that demonstrates a change in characterization of Isabel’s political interventions: they are no longer motivated by legitimately intersecting personal and political concerns but by a sense of private injury exacerbated by the vengeful nature of women. Changes to the 1587 edition of the Chronicles that modify Isabel’s characterization occur not just in the text’s added assessment of Isabel’s womanish passion and vengeful motives; they are also found in its accounts of her adulterous relationship with Mortimer and her responsibility for Edward’s death. Both editions of Holinshed highlight their relationship in ways that foreground Mortimer’s historical influence and decrease the queen’s political import, an emphasis Marlowe extends in his stage play. The destruction of the Spencers and their allies is procured “by the lord Mortimer of Wigmore, who hated them extreamelie, by reason whereof they were not like to speed much better, for what he willed the same was done, and without him the queene in all these matters did nothing” (1587 340). Driven by a personal grievance just as malicious as the queen’s, Mortimer influences Isabel to act upon his will. Her own vengeful desires passively give way to his, she does nothing without him, and he becomes the actor instigating historical change. The Chronicles likewise details Isabel’s personal distress over Mortimer’s arrest as a sign of her immoral affection and their cohabitation as a sign of his influence over her: But whosoeuer was glad or sorie for the trouble of the said earle, suerlie the queene mother tooke it most heauilie aboue all other, as she that loued him more (as the fame went) than stood well with hir honour. For as some write, she was found to be with child by him. They kept 144  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

as it were house togither, for the earle to haue his prouision the better cheape, laid his penie with hirs, so that hir takers serued him as well as they did hir both of vittels & cariages. (1587 349) A margin note attributes this account of Isabel and Mortimer living openly together to John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. While the passage hedges her love for Mortimer—­“as the fame went”—­and her pregnancy—­“For as some write”—­with skeptical language, it rehearses the rumors and posits their shared households as evidence of his control. The 1587 Chronicles increases moral censure of Isabel’s reported affair with Mortimer by adding to the 1577 edition a moralizing reflection: “Of which misusage (all regard to honour and estimation neglected) euerie subject spake shame. For their manner of dealing, tending to such euill purposes as they continuallie thought upon, could not be secret from the eies of the people” (1587 349). Fleming’s evaluative statement includes a confident assertion about the interior thoughts of Isabel and Mortimer, a claim that such dealings cannot be hidden from the public, and a universal condemnation of the couple by all the subjects of the realm. The Isabel of this 1587 edition is a far cry from Grafton’s heroic champion welcomed by adoring English subjects. Fleming uses the censure of the citizen subject to invite readers’ judgments against her general “misusage,” a term that prefigures the misuse—­of a queen’s body, finances, and royal position—­ that Marlowe’s play stridently highlights when it adapts the Chronicles’s increasing attention to Isabel’s adultery. Even more conspicuous a revision is Fleming’s added comments ascribing responsibility for Edward II’s death to Isabel. Both editions describe the queen sending her husband “courteous and louing letters with apparell and other such things,” noting that she refuses to see him on account of the “peoples displeasure, who hated him so extreamelie” (1587 341). The 1587 edition adds to this paragraph’s end “Howbeit, the with the rest of hir confederats had (no doubt) laid the plot of their deuise for his dispatch though by painted words she pretended a kind of remorse to him in this his distresse, & would seeme to be fautlesse in the sight of the world.” (1587 341). Interjected evaluation and interior perspective combine here From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  145

to portray Isabel as a dissembling villain who pretends care and concern for her husband even while she plots Edward’s death. Strongly directing his readers’ interpretations through these prominent revisions, Fleming’s editorial hand moves beyond selection of historical detail to direct censure of Edward’s queen; his revisions to the 1587 edition thus modify the effect of the positive interjected evaluations of her character and the descriptions of her legitimate political involvement visible in the 1577 text. While the narrative strategies shared with Grafton that establish Isabel as a legitimate political player remain present even in the 1587 edition of the Chronicles—­Fleming’s hand here is only additive—­Fleming’s inclusion of censorious and gendered commentary about Isabel renders her representation highly ambivalent. This process of editorial revision, from one individual chronicle edition to another, and from earlier complexly positive portrayals to later starkly negative ones, can be charted, even more obviously, in the work of Stow, one of the chroniclers responsible for assisting Fleming with the 1587 expansion of Holinshed’s Chronicles.29 Though he initially crafted a series of short abridgments in the 1560s that shared source material, perspectives, and even identical language about Isabel with Grafton’s own chronicle abridgments, Stow ultimately creates in his two full-length chronicle histories an Isabel unrecognizable in comparison to Grafton’s noble queen. Stow gradually rejected the view of Isabel’s queenship he originally shared with his historiographer rival through successive revisions of his abridgments and chronicle histories, further demonstrating the trajectory of changing queenly representation within chronicle histories of the late sixteenth century. Stow, like Holinshed, made significant revisions to his second edition of chronicle history, the 1592 Annals of England, by expanding upon his 1580 The Chronicles of England to increase censure of Isabel’s political influence and characterize her motives in gendered terms. The digression about women’s evil nature that appears for the first time in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles becomes a governing principle for Stow’s own revised text. Stow’s history limits Isabel’s political legitimacy and recasts her affective responses as irrational and her political decisions as personal vendettas. Stow dismisses Grafton’s view of Isabel’s rebellion 146  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

as a principled response to Edward’s misrule, and instead represents her invasion as a personal disobedience that leads to a breakdown of order and authority. The English citizens of Stow’s narrative are a violent mob who kill indiscriminately, and the international participation Grafton frames as a justification of Isabel’s political action becomes “a power of Aliens” who aim to “put [Edward] downe from his kingly dignitie.”30 Stow recasts Isabel’s persecution of the Spencers as revenge rather than justice, emphasizes her paradoxical manipulation of and subservience to male rebels to portray her as a threat to the realm, heightens her complicity in her husband’s death and the scandal of her affair with Mortimer, and evaluates her motives and actions as the result of her inferior gender. Stow initially excises the political context of Isabel’s motives and decisions so crucial to Grafton’s narrative through a truncated retelling of her journey to France, which he minimizes in favor of details that focus on Edward’s perspectives and suffering. He attributes this trip to Edward’s command—­“King Edward sent the Queene his wife unto her brother the French king”—­and he never assigns Isabel a desire to escape the Spencers nor frames her negotiations overseas as acts of political statecraft (Annals 337). He briefly aligns his narrative voice with her interior perspective when he notes her awareness that the French have been bribed by her enemies—­ “The Queen perceiuing that the nobles of France were corrupted with gifts sent out of England, so that she could trust none of them, secretly conueyed her selfe and her sonne to the earle of Heynald, desiring ayde of him” (Annals 337–­38)—­but otherwise eliminates this aspect of her characterization. Glossing over the international reception and sympathy for her cause accentuated in Grafton with a mention that the Earl of Hainault “receiued and intreated her very honourably,” Stow limits discussion of her public support to one short phrase (Annals 338). Isabel’s refusal to return is similarly truncated but unequivocally evaluated: “she woulde not come agayne wythout Roger Mortimer and other Nobles that were fledde out of England, and especially for the hatred she bare to the two Hugh Spencers, the king in displeasure banished them both, and all other that tooke their partes, whereupon many fled ouer the Seas to the Queene” (Annals 337). Isabel’s feud with the Spencers is motivated by her hatred rather than their From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  147

mistreatment of her and mismanagement of England. Employing emotive language to frame her motivations as negatively passionate and eliminating the extensive context provided by both Grafton and Holinshed for Isabel’s animosity toward the Spencers, Stow’s narrative separates her actions and motivations from politics and associates them with a personal grudge. Stow frames Isabel’s invasion of England as a perversion of her military power, the effects of her own willfulness, and the persuasion of the vilified Bishop of Hereford. He reinterprets Isabel’s progression, represented by Grafton and Holinshed as a pursuit of the Spencers, as a persecution of the king: “The Queene being now of great power under her sonnes banner (persecuting his father) being naughtily perswaded, commaunded the hoste to goe forward in pursuing the king” (Annals 339). In Stow’s account, Isabel has been wickedly manipulated to use her power to damage the monarchy. Whereas Holinshed’s inclusion of the Bishop of Hereford’s Oxford speech emphasizes Isabel’s devotion to the commonwealth and her desire to reform tyrannous forces in England, Stow’s 1592 edition adds Hereford’s sermon as a notable example of her overreaching invasion. Stow calls Hereford “the cheife deuisor of so wicked a dissension” and accuses him of inciting unlawful rebellion against a lawful king when he preaches that “a vaine and slouthfull head,” should be removed from power (Annals 339). Hereford is repeatedly cast as wicked in the Annals of England, primarily due to his education of Isabel: he is labelled her “wicked Schoolemaister,” an association that simultaneously attributes her active decision-­making to the bad influence of a male authority figure and registers the dangerous power she wields as a rebellious queen consort with an army at her heels (Annals 342). Stow’s final assessment of Isabel’s punishment of the Spencers, added to his second edition, further evaluates her actions as petty, violent revenge. The 1592 Annals of England reframes the deaths of the Spencers to incorporate interjected evaluation about Isabel and new accusations about her mistreatment of them. Spencer the Elder is depicted by Stow as a victim who “committed himselfe and all his unto the mercy of the angry and outragious woman” when the queen arrives in Bristol (Annals 339). Isabel is directly responsible for commanding the earl’s torturous death, “without question or answere,” which is described in detail (Annals 340). 148  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

This addition to the 1592 edition amplifies a parallel description of Hugh Spencer the Younger’s death, present in both the 1580 and 1592 editions, that squarely attributes his execution to Isabel and diverges sharply from prior historiography: the earl is brought before the queen by a group of Welshmen, and “without sentence or iudgment” he is drawn and quartered on her orders (Annals 340).31 In Grafton’s text, the barons and earls report their opinions on the case and confer about their judgment, so that the executions are depicted as just, collectively sought, and transparent to all. Holinshed’s Chronicles produces a narrative neutrality about the queen’s role in the Spencers’ executions, reporting them as either historical events with only oblique, generalized commentary about the dangers of angering those in power or only implicating Mortimer.32 Stow, however, follows neither precedent, rendering the Spencers’ deaths as the capricious crimes of a dangerous woman. In addition to revisions that deepen Isabel’s cruelty and malice toward the Spencers, Stow’s 1592 Annals of England inserts evaluative commentary that depicts Isabel not only as directly responsible for Edward II’s death, but also as malignantly desirous of it. Treating Edward, “depriued of his royall Crowne and dignitie,” with clear sympathy, Stow describes Edward’s life as comfortable under the custody of his cousin the Earl of Leicester until Isabel’s viciousness intervenes: But the fierce and cruell woman being troubled with many thinges, taking counsell of her wicked Schoolemaister Adam de Orleton, bishop of Hereford, she had an answere of him, which did not greiue her alittle, that was, that the Earle of Leicester did take pity uppon Edwarde his coosin. [ . . . ] It was therefore decreed by the cruell woman the Queene, through the subtil deuise of her sayde Schoolemaister, that Thomas of Corney, and John Maltrauers [ . . . ] should carrie Edward the olde king about whither they woulde, so that none of his well willers should haue accesse unto him. (Annals 342) In Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles, which introduces new accusations implicating Isabel in Edward’s death, the queen also has a hand in removing the king from the Earl of Leicester’s care. However, her reasoning is depicted From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  149

differently: she is informed “that the erle of Leicester fauored hir husband too much, and more than stood with the suertie of hir sonnes state,” a danger to Edward III’s rule that she answers reasonably by appointing new custodians for the deposed king (1587 341). In Holinshed’s formulation, it is the Bishop of Hereford—­“whose hatred toward [Edward] had no end”—­who instigates the change of ward (1587 341). Stow’s account of Isabel’s role in the mistreatment of her deposed husband generally follows Holinshed’s, but it differs in the motivations it ascribes to the queen. Ignoring the political maneuvering that other historiographers see as the cause of her participation in the death of Edward, Stow repeatedly characterizes her actions as cruel. Isabel is both overly powerful and overly influenced by bad counselors, her political involvement rooted not in the good of the commonwealth but in her own vain desires, motivated by an intrinsic cruelty and directed by a subtle patriarchal teacher whose manipulations she is not wise enough to discern. Adding in 1592 his repetitive assessments of Isabel as a “cruell woman” to his 1580 account of her persuasion by the machinations of her schoolmaster Hereford, Stow unearths the origins of her political meddling and links them through his interjected evaluation to essentialized sixteenth-­century views of female behavior. Stow’s Isabel seems a caricatured vengeful woman; her overreaching authority functions in his narrative as a nightmare of dynastic power used to ill effect. As a queen mother of a sovereign in his minority, she has the political influence to act upon the capricious vengeful motives that Stow vividly assigns to her. The narrative frames her influence as both illegitimate and dangerous, suggesting the problems of a dynastic model that allows irrational women like Isabel access to, and sometimes control over, their sovereign kin. She embodies the worst qualities of a simultaneously manipulated and powerful woman when she subtly instructs her own schoolmaster, the Bishop of Hereford: Isabell his wife taking it greeuously that her husbands life (which shee deadly hated) was prolonged, made her complaint to her Schoolemaister Adam de Orleton, saying that shee had certaine dreames, the interpretation whereof she misliked, which if they were true, shee feared 150  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

lest, that if her husband be at any time restored to his olde dignitie, that hee would burne her for a traitor, or condemne her to perpetuall bondage. (Annals 343) Isabel’s hate for Edward is unexplained and her desire for his death acute; her dreams of punishment at the hands of Edward are either superstitious, faulty evidence for his assassination or a pretext for her to demand it. Stow makes Isabel and Hereford squarely responsible for Edward’s violent death. While the Chronicles’s 1587 revision asserts that Isabel and her conspirators are behind the plot to assassinate Edward, Stow’s narrative reiterates this assertion and adds to it a personal and capricious motivation that underscores Isabel’s wickedness. Ostensibly motivated by fear but shown through narrative interjection to be driven by hate for Edward, Isabel is censured both for passionately acting on the witchlike whims of her dreams and for consciously using those dreams to cold-­bloodedly manipulate Hereford. Stow’s other substantive contributions to recasting Isabel’s queenship emerge from his account of Mortimer’s capture and execution. Mortimer’s capture is so diversely reported by historians that even Fleming opts not to speculate on it in the Chronicles, allowing Holinshed’s assessment of too many conflicting reports from the 1577 edition to stand in the 1587 expansion: “the manner of his taking I passe ouer because of the diuersitie in report thereof by sundrie writers” (1587 349).33 Stow, on the other hand, reports Mortimer’s arrest in both editions of his text as a key moment of licentious drama, drawn from Holinshed’s evaluation of the couples’ cohabitation as dishonorable and featuring Isabel as its most ridiculous actor. After widespread rumors that “the Queenes Paragon” sought “to destroy the kings blood” emerge, Edward III and his allies plot to capture Mortimer (Annals 349). The king’s close advisers enter Isabel’s chamber with swords drawn while Edward hides out of sight from his mother; the group catches Mortimer with the queen “readie to haue gone to bedde” (Annals 350). The noblemen who arrest Mortimer “ledde him out into the hall, after whome the Queene followed, crying Bel filz, bel filz, ayes pitie de gentil Mortimer, Good sonne, good sonne, take pitie vppon gentle Mortimer” (Annals 350). Given a rare moment of invented dialogue, Isabel is rendered From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  151

a morally corrupt and powerless joke, pleading with a son she “suspected . . . was there, though shee sawe him not” (Annals 350). The familial ties that in Grafton and Holinshed produce Isabel’s comfortable house arrest are finally severed in Stow’s version, where her son’s confiscation of her lands and minimal financial support contain no traces of the continued access to the king she is afforded by other historiographers. It is this severing of her maternal connection to the king, initiated here in Stow’s narrative, which Marlowe eventually exploits to foreground the rejection of queenly power as an important condition for the construction of English national identity. Stow’s view of Isabel takes cues from Holinshed’s ambivalent portrayal of her, an unsurprising affinity given Stow’s close proximity to Fleming’s editorial oversight of the 1587 edition. Yet he adds to the Chronicles’s basic account of Isabel’s character a censorious interjected evaluation of her as a “fierce and cruell woman” (Annals 342) that emphasizes her gender as a source of her irrational anger and thus more fully critiques the dynastic power afforded to queen consorts than either edition of the Chronicles, ultimately constructing a contrastive portrait to Grafton’s view of her as the “goodliest of ladies” (355) who is also a principled political leader and champion of the nation. Many of the most salient features of Stow’s portrayal of Isabel, including his indictments of her as a tyrannous figure driven to execute the Spencers without due process by emotions that are attached in his narrative to her gender, are new additions to his 1592 version of the text. To a surprising degree, the later revisions Stow makes to his chronicle history echo, in effect, the revisions made by Fleming in the 1587 Chronicles. This pattern indicates that not only did sixteenth-­century chronicle histories diverge significantly from one another in their approaches to Isabel, but that those histories were gradually revised toward a new view of queenship as a potentially harmful mode of access to political power for women unfit to participate in the public sphere. The import of Stow’s revisions within this evolution of narrative historiography can be further clarified by an examination of the shared genesis of the two traditions of queenly representation. Though the full-­length chronicle histories of Stow and Grafton display two different approaches to portraying Isabel, they were not simply created as separately evolving 152  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

perspectives relying on wholly different source material. Famously engaged in a bitter feud from 1563 until Grafton’s death in 1573 over their respective chronicle history abridgments, these historiographers’ ideological grappling about historical veracity impinged upon their representations of Isabel.34 Stow’s account of Isabel’s queenship in his 1560s abridgments begins with, and then moves decisively away from, his adversary’s use of Froissart as a key source, chosen emphases of historical details, and positive view of Isabel toward the fierce and cruel woman of the 1592 Annals of England, a progression driven in part by intellectual and commercial rivalry. Stow’s early abridgment, A summarie of Englyshe chronicles (also variously titled The summarie of English chronicles), printed in four editions from 1565–­1567, uses the same verbatim depiction of Isabel that appears in Grafton’s own first abridgment, An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England, printed in three editions from 1563–­1564. While Grafton and Stow accused each other of plagiarism, the view of Isabel shared by their early texts likely comes from their simultaneous use of a source, Thomas Cooper’s Chronicle, printed in 1560 by Grafton himself.35 Stow’s early abridged accounts of Isabel record her departure to France, invasion of England, execution of the Spencers, and the deposition and death of Edward II in a brief two pages. All four versions minimize or eliminate Isabel’s relationship with Mortimer and her complicity in Edward’s death, features that become prominent in his longer histories of 1580 and 1592; the executions of the Spencers, so crucial to vilifying Isabel in his Annals of England, are only briefly reported without any commentary identifying them as extralegal or irregular.36 These early abridgments also include the manifold explanations for Isabel’s journey to France that are a distinguishing feature of Grafton’s and Holinshed’s expanded histories but absent from Stow’s own full-­length texts: Kynge Edwarde sent his wyfe Isabell to entreate wyth her brother Charles for peace, or (as Froisard sayth) the Quene her selfe fleyng the tyranny and mischief of ye Spencers, fled with her yong sonne Edwarde into France, and was gentiliy receiued of hir brother, which made greate promise to ayde hir against the tyranny and iniury of the Spencers.37 From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  153

Stow invokes Grafton’s most valued source—­Froissart—­to present Isabel’s desire to escape the Spencers’ tyranny as her primary motive, producing a narrative voice that acknowledges her flight as justified and well received by the international community Grafton foregrounds. No mention is made of Charles’s betrayal, but the abridgments further recount how “Quene Isabell by the ayde and help of syr John of Heynald” returns to England, where she receives the support of “the Nobles and the commons gathering in greate numbre.”38 Skipping over the events that become central to his later full-­length histories, Stow’s abridgments present a cursory sketch of a queen who flees the injurious persecution of Edward’s favorites, driven not by hatred or personal grievance but by their mistreatment and “tyranny,” a word strenuously applied by both Grafton and Holinshed in their longer texts to license Isabel’s political interventions and here repeated twice in the space of one sentence. Primarily descriptive rather than evaluative, Stow’s early abridgments nevertheless conceptualize a view of the reign of Edward II that is very like Grafton’s 1569 Chronicle At Large and directly at odds with his own 1592 Annals of England. Both Grafton and Stow printed additional abridgments into the 1570s; whereas Grafton’s later short texts continue his approval of Isabel’s queenly participation, Stow’s later abridgments demonstrate his evolving critique of her character. Grafton’s view of Isabel in his 1569 A Chronicle at Large, first visible in the cursory portrait of his 1560s abridgments, is a seamless expansion of an established perspective achieved by following Cooper’s own source cue and interpolating much of Berners’s translation of Froissart.39 Grafton’s last abridgments, printed in 1570 and 1572 just before his death, continue this perspective by blending the language of the early 1560s abridgments with new details taken from the full-­length history. Stow’s next set of revised abridgments, which begin with his 1570 A Summarie, demonstrates greater variation. The 1570 Summarie expands the story of Isabel’s journey to France, return to England, and pursuit of the Spencers from two to eight pages, and it debuts the view of Isabel to follow in his 1580 Chronicles by excising Froissart’s explanation for her journey to France and accusing her of “condemn[ing]” Spencer the Younger to “die without any aunswere” because of her hatred for the king’s enemies.40 Without the detailed focus 154  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

on Edward’s mistreatment by Isabel and Hereford he later develops in his full-­length chronicle histories, Stow’s 1570 abridgment newly blames Isabel for the king’s death—­“ he was cruelly murthered in the Castle of Barkley, by the practice of the Queene his wyfe, and the Lorde Mortimer”—­as well as for Kent’s execution.41 Edward III’s confiscation of her lands and reduction of her yearly allowance in these revisions also prefigures Stow’s account of her punishment included in his two full-­length histories. In his 1575 revision, Stow includes a report that Mortimer was “taken in the night season, in the Quenes chamber.”42 Stow’s 1570s abridgments thus decisively reject the view of Isabel, taken from Cooper and essentially the same as Grafton’s, found in his own 1560s abridgments. The fierce and cruel queen of Stow’s 1592 Annals of England evolved from a version of Isabel that was at first quite literally the same as Grafton’s. The two alternative representations of Isabel that characterize the chronicle history traditions emerged from an initially shared source, language, and perspective that minimizes Isabel’s adultery and complicity in Edward’s death and depicts her political action as a justifiable response, acknowledged and supported by an international community, to the political tyranny of the Spencers. Reprinting the abridgments rapidly, in response to the pressures of a commercial market, Stow and Grafton changed the content of their similar, short texts very little from year to year in the 1560s.43 But when given the opportunity, beginning with his next set of revised abridgments, to fill in the brief skeleton of Edward II’s reign, Stow moved as far away from Grafton’s queen as he could. As Alfred Hiatt’s analysis of the historiographers’ feud demonstrates, Stow established his historiographer’s identity by vociferously defining it in opposition to Grafton.44 Rejecting his rival’s view of Edward’s reign and their initially shared source material, Stow transforms Grafton’s heroine into his own villain, and thereby produces a version of history with markedly different ideological emphases than those of his commercial and intellectual foe. Chronicle history of the late sixteenth century—­and its diverse accounting of royal women—­is the result of complicated revision of the historical record driven in part by the political, commercial, and personal investments of its historiographers. Queenship was an important site of contest for historiographers navigating From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  155

both the polemical acts and the palimpsestic nature of late sixteenth-­century history writing. As these extensive chronicle histories were written and revised in successive editions in the last decades of Elizabeth I’s rule, their representations evolved away from licensing royal women’s perspectives, emotions, and political participation and began to use gendered discourse and essentializing assumptions about women’s behavior to greater censorious effect. Marlowe’s Edward II steps into this discussion through a skillful reworking of its narrative intertexts that produces yet another vision of queenly power. Inconstant Queenship in Edward II Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II was first performed in 1592, just after Stow’s revised Annals of England, with his strongest critiques of Isabel, was printed.45 The play’s vision of Isabel as both a lamentable victim and unnatural queen is the product of Marlowe’s careful selection of details and perspectives from the competing historical traditions exemplified by Grafton and Stow. Marlowe isolates the interiority and sympathetic suffering of Grafton’s queen from the political context which establishes her as a national savior in narrative history to instead stage Isabel as a private victim of her husband’s neglect. Critics who contrast Edward II’s queen to her earlier iterations in chronicle history don’t often identify Marlowe’s innovative use of Grafton’s history, but they frequently perceive Marlowe’s greater focus on Isabel’s private passions as an adaptation of source material that better values women. Georgia E. Brown argues that Edward II privileges the private emotion that is absent from the masculine chronicle tradition, and reads this revision as recuperative of the historical women who are associated with such privacy.46 Joan Parks argues that Marlowe’s modifications of chronicle history turn Isabel from a public figure into a queen defined by her adultery in order to clarify how “the public, political world is constituted and determined by private forces.”47 As these critics rightly observe, the play differs from its sources in its unique interest in the private affections of its primary characters, including its expanded attention to Isabel’s personal desires.48 Read in the context of Marlowe’s careful revisions, however, this difference in focus ultimately underscores the unique dangers of queenly 156  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

power and implicitly argues for royal women’s relegation to an imagined private sphere by portraying Isabel’s political power as illegitimate and assigning her vengeful motives gleaned from Stow’s chronicle. The play’s critiques of queenship are thus achieved by Marlowe’s use of the chronicle traditions available to him in narrative historiography: demonstrating clear preferences for Stow’s censorious account of Isabel’s gendered behavior, he also skillfully reframes Grafton’s focus on her suffering to reduce her political import. To a remarkable degree, Marlowe’s play hews to the pattern of selection from narrative history that I have noted in the historical drama of Shakespeare, Heywood, and the anonymous author of The True Tragedy. These late Elizabethan plays all distinctly manipulate their source intertexts, and in doing so, produce characterizations of royal women that simultaneously reveal anxieties about female dynastic power and attempts to circumscribe women’s political interventions. Edward II initially figures Isabel as a sympathetic victim driven by wholly private concerns when she vies with Edward’s first favorite, Piers Gaveston, for the heart of her husband, a focus on competition for Edward’s love that finds no precedent in either chronicle tradition.49 She confides in Mortimer, who catches her fleeing, that she goes “Unto the forest, gentle Mortimer / To live in grief and baleful discontent” because “my lord the king regards me not / But dotes upon the love of Gaveston” (2.47–­50). Hearing of the barons’ plans to exile Gaveston again, Isabel checks their desires, promising to “endure a melancholy life” (2.66) rather than Edward “be oppressed by civil mutinies” (2.65). She explicitly tells Mortimer, “for my sake, / Forbear to levy arms against the king” (2.81–­82), initially appearing as a peacemaker who sees rebellion against her husband and sovereign as a greater evil than either his mistreatment of her as his consort or his disregard for the English nobility. She is depicted suffering a personal wrong that she must honorably endure, but her eventual affair with Mortimer is already highlighted through their use of affectionate terms and private conversation. She relies on his private desire for her to influence his actions, and the military action she eventually participates in is framed from the outset as traitorous rebellion damaging to rather than restorative of the commonwealth. Marlowe’s queen is driven by a desire for a personal relationship with her husband, and her From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  157

own early words evaluating political intervention against Edward condemn her later decisions as a civil mutiny. Edward II extends this attention to Isabel’s private emotions through a careful selection of details from Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large. Isabel’s physical experience of grief as she laments her own mistreatment is strongly indebted to the interior perspective assigned to her in Grafton’s text, but it is also newly isolated from its political context. Mistreated publicly by both Gaveston and her husband, Marlowe’s Isabel is given a mournful monologue that emphasizes her personal devotion to Edward: “witness the tears Isabella sheds, / Witness this heart, that sighing breaks for thee breaks, / How dear my lord is to poor Isabella” (4.164–­66). Alone onstage moments later, Isabel presents a soliloquy wherein she wishes Hymen’s cup “had been full of poison” or that Edward’s arms had stifled her when he first embraced her upon their marriage (4.174). She imagines filling “the earth / With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries” like Juno, but realizes she must entreat the barons to recall Gaveston—­against the best interests of the nation and her own happiness—­and thus be “forever miserable” (4.178–­79,186). Kennedy observes that Isabel reacts to her plight with “sorrow and passivity” and that Marlowe “gives the queen sorrowful complaint as the vehicle to express her discontent.”50 Notably, the play’s emphasis on “women’s associations with weeping, pity, and forms of verbal lament” is achieved by modifying, and ultimately departing from, a chronicle precedent that establishes such personal, physical response to suffering as part of a larger validation of Isabel’s international political interventions.51 Akin to Grafton in its presentation of Isabel’s somatic response to grief, the play nevertheless produces stage lamentations that highlight the emotional costs of using her status as queen in the service of her corrupted spouse. Rather than addressing an international community of nobles that in turn licenses her political interventions, as Grafton’s grief-­stricken queen does, Marlowe’s Isabel speaks only to a silent stage audience, and her tears and sighs effect nothing. While both accounts register Isabel’s somatic responses and evoke sympathy, the import of such responses changes drastically when Marlowe stages it.52 Marlowe’s Isabel, in contrast to her chronicle counterpart, privileges her own personal motivations—­including her jealousy—­for the restoration of 158  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

her marriage above any political motivations, and she acts upon Edward’s ruinous requests for her to use her position as queen consort at great cost to the country. Isabel is a sympathetic, wronged wife, but her use of her queenship is portrayed as shortsighted, undertaken at the behest first of her manipulative husband Edward for his own selfish end, and finally, at the behest of her ambitious lover Mortimer. Her triumphant orchestration of Gaveston’s repeal is achieved through a combination of her use of royal position, her personal pleading, and her suspiciously sexual influence over Mortimer. Edward’s pleasure in her success—­“Repealed? The news is too sweet to be true” (4.322)—­is immediately leveraged by Isabel for the personal reconciliation she desires: “But will you love me if you find it so?” (4.323). Edward rewards her with embraces and kisses, but his affection is contingent upon Isabel’s use of her status to advocate for Edward and Gaveston: “For thee, fair Queen, if thou lov’st Gaveston” (326). Her role in this scene is to enable a manipulation of the barons to recall a corrupt favorite who is already divisively and purposively antagonizing the crucial relationship between Edward and his nobles. She is a victimized wife, the play suggests, but her power as queen is misplaced and misused, illegitimately employed without concern for the English nation that Grafton so strongly emphasized as a motivating factor in her decision-­making. When Isabel demonstrates political efficacy in the play, that efficacy is shown to be motivated by her own personal suffering and in opposition to the well-­ being of her country. Marlowe further limits Isabel’s role as Edward’s queen consort by foregrounding the personal dimensions of Isabel’s affair with Mortimer. This emphasis—­and his later staging of Mortimer’s undue influence over her—­diverges from Grafton, who largely ignores their relationship and Mortimer until assigning him the whole blame for Edward’s death. Indebted to Holinshed and Stow, who conclude their histories of Edward’s reign with expanded accounts of Isabel’s infidelity, Marlowe nevertheless goes beyond these sources to make her affair both more prominent and inevitable. Edward repeatedly and publicly accuses Isabel of sleeping with Mortimer from nearly the beginning of the play, calling her a “French strumpet” and “too familiar with that Mortimer” (4.145, 154), a charge that seems to drive From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  159

her to fulfill her husband’s accusation. Isabel’s vehement denials are leveled publicly—­“Heavens can witness I love none but you” (8.15)—­and revealed as genuine in her subsequent soliloquies: “that these tears that drizzle from mine eyes / Had power to mollify his stony heart, / That when I had him we might never part” (8.19–­21). However, her private lamentations give way to a visible transfer of affection, as when she tells Mortimer she is “tired with haling of my lord / From Gaveston” (8.26–­27) and frames her sudden attraction to him as the result of her loss of Edward’s love: So well hast thou deserved, sweet Mortimer, As Isabel could live with thee forever. In vain I look for love at Edward’s hand, Whose eyes are fixed on none but Gaveston. (8.59–­62) Initially displayed as unfair, Edward’s accusations of adultery are proven right. Isabel is goaded into unfaithfulness by Edward’s rejection of her love, and while the spousal mistreatment she suffers evokes audiences’ sympathies, both cause and effect are identified as personal, emotional responses. Like Edward IV’s depiction of the enmity between Queen Elizabeth and Jane Shore, Edward II locates Isabel’s animosity toward Gaveston as an individual sexual rivalry separated from its potential political ramifications. The play figures personal jealousy as the heart of her antipathy and a major motivation for both her conflict with Gaveston and her relationship with Mortimer. In both chronicle history traditions, the relationship between Isabel and Mortimer is a primarily political alliance that only develops into an illicit relationship after Edward II’s death. In Edward II, Isabel’s affair becomes a private reaction to Edward’s spurning of her, a personal relationship that has disastrous effects on the nation while simultaneously diminishing her into an unchaste, whorish wife. While both chronicle history traditions situate Isabel’s spousal mistreatment and subsequent military action within the larger context of Edward’s misgovernance, Marlowe extends Stow’s view of her rebellion as treasonous through her own dialogue. When she briefly addresses the civil conflicts between Edward and the baronial class, Isabel’s words become self-­condemnatory, as they insist upon the absolute authority of 160  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

even tyrannical monarchy and thus frame her own later political actions as illegitimate rebellion. The language Isabel uses to condemn civil war employs conventional tropes of hierarchal authority: “Unnatural wars, where subjects brave their king. / God end them once” (11.86–­87). While these lines have been read as a sign of Isabel’s dissembling—­she lies when she speaks against the rebellion she is about to undertake—­in the context of patterns of dramatic adaptation that reveal royal women frequently condemning their own political actions, they function as a self-­incrimination. The play uses Isabel’s own voice to censure her later actions and signals to an early modern audience aware of the basic impending historical events a condemnation of those actions as unnatural rebellion. Like The True Tragedy’s Queen Elizabeth and Edward IV’s Jane Shore discussed in chapter 2, Edward II’s queen unwittingly censures her historical counterpart’s political participation. Her legitimacy as queen is established only by her suffering and victimization and is removed when she takes up an unnatural war and braves her husband. When Marlowe stages Isabel’s flight to France, he provides both historical explanations for her journey available in his source narrative historiography—­her solicitation of her brother’s help and Edward’s diplomatic mission—­but he eliminates the queen’s own political investments in either one. In soliloquy, Isabel explains that “My son and I will over into France / And to the king my brother there complain / How Gaveston hath robbed me of his love” (8.65–­67), but in her next appearance, Isabel brings letters and a messenger to Edward to inform him of her brother’s seizure of Normandy, and Edward instructs her “You shall go parley with the king of France” (11.71). Gone are the manipulative machinations of the Spencers so prominent in Grafton, replaced here by a conflation of Edward’s favorites and by Isabel’s singular focus on the loss of Edward’s affection. So vividly drawn in Grafton as a daring escape from the Spencers, the journey is neither an example of Isabel’s intellect nor of her role as peacemaker. Marlowe reconceives this crucial episode by minimizing the political influence and intelligence Isabel possesses in narrative historiography and amplifying her preoccupation with Edward’s love. From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  161

Edward II likewise emphasizes the failures of Isabel’s visit to France rather than her diplomatic successes, and it reframes her cause as unjust through reports of her motives. Isabel enters scene fifteen in defeat, lamenting to her son that “our friends do fail us all in France; / The lords are cruel and the king unkind. / What shall we do?” (15.1–­3). Skipping over her brother’s initial concern for her and the international outpouring of sympathy detailed in Grafton’s narrative, Marlowe depicts Isabel as an isolated outcast separated from the communal support that justifies her actions in Grafton’s narrative. Two scenes earlier, Spencer Junior sketches out the basic historical facts of Isabel’s eventual return to England when he sends the messenger Levune to “bestow that treasure on the lords of France, / That therewith all enchanted, . . . all aid may be denied / To Isabel the Queen, that now in France / Makes friends, to cross the seas with her young son / And step into his father’s regiment” (13.45–­52). Spencer’s report proposes Edward’s overthrow rather than the removal of the Spencers and the restoration of good governance to the nation as Isabel’s primary goal. The use of report rather than dialogue strips Isabel of an interiority that in narrative historiography assures readers of her stalwart devotion to English justice. Marlowe’s play simultaneously excises the international voices of support emphasized in Grafton’s historical tradition and reports Isabel’s motives as overreaching ambition, devoid of the moral imperative that Grafton assigns her. An encounter with Sir John of Hainault similarly strips Isabel of her political agency. When Sir John greets the English fugitives, he speaks to Edward III: “How say you, my Lord, will you go with your friends / And shake off all our fortunes equally?” (15.19–­20). The young Prince Edward becomes the active decision-­maker, “So pleaseth the Queen my mother, me it likes” (15.21) while Isabel frames her despair and hope in terms of her son: “O my sweetheart, how do I moan thy wrongs / Yet triumph in the hope of thee, my joy” (15.27–­28). Her maternal and spousal roles become her primary signification; she moans her son’s wrongs and hopes for his success, but she is never portrayed as able to act effectively for her son and country. While dramatizing some of the basic material about Isabel’s travels to France important to narrative historiography, Marlowe transforms the queen into a private figure driven by personal emotion, 162  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

often acting against the best interests of the nation, and with little agency even during those moments when Grafton’s precedent offers a radically different view of her. In the play’s second half, its plot aligns more directly with those historical events of Edward II’s reign that foreground Isabel’s political importance in both chronicle history traditions. Marked by a shift in Isabel’s affections—­ from her unrequited love for King Edward to her adulterous relationship with Mortimer—­the play’s concluding action continues to depict her concerns and motives as wholly personal. Isabel’s influence is strengthened, but the play evaluates that influence as dangerous and illegitimate because her selfish motives are directly linked to her gender and at odds with the nation’s well-­being. This transition from a figure who initially solicits sympathy as a wronged wife and lamentable victim to an avenger appearing both innately cruel and overly subject to Mortimer’s influence is often perceived as an inconsistent and divided characterization of the queen. Critical approaches to Isabel’s representation in Edward II necessarily grapple with what Kennedy calls “a severe lack of coherence” in the queen’s character that generates “strikingly diverse responses by literary critics.”53 These diverse responses restore order to her puzzling representation through critiques of her as villainous or readings that advocate for her transgressive power.54 Such opposing readings of Marlowe’s Isabel are as pervasive as those of Cary’s queen, which I discuss in the following chapter. However, these apparent inconsistencies in Marlowe’s characterization of Isabel can be traced to his thoughtful selection of source material from two divergent chronicle history traditions. In the context of Marlowe’s navigation of his narrative precedents, his divided representation of Isabel coheres as a critique of women’s access to political power and as part of a larger pattern of Elizabethan historical drama’s adaptive staging of historiography’s queens. While Edward II substantially draws from Stow’s condemnatory view of Isabel in its second half, the play’s staging of the queen’s military invasion initially appears most indebted to Grafton’s account of a principled ruler acting on behalf of the English nation. Isabel’s arrival in England is announced with a public speech to her nobles and soldiers that frames her cause as a communal political concern: From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  163

Now, lords, our loving friends, and countrymen, Welcome to England all. With prosperous winds, Our kindest friends in Belgia have we left To cope with friends at home. A heavy case, When force to force is knit, and sword and glaive In civil broils makes kin and countrymen Slaughter themselves in others, and their sides With their own weapons gored, but what’s the help? Misgoverned kings are cause of all this wrack, And, Edward, thou art one among them all, Whose looseness hath betrayed thy land to spoil And made the channels overthrow with blood. Of thine own people patron shouldst thou be, But thou—­ (17.1–­14) The queen’s speech employs a conventional trope of civil war as kin-­killing and individual self-­destruction, and laments the heavy case that has brought them all to the brink of a damaging internal “broil.” She finds no other alternative, however, and squarely blames Edward, whose looseness has betrayed not just her and his peers but the land itself, spoiling it and filling its channels with blood. Gone is her early self-­indictment of unnatural war precipitated by subjects who “brave their king,” replaced with a censuring of “misgoverned kings” and an implicit acceptance of the validity of subjects who resist tyranny in a sovereign ruler through armed rebellion. Sounding a great deal like the Earl of Richmond at the end of Richard III, Isabel makes use of a tested narrative of the damaging effects of civil war to publicly sanction her military action. She employs the rhetoric of early modern nationalism, shaping the country of England into a feminized body, that like hers, has been betrayed and spoiled by Edward’s looseness. Metaphorically equating the wrack of civil war with Englishmen goring themselves with their own weapons and slaughtering their own bodies when they kill their countrymen, Isabel articulates the devastating national effects of civil war and marks Edward as their cause. This is both Grafton’s heroine and the Isabel the Bishop of Hereford praises in Holinshed’s account, a champion 164  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

of the commonwealth and the valiant agent of an unfortunate but necessary intervention against a king’s tyrannical use of royal prerogative. And then Mortimer interrupts her, revealing Marlowe’s brief staging of a Graftonian heroine to be a denunciation of an unfaithful queen consort’s unmerited power. With an unfounded accusation of overly emotional behavior, he cuts off her rational explanation of the justness of her cause: “Nay, madam, if you be a warrior, / Ye must not grow so passionate in speeches” (17.15–­16). While some critics take Mortimer at his word, evaluating Isabel’s speech accordingly, I see his charge as jarring, registering most powerfully in its inaccuracy and its effectiveness.55 Mortimer is both wrong in interpreting Isabel’s speech as too passionate and entirely successful in stopping her mouth. He continues her accusations, but he turns them backward toward the vengeful motivations speculated upon in Holinshed’s account and extended by Stow: after briefly mentioning “our country’s cause” (17.19), Mortimer claims “for the open wrongs and injuries / Edward hath done to us, his Queen, and land, / We come in arms to wreak it with the sword, / That England’s queen in peace may repossess / Her dignities and honours” (17.21–­25). The restoration of Isabel’s dignities and honors harkens back even to the very language of Grafton’s narrative, but in violently separating this personal restoration from the reasoned political concepts evinced in Isabel’s initial speech and yoking it instead to the private “wrongs and injuries” the play details in its first half, Mortimer nullifies Isabel’s just cause. He simultaneously demonstrates his undue influence over her, exposing her as one of the “misgoverned kings” that are the “cause of all this wrack” and showing her political power as vulnerable to his capricious manipulation and therefore both dangerous and illegitimate. Isabel largely occupies the rest of the play through the reports of others, which adapt details from Holinshed and Stow to further characterize her as an overly emotional woman swayed by her personal attachment to Mortimer. Kent, experiencing a second change of heart and returning once again to support his brother the king, observes that “Mortimer / And Isabel do kiss while thy conspire. / And yet she bears a face of love, forsooth—­/ Fie on that love that hatcheth death and hate!” (18.21–­24). Kent’s formulation, which positions Isabel as a dissembler whose skill is From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  165

employed to deceive the wronged Edward, echoes Fleming’s addition to the 1587 Chronicles, where he notes Isabel plots against the king’s life “though by painted words she pretended a kind of remorse to him” (1587 341). Curtis Perry sees the play’s heightened attention to the eroticized passions most strongly signified by Mortimer and Isabel’s conspiring kisses to be part of the play’s consideration of favoritism and rebellion. He argues that the couple’s “resistance to legitimate monarchy is treated by Marlowe as an expression of unruly passion that shares a striking symmetry with the royal excesses it sought originally to curtail.”56 Certainly the play’s pairing of the eroticized passions of Mortimer and Isabel with those of Edward and his male favorites indicates how such passions can sully both royal prerogative and subjects’ resistance. In the context of its revisions to source material, the play seems to hold Isabel’s passions up for special rebuke because of her status as queen and her gender. In doing so, Edward II suggests that passion is a feminine emotion capable of tainting masculine right rule when it appears in bad male monarchs and confirming the villainy of feminine power when it appears in queens with authority. When Leicester also calls attention to Mortimer’s power over her, asking “What cannot gallant Mortimer with the Queen?” (19.50), he echoes the Chronicles’s assertion that “without him the queene in all these matters did nothing” (1587 340). Edward himself calls her “that unnatural Queen, false Isabel,” (20.17) and laments that “Mortimer and my unconstant Queen . . . spots my nuptial bed with infamy” (20.30–­31), recalling Stow’s vivid account of Mortimer’s capture in Isabel’s bedchamber. Edward’s charges of unnatural falsehood here resituate Stow’s refrain of “cruell woman,” reminding attentive readers of historiography of the double bind of early modern gender expectations. Women are, as Fleming’s Plautus quotation hypothesizes, cruel and false, prone to wickedness and more likely to experience goodness as a heavy burden and evil as a compelling desire. Yet queenship demands constancy and fidelity, of both the sexual and political kind, and such departures from loyalty elicit charges of unnatural behavior and whoredom. Isabel’s sexual susceptibility to Mortimer renders her an unnatural queen who betrays the private and public duties of a consort, but it also reveals her to be a natural woman; the play thus highlights the problem of female 166  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

influence exerted through the structural position of queenship. Briefly situating Isabel’s queenly role as a public, national one in her speech on England’s civil broils, the play definitively censures the position of queen consort as inevitably corrupted by her inferior gender and diminishes her into an unchaste wife. Marlowe also reframes his source material to link Isabel’s public cruelties to her privately motivated infidelities. Whereas both chronicle traditions detail Isabel’s pursuit of the Spencers—­which Grafton frames as just punishment and Stow conceives of as cruel vengeance—­the play centers on her pursuit of a newly sympathetic Edward. Much of the performative power of the king’s own suffering in Edward II is created by Edward’s insistent focus on Isabel’s betrayal and mistreatment of him, which he repeatedly ties to her unfaithfulness as a wife and to her emotional callousness. He tells the Bishop of Winchester to “send for unrelenting Mortimer / And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel, / Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear” (20.103–­5), and asks him to bear a handkerchief wet with his tears to his erstwhile queen, importuning the Bishop, “if with the sight thereof she be not moved, / Return it back and dip it in my blood” (20.119–­20). Figured as hard-­heartedness, Edward’s characterization of Isabel nevertheless shapes her as overly passionate in her cruel rejection of his suffering and her wifely obligations. Speaking later to his tormentors, Matrevis and Gurney, Edward questions when Mortimer will be “satisfied with blood” and tells them “If mine will serve, unbowel straight this breast / And give my heart to Isabel and him—­/ It is the chiefest mark they level at” (22.9–­12). He imagines she desires his tears, blood, bowels, and heart, an anatomizing of his body as a means of exacting vengeance. The play offers few alternative explanations for her behavior and places Stow’s interjected commentary about her motives in the mouth of Edward. The drama of the king’s heartfelt experience of wifely betrayal and his performative censure of Isabel vastly outweighs her brief assertion that “I rue my lord’s ill fortune, but alas, / Care of my country called me to this war” (18.73–­74). Situated within a play that repeatedly dramatizes her misuse of queenship, this moment where she sounds like her counterpart in Grafton’s chronicle becomes an empty, impoverished sentiment that underscores her negligence. From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  167

While the play uses Edward’s suffering to highlight Isabel’s actions as the private betrayals of a bad wife writ large through her ill-­gotten access to political power, it also revises narrative historiography’s view of her role in Edward’s death to further critique her as an unfit queen. As I have shown, chronicle histories’ treatment of Isabel differ in their assignations of responsibility for Edward’s death. Grafton solely blames Mortimer and the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles primarily implicates him, but Fleming adds to the 1587 edition interjected evaluation that deepens Isabel’s responsibility by identifying her as one of the masterminds of Edward’s assassination. Stow’s 1580 Chronicles accuses Mortimer but also reassigns guilt to Isabel’s “Schoolmaster” the Bishop of Hereford; his 1592 Annals of England strengthens the queen’s cruel desire for Edward’s death by connecting it to the overly passionate failings of her gender. Marlowe’s play returns responsibility to Mortimer, as Grafton has it, and transfers to the queen’s lover the violent ruthlessness that Stow ascribes to Isabel and that Marlowe’s Edward also convincingly claims for her. Marlowe’s Isabel is aware of the plot to execute Edward but reluctant to support it, consenting to her husband’s death not out of a cruel compulsion for revenge or cold political ambition but out of a weak submission to her unworthy counselor, Mortimer. When he proposes to kill Edward, Mortimer instructs Isabel to defer to his commands to retain control of England: “Be ruled by me, and we will rule the realm.” (21.5). Marlowe then reformulates the suspicious fears that Stow’s Isabel confesses to the Bishop of Hereford, assigning them not to Isabel but to Mortimer as a strategy of manipulation used to convince the queen to abdicate her own authority: “In any case, take heed of childish fear, / For now we hold an old wolf by the ears, / That if he slip will seize upon us both / And gripe the sorer, being griped himself ” (21.6–­9). Mortimer here prompts the childish fears that in Stow are Isabel’s nightmares of retribution and evidence of her womanish cruelty, and encourages her to accept his judgment. Isabel replies: Sweet Mortimer, the life of Isabel, Be thou persuaded that I love thee well, And therefore, so the prince my son be safe, 168  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

Whom I esteem as dear as these mine eyes, Conclude against his father what thou wilt, And I myself will willingly subscribe. (21.15–­20) Isabel here assents to Mortimer, allowing him “what thou wilt.” She is primarily concerned with expressing her love for Mortimer; convincing him of that love is at least as equal a desire for her as protecting her son, and deferring to Mortimer over the life of Edward II is a means to prove both desires to Mortimer. Isabel’s privileging of private affection evokes her earlier sentiments for Edward, which she also places above the good of the commonwealth when she pleads to recall Gaveston. Her brief attempts to act and speak as an autonomous political agent who might be viewed as the victorious savior she embodies in Grafton are dramatically revealed to be ineffective because of her submission to Mortimer, and her character, unlike Edward’s, expresses no awareness of her abuses of power. The play thus further depicts Isabel as a puppet of her more politically ambitious lover, bestowed with an ability to influence the fate of the nation through her dynastic ties to her son but underserving of her position because of her female weakness. Mortimer’s dominance is accentuated through a series of late scenes that feature his Machiavellian soliloquies and a public display of Isabel’s powerlessness that positions her in opposition to both son and country.57 Driven by a fear Mortimer is conspicuously responsible for planting, Isabel asks a leading question—­“But, Mortimer, as long as he survives / What safety rests for us or for my son?” (21.42–­43)—­that Mortimer eagerly anticipates and then answers: “Speak, shall he presently be dispatched and die?” (21.44). Isabel’s response underscores the authority she holds as queen in her son’s minority, but it also registers an understanding of the injustice Edward’s death will perpetuate, and a desire to abdicate responsibility for the decision itself: “I would he were, so it were not by my means” (21.45). Mortimer capitalizes on the childish fear he has warned her to heed, ready with the solution of Edward’s death. As Thomas and Tydeman note, one of Marlowe’s crucial revisions to his sources is “the prominence given to Mortimer . . . Marlowe’s characterization of him as in every way Edward’s From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  169

antithesis and as a man corrupted by power is almost entirely his own creation.”58 Marlowe stages soliloquies that flesh out the brief commentaries found in Holinshed and Stow indicating Mortimer’s manipulations of the queen. Sounding very much like Richard III, Mortimer observes that “The prince I rule, the queen I do command, / And with a lowly congé to the ground / The proudest lords salute me as I pass;” (23.46–­48). Like Isabel’s, his more justifiable motives and sufferings under the tyranny of Edward’s capriciousness have given way to something else; in Mortimer’s case, it is an ambitious desire to be elevated over his peers that echoes the failings of Edward’s minion Gaveston. Isabel’s private affection for him is Mortimer’s means of control, and her position as first queen consort and then queen mother is his mechanism. The play thus exposes her dynastic access to the king as one that harms the commonwealth. When Mortimer seizes Edmund, the Earl of Kent, Isabel answers her son’s plea that she “Entreat my lord Protector for his life” with an explanation of her current position that encapsulates her capacity to intervene and her stubborn refusal to do so on behalf of the nation’s well-­being: “Son, be content, I dare not speak a word” (23.92–­93). When the play stages Mortimer’s downfall, arrest, and execution, Isabel’s emotional outburst of performative pleading, crafted from Stow’s account, voices her impuissance and censures her own behavior. Reporting her son’s discovery of Edward II’s death, Isabel speaks in fear to Mortimer, observing that “now, Mortimer, begins our tragedy” (25.23) and articulating an awareness that their treason against Edward will have an inevitable result. She also evaluates the end results of their shared complicity in Edward’s death as inevitable: “I feared as much. Murder cannot be hid” (25.46). Speaking, like Shakespeare’s Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, about her own place in history as a foregone conclusion and a tragedy to be dramatized onstage, Isabel also condemns her own participation as a crime that history will always reveal. Following Stow’s queen, who cries in French for her son to spare Mortimer, Marlowe’s Isabel pleads with her son for the life of her lover without good cause, appealing directly to her maternal relationship with the king as her only logic: “As thou receivèd’st thy life from me, / Spill not the blood of gentle Mortimer” (25.68–­69). Isabel’s pleas are solely 170  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

personal, and they reveal her lack of attention to the principles of good government that have been squandered by Edward and Mortimer in turn. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the play reinvests the English monarchy with just governance through Edward III’s overthrow of his corrupted protectors. While Mortimer rejects Edward’s kingship and reminds audiences of his youthful inexperience, calling him a “paltry boy” (25.57), the new king claims his authority through his destruction of the “traitor” Mortimer and his rejection of his mother. As the Second Lord tries to remove Isabel from her son’s presence, she responds by again appealing to her maternal ties to the new monarch: “He hath forgotten me. Stay, I am his mother” (25.90). The Second Lord’s telling rejection of her kinship claims—­“That boots not” (25.91)—­speaks to Edward III’s new model of government as a conscious rejection of the errors of the royals and nobles the play catalogues. The contrast between Edward III and the “misgoverned kings” who are his parents is convincingly drawn at the play’s close, but so is the difference between Edward III and his fellow stage sovereigns. He is no Henry Tudor, who closes Richard III with a national vision that stitches up the civil wounds inflicted on the feminized body of England and masculine bodies of her people. The conclusion of Edward II is instead marked by the tears of the too-­young king, whose final words do not craft a restoration of national order but serve only as “witness” to his “grief and innocency” (25.102). Ralf Hertel contends that national identity is an “acutely felt absence” through which the play “fosters a desire for a nationwide English community . . . with a sense of national self-­awareness that shows all the masculine qualities so flagrantly absent in Edward and which were to define early modern English national identity.”59 Certainly national identity, as a framework for the creation of a communal England consolidated around a shared—­and masculine—­self -­awareness, does seem absent from this final vision of Edward III as a young king who can think of little else but dressing the coffin of his father with the head of a traitor. And yet, the play does in fact conclude with a strong assertion of the English nation, one predicated upon the exclusion of women and acted out through its rejection and punishment of Isabel. As Mortimer’s interruption of Isabel’s political speech to England’s “countrymen” makes From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  171

clear, the conception of the nation proposed by the play cannot encompass royal women. The same national sentiments espoused by Henry Tudor in Richard III are vociferously rejected when they are voiced by Isabel in Edward II, in spite of chronicle history’s extensive precedent depicting her as a steward of the nation under a dynastic system. Edward II, then, is very like the Richard III plays of the 1590s in its vision of national identity as the preserve of men, though its processes for conveying this vision are more oblique, centered around the exclusion of royal women rather than a celebration of masculine Englishness. Edward III’s restoration of order to the nation and dignity to the monarchy is achieved by his ability to reject personal ties, especially maternal ones, and to separate the sovereign from the feminized dynastic family. Unlike his father and mother, who are subject to the undue influence of the objects of their private desires, embodied in Gaveston, Spencer, and Mortimer, Edward III recognizes the damaging effects of the unofficial channels of influence that afford women power under a dynastic model. He must banish Isabel to avoid the pity she can evoke with her words; he becomes man and king simultaneously, through overthrowing the maternal ties that the play has suggested all along are damaging to national order. Marlowe leads audiences to interpret Isabel’s punishment as greater than the historical record allows and to evaluate it as deserved, enacted by a good king who steels himself against the damaging personal emotions that plagued the rule of his parents. Skillfully navigating two chronicle history traditions to portray women as inevitably ill-­equipped for the political necessities queenship requires, Marlowe finally steps away from his historical intertexts altogether, promising a new conclusion that signals the restoration of justice to the nation through the exclusion and punishment of women. Isabel functions at the play’s end as a reminder of the problems of influence. Such problems emerge as uniquely gendered: Isabel demonstrates the specific dangers of queenly power under a dynastic system. As Hertel argues, “National identity as a particularly masculine form of self-­conception emerges precisely as a reaction to the anomaly of female power with which Elizabeth’s reign confronted her subjects—­and as an attempt to contain it.”60 In Edward II, attempts to contain female power 172  From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen

through defining national identity as solely masculine are perhaps most visible in the play’s carefully reimagined Isabel. She is a representative queen in early modern historical drama, which frequently modifies its source narratives to minimize and repudiate the political interventions of such female historical figures, and to implicitly argue for the relegation of royal women to a private sphere removed from influence. The prevalent critical reading of Isabel’s bifurcated characterization is not a false one; this characterization, as a poor soul on the one hand and an unnatural queen on the other, is a primary feature of Marlowe’s play indebted to the playwright’s careful engagement with his narrative sources. Engaging with a different episode of medieval history and two disparate chronicle traditions, Marlowe nevertheless constructed revisions of royal women notably similar to his fellow playwrights’ own adaptations, suggesting that the late Elizabethan stage and playwrights’ uses of history were powerful locations of contest over queenly participation in the new Tudor construction of the English nation as an entity defined by and for men.

From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen  173

4 So Masculine a Stile Gender and Genre in Elizabeth Cary’s The History of Edward II

In the publisher’s address that opens Elizabeth Cary’s folio version of The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, Charles Harper invites readers to judge the quality of the author’s historiography: “And this we think we may say, (and perswade our selves that upon the perusal thou wilt be of the same opinion) that he was every way qualified for an Historian. [ . . . ] we are apt to believe those days produced very few who were able to express their Conceptions in so Masculine a Stile.”1 The masculine historian Harper believes he is praising is Elizabeth’s husband Henry Cary, the Earl of Falkland, to whom the book’s publisher attributed its authorship in 1680.2 Cary’s own 1627 preface speaks to the same concerns as Harper’s address, but she differs in her assessment of the work of the historian. Cary locates her qualifications as a historian in her adherence to historiographical tradition—­she refuses to exaggerate the facts given to her by previous writers—­and in her privileging of “Truth” over “Time”: “I have not herein followed the dull Character of our Historians, nor amplified more than they infer, by Circumstance” (Br). The dissonance between Cary’s own articulation of her historical project and her publisher’s—­ including the stylistic masculinity he sees produced by the authorship 175

he attributes—­is an important reminder of the fault lines that influence critical approaches to her work. Since Donald Stauffer first proposed Cary as its rightful author in 1935, critics’ selections of internal evidence from The History of Edward II to attribute authorship to her have revealed assumptions about the interests of women writers.3 Stephanie Hodgson-­Wright’s critique of the biographical methodologies that canonized Cary as an early woman writer reveals that such “anxious biographical validation” forecloses contextual readings and relegates her work to the margins of Renaissance literature in the process.4 She notes that while it is hard to ignore that Cary’s History of Edward II deserves “a place amongst the political writings of the period,” frequent critical reading of the text as “a pseudo-­biography of Cary helps to effect precisely this denial.”5 Curtis Perry likewise observes that The History of Edward II “demands a less solitary frame of reference” than the biographical study it has received.6 Karen Raber, who surveys gendered suppositions about women writers in early feminist scholarship on the text, posits that “what counts for our generation of critics who wish to claim Cary’s History is less who wrote the text than what kinds of readings are mobilized by the assignation of authorship.”7 The label of a masculine-­styled historiography assigned to The History of Edward II by its publisher and first literary critic correspondingly reminds us that gender-­focused arguments for authorship and biographical readings of gender representation can govern our hypotheses about genre as well as our readings of a text’s treatment of women. The overly directed biographical readings of The History of Edward II that Hodgson-­Wright, Perry, and Raber cue us to question emerge not simply from a focus on Cary’s gender as an important category of interpretation but from the unexamined insistence that the historical record of her chronicle sources and the political history genre in which she writes are masculine in style. Approaching Cary’s history as part of a larger historiographical tradition defined by its nuanced representation of queenship rather than as an anomalous female-­authored text usefully challenges generic and gendered assumptions not only about The History of Edward II but about the larger field of history writing as well, as this book seeks to do. 176  So Masculine a Stile

Critical analyses of Cary’s depiction of Queen Isabel in The History of Edward II that take up her reliance on chronicle, dramatic, and poetic sources, namely Richard Grafton’s 1569 A Chronicle at Large and Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 Edward II, rarely agree about how and to what effect Cary uses these sources. Critics such as Karen Nelson identify Cary’s revisions of Isabel as protofeminist and uniformly positive in contrast to male-­authored chronicle histories: “Unlike the weak or villainous queens in other Edward II narratives, this Isabel is a hero . . . Cary constructs her as a model queen.”8 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski likewise sees an “extended, complex, and sympathetic portrait of Queen Isabel” as a tragic heroine who is “unparalleled in other accounts of Edward’s reign.”9 Other critics comparing Cary’s account to her source histories have reached opposite conclusions, finding continuities rather than sharp contrasts. For example, Meredith Skura, while recognizing that Cary’s “treatment is more positive than many of the chroniclers’—­which can indeed be perfunctory or misogynist” claims that “it is not unprecedented” and sees Grafton as well as the dramatists and poets who take up Edward’s story as precedents for Cary’s sympathetic representation of Isabel.10 Gwynne Kennedy goes past these readings of shared or inherited sympathies to argue that Cary’s revisions produce a less, not more, sympathetic Isabel: she claims that Cary’s “furious, cruel Isabel” is in fact without “counterpart in other accounts of Edward’s reign” and that “her history greatly exaggerates the description of Spencer’s punishment in Grafton’s Chronicle.”11 These discussions about how Cary uses her source intertexts to represent Isabel can reinforce typical assumptions about narrative history by privileging the supposedly anomalous value of Cary’s text; they also reveal conflicted readings of Isabel’s character as either “good” or “bad” similar to those found in approaches to Marlowe’s play. For example, whereas Nelson finds in Isabel a model for Charles I’s consort Henrietta Maria, Mihoko Suzuki sees her as “negative exempla” for the very same woman.12 Such varying opinions about Isabel’s function as a potential exemplar in The History of Edward II—­and about the sources of that depiction—­are understandable. As with approaches to Marlowe’s Edward II, which produce similarly bifurcated readings of Isabel, interpretations of Cary’s queen So Masculine a Stile  177

grapple with a perceived incoherence in her character. Cary’s Isabel is at times the model queen and tragic heroine Nelson and Lewalski identify and at others the cruel and negative exemplar Kennedy and Suzuki uncover; most critical analyses of her emphasize one of these characterizations and minimize the other. The best assessment of Isabel’s divided characterization in The History of Edward II comes from Perry, who argues that “the dramatic shifts in perspective that make Cary’s characterization so baffling” are in fact a part of the text’s design.13 Perry notes that “though Cary’s depiction of character—­Edward’s, Mortimer’s, and especially Isabel’s—­may be at some level incoherent, the text’s emphasis upon destructive passion remains remarkably constant.”14 His excellent study of The History of Edward II’s topical critique of personal rule frees Cary’s text from the solitary frame of biographical reference that has severely limited study of her political history and partially explains the import of Isabel’s incoherent character, though it does not consider her uses of narrative or dramatic history. Building upon the thoughtful analyses of Nelson, Lewalski, Skura, and Kennedy, who have turned valuable critical attention to Cary’s depiction of queenship and her use of sources, and Perry’s assessment of her work as “a sophisticated piece of political commentary,” I move beyond biographically based readings and explain The History of Edward II’s puzzling representation of Isabel by examining Cary’s careful navigation of her sources and generic form to situate her work alongside other political histories and within the rich representation of royal women in the early modern historiographical tradition.15 When Cary wrote The History of Edward II in the late 1620s, she was reckoning with the two well-­established and very different chronicle history traditions of representing Queen Isabel and the more recent and powerful stage vision of Marlowe’s distressed queen that I detail in chapter 3.16 Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, as I have shown, depicts Isabel as a beleaguered heroine whose political interventions on behalf of a suffering nation are approved by her historiographer’s narrative voice. In contrast, the chronicle histories of Raphael Holinshed and John Stow were revised across editions to ultimately represent Isabel’s political participation as the personal vengeance of a furious woman, a portrait Marlowe subsequently modifies to critique royal women’s influence. Cary’s text reflects a careful engagement 178  So Masculine a Stile

with these thorny chronicle history and dramatic source materials. Cary had a strong command of her chronicle intertexts: her own family biographer observes that she had read “all Chroniclers what soever, of her owne Country.”17 Relying on the typical narrative strategies of divergent chronicle histories and the newer precedent of Isabel’s iteration in drama, Cary was also working within the parameters of the subgenre of narrative history she had chosen for her text: the political history. A careful reader of both English history and the Tacitean models to which the English political historians Thomas More and Francis Bacon were indebted—­she read “Historie very vniversally, especially all ancient Greeke, and Roman Historians”—­Cary synthesizes evidence from her chronicle and dramatic source models with techniques imported from political histories by influential English writers.18 This chapter traces Cary’s integration of the contrastive chronicle history traditions of representation—­characterized by Grafton’s endorsement of Isabel’s political agency and Stow’s censure of her cruelty—­along with Marlowe’s lamentable and unnatural queen into the generic structure of a political history. Cary embraces the narrative strategies of her sources and political history precedents and navigates the conflicting gendered representations in these intertexts to reimagine Isabel’s queenship, revealing as she does so the pressures of genre on the changing historical representation of medieval queens in early modern historiography. Cary’s most visible debt to chronicle history is her initial interpolation of Grafton’s powerful view of the queen as a rescuer of the English nation and a political savior whose cause is both right and beneficial to the commonwealth. Cary, like Grafton, represents Isabel as unjustly wronged by her husband, morally justified in her escape to France, and vindicated by the international outrage at her plight. Cary’s narrative voice, which evaluates Isabel’s interior perspectives and privileged knowledge of her enemies as legitimate political participation, emerges from both her chronicle history sources and the generic precedent of early modern political histories written by More and Bacon. But The History of Edward II also shifts remarkably in its navigation of sources, turning to an alternative chronicle history tradition for evidence that contradicts Grafton’s portrait: from Holinshed Cary has drawn the language of revenge and personal injury—­rather than So Masculine a Stile  179

justice—­that frames Isabel’s victories over her enemies, and from Stow she has borrowed additional accusations of cruelty. Ultimately, though, Cary integrates these opposing traditions by carefully reframing Marlowe’s view of the queen—­particularly his staging of Isabel’s lamentations and her adulterous relationship with Mortimer—­and employing the political history genre’s frequent ironizing of critiques of female power. Through her nuanced use of source material and generic precedent, Cary finally produces crucial interrogations, rather than reproductions, of the essentialist perspectives about women that emerge in the histories of Holinshed and Stow and are then staged by Marlowe, knitting together a subtle but powerful defense of queenship that both borrows from and responds to all her intertexts. Reckoning with History and Reframing Drama While scholarship on The History of Edward II frequently identifies political history as the genre in which Cary recognizably writes, little attention has focused on the similarities between her work and that of other political historians writing in English. Lewalski, Skura, Karen Britland, and Joan Parks all acknowledge The History of Edward II’s status as “a conventional example of early Stuart Tacitean historiography.”19 Skura, for example, notes that the style of Cary’s history, including its invented speeches, links it to John Hayward and Bacon, but she prioritizes the text’s poetic and dramatic influences over this historiographical context.20 Though critics nearly always identify Cary’s text as a political history, they generally do not discuss the impact of such a tradition on her work.21 Britland suggests one explanation for the neglect of political history as a generic context for Cary’s work: “as literary critics have come to accept the idea that the Edward II histories were written by a woman, the critical discourse has subtly altered” from identifying the text as a male-­authored model of Tacitean history to a unique example of feminized historical fiction.22 Britland’s observation speaks to the ways that female authorship has frequently been perceived—­ even unconsciously, by male and female critics alike—­as incompatible with the conventions of political history. Pervasive assumptions that early modern historiography, particularly political history, is unconcerned with women has obscured from critical view what Cary’s seemingly unique 180  So Masculine a Stile

representation of Isabel—­achieved through narrative conventions, such as invented dialogue, interior perspective, and interjected evaluation—­shares with other political histories. Early modern political histories were based on classical models frequently translated from Latin in the sixteenth century. Influenced by humanism and the Renaissance’s interest in classical historians, these texts “developed an approach to history writing that foregrounded the role of individual psychology in historical causation, while de-­emphasizing divine providence” and purported to follow factual research and thoughtful source use.23 “Politic historians,” according to Jerry Weinberger, “took their inspiration from two historians not content merely to justify the established rule of a princely or monarchical order: Tacitus and Machiavelli,” and they “relaxed the epic scope of the chroniclers and used history to teach practical and realistic political wisdom.”24 Substantial scholarship identifies More’s History of King Richard III, written ca. 1513, and Bacon’s 1622 The History of King Henry VII as prime examples of the genre.25 The common features of political history shared by Bacon, More, and Cary include dramatic dialogues assigned to key historical figures, interjected evaluation on the part of the historiographer, and strong foci on individual psychology, generated in part by the use of interior perspective.26 While these texts are representative of the political history genre, recent reevaluation of the generic contours of narrative historiography also suggests that chronicle history exhibits greater similarities with political history than is often acknowledged. Dan Breen, for example, argues that the humanist historical thought critics such as F. J. Levy and D. R. Woolf locate almost exclusively in political history is in fact evident in other forms of early modern historiography.27 As demonstrated in earlier chapters, many of the rhetorical strategies characteristic of political history are, like the humanist historical thought Breen finds in diverse modes of narrative historiography, also visible to a lesser extent in the chronicle histories. In the case of Cary’s history, then, both her source narratives from the chronicle tradition and the generic models of political history offered precedents for her use of these techniques. In her telling of the basic story of Isabel’s escape to France, journey to Hainault, and return to England, Cary integrates Grafton’s attention to So Masculine a Stile  181

Isabel’s interior perspective and his account of international support for her cause with Marlowe’s somatic lamentations and his early, sympathetic focus on her private emotions. She also crafts from her political history precedents a dramatic back and forth battle of wits between a clever Isabel and Edward’s villainous favorite, Hugh de Spencer the Younger. Isabel’s flight to her brother’s court becomes a triumph of political statecraft over Spencer, who initiates these events by disingenuously advising the king to send her to France so that he might be rid of her suspicious eyes. In her characterization of Spencer, Cary crafts a wicked adversary with privileged knowledge of Isabel’s political strengths: “He knew her to be a Woman of a strong Brain, and stout Stomack, apt on all occasions to trip up his heels, if once she found him reeling,” qualities that convince Spencer to “pare her nails before she scratcht him” (86–­87). The interior perspective used to establish Spencer’s animosity toward Isabel evokes More’s own characterization of the villainous king in The History of King Richard III, discussed in chapter 1. More’s Richard sees his late brother’s wife, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, as a formidable enemy with the potential to prevent his manipulation of dynastic succession and to turn public opinion against him. Through invented dialogue, Buckingham accuses Elizabeth of “womannish frowardenesse,” and, along with Richard, attributes her political decisions to gendered behavior (More 28). Additional interior perspective assigned to Richard by More reveals that he sees the queen as a challenging opponent and consciously acts to mitigate her power over her sons. And Elizabeth, unlike those around her, is the only historical figure in More’s text who rightly intuits Richard’s bloody motives.28 Cary’s Isabel, in her interior perspective, echoes the discernment of Grafton’s queen, who not only accurately perceives the Spencers’ pride, animosity, and undue influence but also pities the effects of their “miserable gouernement” upon the state (Grafton 204). And like More’s Elizabeth, Cary’s Isabel possesses privileged knowledge of Spencer the Younger’s attempts to neutralize her political threat. Isabel’s contentiously recorded motivation for her journey to France, framed in Grafton as a wisely feigned pilgrimage, is expanded with a deeper interior perspective in Cary’s narrative—­written like the rest of The History of Edward II, in mostly present tense—­that lingers 182  So Masculine a Stile

upon and celebrates the many manipulations she must carry off to successfully escape England.29 When Isabel is brought word of the king’s desire (instigated by Spencer as a means to be rid of her problematic presence) to send her to France, she finds that her enemy “had prescrib’d the way for her escape, which she herself intended, and in her private thoughts had laboured with the best powers of her understanding” (88). The History of Edward II’s expanded interior perspective foregrounds Isabel’s awareness of Spencer’s plot, her understandable but hidden motivations, and the inner workings of her intellect as she turns the king’s decision to her advantage and engineers her own escape from England. Isabel’s dissimulation—­“she seem’d wondrously well-­pleas’d” by Edward’s request “and offers to undertake, and to assure the business” (88)—­is likewise conveyed through an interior perspective that emphasizes her political acumen and her privileged role as England’s only viable opposition to Spencer’s corruption of the king. This view of Isabel’s dissembling as a survival tactic harkens back to The History of Edward II’s title-­page Latin epigram, “Qui nescit Dissimulare, nequit vivere, perire melius,” or “He who does not know how to dissimulate, is not able to live, rather will perish” (Ar). This Tacitean tag line is powerfully evoked when Isabel “courts her Adversary with all the shews of perfect reconcilement” to make her getaway to France (90). This practice, while spotted by Spencer, who “by his own could judge her Cunning,” is ultimately so well devised that “his Spies . . . could not so discover” her intentions “but that she seem’d as pure and clear as Crystal,” a facade that renders Spencer impotent to stop her and eventually enables her to make her way to her brother’s court (90). Queen Elizabeth’s ability to recognize Richard’s secret plans, as Isabel registers Spencer’s, frames her as a privileged character aligned with More’s own authorial voice. Cary’s depiction of Isabel’s temptation by “such as seem’d her friends, but were [Spencer’s] Agents” (101) echoes More’s iterations of Richard’s attempted manipulations of Elizabeth and her strong resistance in contrast to the acquiescence of so many others. Isabel withstands the king’s pleas to send her son back from France because she is, like Elizabeth, not swept up by the flattery of her adversary: “These sweet enchantments move no whit her yielding, that too well knew the Serpent that begat them; So Masculine a Stile  183

her Son sent back, they had the prey they lookt for, and she must lack the prop must keep her upright” (102). Isabel and Elizabeth are both figured through common narrative strategies in their respective political histories as queens possessing a unique awareness of the sweet enchantments, painted processes and trifling pretexts of the “Serpents” cast as their own singular foes. Whereas Fleming’s additions to the 1587 Chronicles record Isabel’s use of “painted words” (1587 341) to present her as a villain at the close of Edward’s reign, Cary, like More, deploys that charge against her adversary. Cary thus rejects the Chronicles’s evaluation of Isabel, selecting instead Grafton’s view of her as a wronged queen who must use intelligent, politic decision-­making to redress the Spencers’ crimes against England. She adds to that Graftonian cue an expanded account, likely prompted by More’s study of Elizabeth Woodville and Richard III, of Isabel’s own dissembling as a battle of wits with a serpentine villain. In addition to depicting her queen, as More does, as a privileged historical agent with unique knowledge of the nature of her enemy, Cary frequently uses narrative strategies to critique perspectives asserting women’s natural weakness and challenging their political efficacy. Cary’s interjected evaluations about women’s nature, which move from gloating accounts of Isabel’s triumphs over her male enemies to moralizing claims about women’s irrationality that reflect the gendered sentiments offered by Holinshed and Stow, confound critics looking for consistent authorial approval of Isabel’s political decisions. In the context of seventeenth-­century political history, however, these dissonant reflections on women’s nature become more legible. Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, discussed in chapter 5, provides a strong precedent for depicting the political rebellions of royal women and ironically interrogating essentializing claims about women’s overly passionate nature through interjected evaluation and interior perspective. For example, Bacon’s descriptions of Margaret of Burgundy, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, position her as a singularly powerful political opponent to Henry VII, critique Henry’s inadequate responses to her as examples of his failed kingship, and challenge voices that downplay her political influence by describing it as irrational female behavior. His portrait of the dowager duchess is indebted to the narrative histories of 184  So Masculine a Stile

Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall, John Speed, and Thomas Gainsford, but he adds to their descriptions of her fury and animosity an ironic engagement with these earlier writers’ assessments of gender as the cause of Margaret’s actions. While certainly not “sympathetic,” Bacon’s portrayal of Margaret, who has “the spirit of a man and malice of a woman,” also questions the misjudgments others make about her political efficacy because of her gender (24). Margaret, who is motivated by a “mortall hatred to the house of Lancaster,” embraces multiple pretenders to Henry’s throne with “a great violence of affection,” as well as military support (Bacon 25). According to Bacon’s interior perspective, Margaret sees Henry “as a Marke at whose ouerthrowe all her actions should aym and shoote,” and Bacon’s evaluation of Henry VII’s reign notes that “his succeeding troubles came cheifely out of that Quiuer” (24). Thus, while Bacon’s initial aphoristic assessments of Margaret identify her motives as personal, malicious, and stemming from her gender, his interjected evaluations comment upon her formidable efficacy in distinctly political terms and eventually examine the consequences of misjudging female emotion as irrational and ineffective. Bacon parodies responses to Margaret that characterize women’s involvement in politics in magical and monstrous terms that seek to discount their influence. He ironically describes the pretenders to the English throne as “sprites” that haunt Henry and depicts Margaret’s politically efficacious financial and military support as the “Magick and curious Arts” that bring such sprites to life (Bacon 80). Margaret’s malice is likewise figured by Henry’s advisers and ambassadors as the source of a comedic monstrous maternity that motivates her support of pretenders. When Henry sends his ambassador William Warham to the Flemish Archduke Philip to request the delivery of the pretender Perkin Warbeck, harbored by Margaret, Warham marvels that “it is the strangest thinge in the world” that Margaret “(excuse vs if we name her whose malice to the King is both causeless, and endless,) should now, when she is olde, at the tyme when other women give ouer Child-­beareing, bring forth two such Monsters, being not the Birthes of .ix or .x. Moneths, but of many yeares” (Bacon 90–­91). Warham’s Flanders oration first appears in Vergil’s Anglica Historia, where the Archbishop of Canterbury refers to Margaret’s “monstrous designs,” a reference that So Masculine a Stile  185

develops into a full mockery of her monstrous deliveries in Hall’s Union and Speed’s History of Great Britaine before Bacon paraphrases Warham’s dialogue in The History of King Henry VII.30 Hall delightedly labels Warham’s mockery as “taunts and jests” that incense the duchess, and Speed similarly celebrates it as “a bitter scoffe” and “sarcasm against the lady Margaret.”31 But Bacon’s narrative contains its derision of Margaret to the dialogue of Henry’s ambassadors, and its added interior perspective highlights Henry’s awareness of Margaret’s power in very different terms: hearing of Lambert Simnel’s appearance in Ireland, Henry initially thinks he might “scatter the Irish as a flight of birdes” until he hears of Margaret’s involvement, whereupon he “apprehended the daunger in a true degree it was: And saw plainely that his Kingdome must againe be put to the stake, & that he must fight for it” (26). In the invented dialogue of Henry’s advisers, Margaret is a laughable, irrational woman motivated by causeless passion; in the interior perspectives of Bacon’s king and the interjected evaluation of the historiographer himself, she is a formidable enemy who misleads the English aristocracy into wrongly classifying her as a figure of female malice until the pretenders she raises wreak havoc upon Henry’s public opinion. Cary, like Bacon, reflects upon the political missteps of monarchs and advisers who ignore the efficacy of their female enemies through assumptions about women’s emotions. Isabel’s emotional reaction when Edward, filled with superstitious premonitions, prohibits her travel to France is conveyed through a characteristic interior perspective: the queen “was torn as much with anger as with sorrow,” a momentary expression of frustration that she quickly moderates in order to undertake a new course of action, this time “to see[m] well pleased, and glad to stay at home” (90) until she can “pretend a Journey of Devotion to St. Thomas of Canterbury” (91).32 In her description of Isabel’s moderation of her behavior, Cary appears to take cues from Holinshed and Stow as she recognizes Isabel’s potential to succumb to the frailty of her gender, her “Sexes weakness” (90). She also manipulates that perspective when she praises Isabel’s ability to rise above such frailty through her intellect: “Reason at length o’recame her Sexes weakness, and bids her rather cure, then vent her Passion” (90). Kennedy notes that “this passage conveys a double message—­that women are by 186  So Masculine a Stile

nature more emotional than reasonable and that a woman’s emotions need not prevail.”33 Indeed, Isabel conquers her feminine anger in a display of rationality that also highlights the gendered assumptions of her political enemies as false premises that can work in her favor because they belie the political acumen she wields. Isabel’s feigned journey of devotion is “wholly unsuspected” by her “jealous Overseers,” and Cary’s interjected evaluation of this scheme provides an essentialist assessment of women’s behavior and a claim for Isabel’s political and social equality to her sworn male enemy: “Spencer, that was as cunning as a Serpent, findes here a female Wit that went beyond him, one that with his own Weapons wounds his Wisdome, and taught him not to trust a Womans Lip-­salve, when that he knew her breast was fill’d with rancour” (91). While Spencer the Younger’s takeaway is to distrust the words of a rancorous woman, Cary’s gleeful valuation of Isabel’s superior wit and ability to turn Spencer’s own weapons against his wisdom provides an alternative view of woman’s “nature.” After Mortimer, Isabel, and her son sail safely to France—­“Thus did our Pilgrims scape the pride and malice of him which little dream’d of this Adventure” (92)—­Spencer is depicted as a failure who feels acutely the sting of Isabel’s trick: “his Craft and Care, that taught him all those lessons of Cunning Greatness, here fell apparent short of all Discretion, to be thus over-­reach’d by one weak Woman” (92). Cary’s account of Spencer’s failure reveals a contrast between gendered beliefs about Isabel’s abilities and the reality of her actions. Both Kennedy and Suzuki see these gendered references to Isabel’s triumphs as challenges to Spencer’s devaluation of her abilities; Kennedy argues that “when the queen outmaneuvers Spencer . . . she also undermines his misogynistic views of herself and women’s nature.”34 Suzuki reads these references as moments where Isabel prevails “despite her disabling gender”: “Isabel overcomes her disability as a woman but also uses others’ expectations of her to her advantage and lulls her adversaries into complacency.”35 Cary’s account of the unsuspected victory of female wit over political villainy realizes the consequences of misjudgment Bacon repeatedly warns against in his ironic depiction of Henry’s counselors, who dismissively figure Margaret in gendered, magical, and mythical terms: “whom the Kings freinds called Iuno, because she was to him as Iuno was So Masculine a Stile  187

to Æneas stirring both heauen and hell to doe him mischeife” (Bacon 80).36 Cary thus expands upon Grafton’s general portrait of Isabel’s political acumen with an evaluative voice that echoes her political history precedents’ wry critiques of male expectations about female ability. Cary’s critique of male responses to Isabel’s surprising success is extended through the improvising lies Edward’s counselors invent to assuage his fears about Isabel’s escape to France: Spencer tells the king Isabel “was more to be fear’d at home,” and Baldock “sets to a helping hand to revive [Edward’s] Spirits” by asking, “Alas, what can the Queen a wandring Woman compass, that hath nor Arms, nor Means, nor Men, nor Money?” (93). The wishful thinking of Baldock and Spencer becomes a potent reminder of future history: readers know that Isabel will return with arms, means, men, and money to overthrow her husband and have both men executed. Spencer’s next move is to bribe French nobles to influence their king; they plead their case to Charles by outlining the high costs of invading England, and conclude by associating Isabel’s motives with her gender and questioning the veracity of her story: “a Womans passion was too weak a motive to levie Arms alone on that occasion” and “a bare relation of a female passion enforc’d the Cause; which whether true or false, was yet in question” (100). While the dishonorable French nobles in Spencer’s pocket trade on expectations about women’s passion as an illegitimate political motive, the rest of Cary’s narrative, particularly her account of Isabel’s distress in France, establishes Isabel’s causes for appealing to her brother as accurate and reasonable. Baldock and Spencer’s French lackeys sound very like William Warham in The History of King Henry VII; Bacon ironically mocks the enemies of Margaret of Burgundy who craft her villainy as a monstrous, private maternity and thus overlook the real threat she poses. Enfolded into the invented dialogue of Spencer’s allies, at a moment when history—­both the present history of the narrative itself and the past history of Edward’s reign that early modern readers might remember—­tells an alternative story about women’s power, the essentialized perspectives of Baldock become, like those of Bacon’s Warham, ironic reminders of the ways in which men can underestimate the political power of female royal figures. 188  So Masculine a Stile

Spencer’s fatal underestimation of Isabel—­and Cary’s lambasting of it—­ is played out a second time when the queen turns from corrupted France to Hainault, and her plans are revealed to her enemies in England through the betrayal of William Stapleton, the Bishop of Exeter, who “with an unnoble president doth now forsake her” (108). Through an interjected evaluation that condemns Stapleton—­“ by this Treachery the resolutions of the Queen are fully discover’d”—­Cary also critiques Spencer’s response as dangerous hubris: “the Landskip of her Travels soon survey’d, begets a more ontempt than fear of danger” in him (109). Spencer is more concerned that his bribes to the French have gone to waste, because he “did expect his bargain for his Money” (109), and the cowardly French nobles who have sold out Isabel are quick to “justifie themselves” by “profess[ing] it freely the Queen had gone beyond them with their Cunning” (109). This episode evaluates Isabel’s victory over both the French and Spencer as a triumph enabled by the intellectual abilities of clever women underestimated by men: “Thus Womens Wit sometimes can cozen Statesmen” (109). The History of Edward II frames pervasive cultural assumptions about women’s nature as wishful thinking, ironically undercutting them with descriptive action and interjected evaluation that demonstrate Isabel’s outmaneuvering of her enemies. The remainder of the paragraph on Spencer’s surprise and disappointment over Isabel’s cozening of statesmen presents a series of unattributed assertions that seem to mitigate the danger Isabel poses: her new allies “were fitter to guard a Fort, than to invade a Kingdom,” and “the Queen was bare of Money, void of Credit” (109). However, Cary’s narrative voice concludes that such rationalizations about Isabel’s inferior forces and contempt for her plan are foolish: “These were conceptions pleas’d our Minions fancy” (109). The gender-­based justifications used by Spencer, his allies, and the French are shown to be vacuous, shortsighted perspectives. While her enemies try to undermine Isabel’s complaints as “a womans passion,” to nullify her strength by dismissing her motivations as petty, and to frame her agency as unimaginable because of her gender, Cary’s narrative establishes Isabel’s opposition as both formidable and admirable. Cary thus blends details from Grafton’s portrait of the queen with the ironic discussions of women’s participation in politics found in the narrative commentary of her political So Masculine a Stile  189

history precedents. Ably integrating ironized versions of the aphoristic statements that Holinshed and Stow make about women’s inferiority with distinct modifications of Grafton’s and Marlowe’s intertexts, The History of Edward II also produces a subtly reimagined perspective on queenship. In the segment of The History of Edward II detailing Isabel’s experiences in France, Cary’s sustained use of invented dialogue and somatic response expands upon both Grafton and Marlowe in privileging Isabel’s physical expressions of emotion to create sympathy for her. Grafton, using techniques unique to narrative history, situates Isabel’s somatic responses as part of her political discourse through interjected evaluation that recalls the broader political context of her supplication and interior perspective that reveals her political motivations. As I argue in chapter 3, the lamenting dialogue of Marlowe’s stage play, which solicits even greater affective sympathy through an actor’s physical embodiment of the somatic responses described in his implicit stage directions, ultimately relegates Isabel’s emotions to the private sphere, where she mourns the loss of her marriage and acts against the best interests of the nation to either restore or revenge her lost wedlock. Cary’s use of Isabel’s emoting clearly evokes Marlowe’s focus on her physical expressions of feeling even as they relocate such displays to the events in France and Hainault detailed by Grafton (and largely overlooked by Marlowe). They also initially seem to do much of the same work as Marlowe’s soliloquies of lament, as when Cary describes Isabel pleading with Charles to “right her Honour” in response to the Pope’s letter, which advances Edward II’s accusations of adultery against her, while “a showre of mellow tears, as milde as April’s, thrill down her lovely cheeks, made red with anger” (103). Isabel’s physical expressions produce an alluring beauty notable not for Isabel’s experience of emotion but for the male gaze of the French court—­and the English reader—­that observes the outward effects of her emotions. However, Cary’s interior perspectives and additional narrative commentary elsewhere situate Isabel’s emotive behaviors as self-­ conscious acts of manipulation that are nevertheless represented as legitimate political interventions recalling Grafton’s version of events. Through the integration and appropriation of her source intertexts, which focus on Isabel’s somatic responses but produce drastically different interpretive 190  So Masculine a Stile

effects, Cary establishes the legitimacy and justness of Isabel’s motives, and creates additional contrasts between Isabel’s powerful actions and her male adversaries’ unwillingness to take those actions seriously. The History of Edward II thus adopts Marlowe’s focus on Isabel’s somatic lamentations while simultaneously rejecting his critique of queenship when it pairs a Marlovian approach to Isabel’s physical responses with Grafton’s interpretation of the political import of the queen’s private suffering. The History of Edward II’s integration and appropriation of these two approaches to Isabel’s somatic lamentation first emerges when the queen, arriving at her brother’s court in France, “beheld the Sanctuary of her hopes, her dearest Refuge,” and falls to her knees (96). She speaks to Charles “with a sweetly-­becoming modestie,” and “thus begins her Story”: Behold in me (dear Sir) your most unhappie Sister, the true picture of a dejected Greatness, that bears the grief of a despised Wedlock, which makes me flie to you for help and succour. I have, with a sufferance beyond the belief of my Sex, outrun a world of tryals: time lessens not, but addes to my afflictions; my burthen is grown greater than my patience. (96) This speech, labeled “The Queens Address,” uses techniques that capitalize upon Isabel’s somatic responses in ways similar to Marlowe’s soliloquies—­ she refers to both her own tears and her “blushing cheek”—­to underscore her personal grief as a “despised Wedlock” (96). The queen frames her plight as one that has forced her to endure more than a woman should; designed to evoke the pity she successfully induces in her European supporters, it is also a reminder of her ability to act “beyond the belief ” of her sex and in contrast to those, like the Spencers and Edward, who err in underestimating her. But Isabel’s address goes on, like Grafton’s narrative, to position her as the advocate of a suffering nation: “yet ’tis not I alone unjustly suffer; my tears speak those of a distressed Kingdom, which, long time glorious, now is almost ruin’d” (96). These lines extend the chronicle tradition that represents Isabel as a legitimate political agent who speaks out against the private wrongs of queen consorts and the public wrongs of the “brave and nobler Subjects” (96) who have suffered Edward’s misgovernment. So Masculine a Stile  191

Following Grafton’s focus on the tyranny of the Spencers as a national catastrophe that extends beyond the reach of Edward’s royal marriage, Cary’s Isabel here speaks on behalf of Edward’s subjects: “besides the Justice of my Cause, the strongest motive, I bring the hearts of a distressed Kingdom, that, if you set me right, will fight my Quarrel” (97). Her plea clarifies her motive not as the personal suffering Edward’s rejection of her has produced, as Marlowe has it, but as the justice of a cause that is much more than her own private wrongs. She claims that the hearts of the English people support her, and more practically, confirms that her people will fight for her if her brother will endorse that same just cause. Appealing to her own status as the daughter, sister, and wife of kings, Isabel tells her brother that his assistance will be seen as an “act of Goodness and of Justice” by “heaven and earth” (97). She effectively constructs her plight as both personal and national, and she asks her brother to respond as both her kin and as a ruler subject to the larger social judgment of nations and God. Isabel’s invented address to her brother is followed by a paragraph of interjected evaluation recounting the responses of the French that also links Marlowe’s privileging of physical expression with Grafton’s emphasis on the communal sympathy Isabel’s just cause solicits in Europe. Cary heightens Grafton’s already detailed account of somatic articulation, both from and in response to Isabel, with greater attention to the pathos produced by the queen’s nonverbal grief. Cary’s evaluative commentary describes “the fountain of her eyes” pouring forth “a showre of Chrystal tears” that render Isabel’s voice silent but also provide a “kinde of Rhetorick” capable of winning “a Noble pitie” (97). Isabel’s sad eyes, bountiful tears, and pitiful looks generate a sensory response in those watching her that “calls to action the foot, the hand, the eye, the tongue, the body” until the “King and all his Peers are deeply moved” and promise her aid (97). Drawn from Grafton’s account of Isabel’s visit to Charles, Cary’s details also evoke the stage lament of Marlowe’s queen, whose tears are both her most powerful weapon and the only one she can wield without Mortimer’s consent. In contrast to Marlowe, who eradicates any sense of Isabel’s international support, Cary follows Grafton in depicting a strong communal response: “The general voice of France proclaim’d a fury strain’d to the height to punish 192  So Masculine a Stile

her Oppressors” (98). While the fury of the general voice of France will, of course, soon dissipate and leave Isabel without allies, Cary reframes the performative lament of Marlowe’s queen by restoring its political context even as she follows her dramatist predecessor in heightening its pathos. In addition, Isabel solicits her brother’s support with pleas that underscore the historical import of what is happening to her: “let not succeeding Ages in your Story read such a taint, that you forsook a Sister, a Sister justly griev’d, that sought your Succour” (97). Appealing to Charles’s historical legacy is a nod to early modern readers aware of the story being told; Cary herself will soon indict Charles for forsaking Isabel. Recalling the historical awareness of Queen Elizabeth Woodville in More’s The History of King Richard III, Isabel here vocalizes her own privileged historical knowledge when she calls on her brother to stand on the right side of history. Cary thus reinvests the physical expressions of and responses to Isabel’s suffering—­turned into personal lamentations in the drama Edward II—­with the public and historical significance that Marlowe’s play strips away. The next five pages of The History of Edward II similarly integrate source material from Grafton and Marlowe as they dramatize Isabel’s betrayals by her brother and the French nobles. As Grafton does, Cary roundly critiques Charles’s betrayal of Isabel as an act of cowardice, matched by his countrymen who have all agreed to support the queen but who are only too eager to sell their devotion for Spencer the Younger’s gold. Cary lambasts the “giddy, light, inconstant” (99) French, and describes the “noble Patience” with which Isabel suffers their cowardice (101). Isabel’s “distressed tears” (99) are forgotten, she is “abandoned and forsaken,” (104) and “led on with promis’d Succours” (101) while the serpent’s agents work covertly against her in France. In spite of Spencer’s powerful attempts to coerce Isabel home—­through bribery, outright lies, the temptations of “such as seem’d her friends, but were his Agents,” and an indictment from the Pope—­she resists (101). That resistance is depicted as both admirable and cleverly executed through her own self-­control. Implored by her brother to reconcile with Edward and by an angry Mortimer not to return, Isabel “moderates” and “mildly calms him, letting him truely understand his weakness, that in such provocation might beget surprisal, when they must be sent back So Masculine a Stile  193

without prevention” (104). While Mortimer “contains not in this strain his Passion,” Isabel, “though that her heart were fir’d, and swoln with anger” is able to “temporizeth so, ’twas undiscovered,” a managing of emotion that allows her to again feign preparations for a journey home, and thus “beguil[e] the French that had cozen’d her,” dissimulating a second time to escape from France and to Hainault (104–­5). In contrast to Mortimer, Isabel is shown to carefully manage her anger, which is simultaneously conceived of as both justified and a potential impediment to her success if allowed to flare unchecked. This management of passionate feeling echoes and confirms The History of Edward II’s earlier evaluation that Isabel’s reason can and should overcome her sex’s weakness. Unlike Marlowe’s queen, she also sufficiently manages Mortimer’s weakness here, displaying a stronger grasp of politic maneuvering than her rash compatriot. Cary’s account of Isabel’s internal response to adversity directly challenges her male enemies’ assessments of her female weakness; it also invites readers to interpret her expressions of other gendered behaviors throughout The History of Edward II—­including those drawn from Marlowe—­as conscious manipulations with a political purpose. For example, Cary’s Isabel, when she discovers a new ally in Sir John of Hainault, secures his aid through a performance as a female supplicant: “By those sweet looks of her distressed Beauty, and the best language of so rich a Pleader, she doth confirm his well-­disposed Affection” (110). Though the political dimensions of such acts of queenly supplication are evident in Grafton’s text, Cary’s Isabel here uses her physical appearance and performance of distress to secure a primarily affective, private, and perhaps sexual response from Sir John in noticeably similar ways to her counterpart in Marlowe’s play, who uses her beauty and language to solicit the affection of Mortimer early in Edward II. Cary’s history does not, however, reduce Isabel to a private sphere or vilify such gendered behavior, as Marlowe’s play does, because it goes on to present her supplication as politically motivated—­and politically appropriate—­for the circumstances. Rightly suspicious of betrayal, Isabel acts to solidify Sir John’s support: “the Queens doubts increasing, and her longing grown to the height of her expectation, she is enforced with more importunity to hasten on the 194  So Masculine a Stile

advancement of her Journey: she makes her winning looks (the handmaids of her Hopes) express their best ability, more to enflame the heart of her Protector” (114). Cary’s interior perspective renders the political motives undergirding Isabel’s use of her “winning looks” transparent and her narrative voice renders such use as a reasonable course of action. Isabel’s strategies in The History of Edward II perhaps look more like the expressions of private affection displayed by Marlowe’s queen than the politically constituted supplications of Grafton’s, but they undeniably demonstrate Isabel using her beauty as a political tool. Cary’s account of Isabel’s manipulations of Sir John challenges both the aphorisms about gender and the privatizing of Isabel’s emotions initiated by Holinshed and Stow and fully realized in Marlowe’s play, and it situates the affect Isabel uses “to enflame the heart of her Protector” as a constitutive part of legitimate political action taken by royal women. Following early modern historiographers who depict a range of queenly behaviors—­some ostensibly private and others more obviously public—­as appropriate political interventions, Cary crafts a queen who adheres to these models of medieval queenship more than Marlowe’s circumscribed queen even though the details she uses to describe Isabel’s somatic responses align most strongly with his play. Cary’s narrative insists upon Isabel’s political legitimacy—­and the affective expressions she both uses and solicits as part of her influence—­ through its view of her supporters. The History of Edward II is indebted to Grafton’s view of Isabel in its extensive focus on the goodness and bravery of Sir John, who Grafton invokes to emphasize the justness of Isabel’s resistance to Edward. Cary’s lively praise of Sir John, like many other features she modifies from Grafton’s narrative, is even more extensive than her predecessor’s. Given an expansive invented dialogue in The History of Edward II, Sir John’s speech to his brother, the Earl of Hainault, belabors Isabel’s status as queen, the justness of her rebellion, and the necessity of international support for it; Cary evaluates this dialogue and Sir John’s subsequent actions as chivalrous, and praises the earl for having a “heart of steel against corruption,” unlike both the English and the French (113). Sir John appeals to his brother in terms that conflate the public and private spheres Marlowe’s play tenaciously works to separate: “Sir, If all the world So Masculine a Stile  195

forsake this Noble Lady, my single arm alone shall fight her quarrel; . . . The Mother and her son, the Heir apparent of such a kingdom, plead in Justice Pity; . . .’tis a Queen that seeks it; a Queen that justly merits Love and Pity” (112). Isabel deserves love, pity, and justice, abstractions that, in their associations with personal affect as well as collective rule, call attention to the entwined public and private facets of queenship as a structural position. As will occur again later in The History of Edward II, Isabel’s multiple roles are first delineated and then brought together: she is a noble lady, a mother of an heir to a kingdom, and finally, a queen whose familial and national status merits the invocation of affective bonds as well as larger social contracts. The History of Edward II further amplifies Grafton’s perspective by doubling the queen’s honorable saviors, thereby compounding its depiction of Isabel’s wide international support and the affective responses that justify her cause. Cary includes a portrayal of Isabel’s cousin Robert of Artois, who returns to France just as Charles is attempting to coerce his sister into reconciling with Edward. While “Mortimer storms” at Charles’s betrayal and “The Queen moderates” (104), Robert, “a man both wise and valiant” (105), provides the queen with his “best Counsel” by advising her to turn to Sir John for help (106). His speech to the queen “revives her spirits” and prefigures Sir John’s, as it models the appropriate response of a nobleman to a queen’s distress (106). Robert, moved by her sadness, addresses the justness of her cause but also counsels her to avoid yielding to her afflictions and instead to act by seeking out other international allies. He also treats her queenship as self-­evident, telling Isabel, “I will not yet presume to teach your judgment, that can much better sway your own Condition: Only I lay before you truly my Conceptions, which have no other aim than for your safety” (106). The narrative voice of The History of Edward II praises Robert in terms reminiscent of Grafton’s own assessment of both Robert and Sir John: he “loved Goodness for her own sake, not for fashion . . . he was a well-­resolved steady States-­man, not led by Complement, or feign’d professions” (105).37 A counterpoint to the weakness of Edward, the villainy of the Spencers, the anger of Mortimer, and the corruption of the French, Robert’s reasoned counsel pities Isabel’s personal suffering and directly acknowledges her queenly authority and wise discernment. 196  So Masculine a Stile

As I have shown, Cary amplifies Marlowe’s view of Isabel’s personal suffering through her heightened focus on somatic response, but she modifies Marlowe’s representation of Isabel as a private victim separate from politics by integrating details from Grafton and cues from her political history precedents that collectively license Isabel’s political participation. Perhaps Cary’s clearest integration and modification of Marlowe’s stage queen is her inclusion of the playwright’s emphasis on Isabel’s adultery with Mortimer, which she also adds to the more politically focused frame she adopts from Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large. The relationship emerges early in The History of Edward II, cued by Marlowe’s portrait of a love affair, initiated in England by Edward’s rejection of the queen, that takes priority over Isabel’s political motivations.38 In Cary’s account, Mortimer and Isabel hatch their escape plans simultaneously through the exchange of “many amorous Letters,” whereby “their hearts are brought together, and their several intents perfectly known” (90). Most importantly, Cary’s Isabel, like Marlowe’s, is driven to love Mortimer because of the king’s rejection of her for his male favorites: She saw the King a stranger to her bed, and revelling in the wanton embraces of his stoln pleasures, without a glance on her deserving Beauty. This contempt had begot a like change in her, though in a more modest nature, her youthful Affections wanting a fit subject to work on, and being debarr’d of that warmth that should have still preserv’d their temper, she had cast her wandering eye upon the gallant Mortimer. (89) Her “wandering eye,” as a number of critics note, is portrayed sympathetically here, instigated by her husband’s denial of the love she deserves.39 Cary never glosses over Isabel’s infidelity as Grafton does but accentuates it like Marlowe. Unlike her playwright predecessor, however, who ultimately incriminates Isabel’s transfer of affections from Edward to Mortimer, Cary instead uses Isabel’s adultery to prove Edward’s political and personal failures. Isabel’s sexual betrayal is always framed in relation to Edward’s own worse behavior, which combines sexual infidelity with a disregard for his wife’s private claims to his affection and her public claims to a social position as queen. When Baldock instructs the king to “let the Kingdom know the So Masculine a Stile  197

Queens departure, how far it swerves from duty, love, or reason,” Edward sends a declaration to his people that, according to interjected evaluation, “taints the Honour of the Queen, but more [Edward’s] Judgement” (94). Even the king’s own interior perspective registers his condemnation of her unfaithfulness as hypocrisy: “he thinks the breach of Wedlock a foul trespass; but to contemn her he so much had wronged, desrv’d as much as they could lay upon him: But he was guilty in a higher nature; he had upheld his Parasites to brave her with too too fond a base presumptuous daring” (95). Edward’s “foul trespass” in not just sexual but social; he has allowed his favorites to abuse his queen by flaunting their personal access to his body, an insult to both the private and public aspects of her queenship. Filled with guilt over his undeserved condemnation of Isabel, Edward imagines the potential political repercussions of his own “cruel actions,” which include seeing his Subjects “full of grief and passion, apt and desirous to embrace Rebellion” (95). Edward’s own “guilty Conscience” registers the political effects of his mistreatment of his queen and his bloody destruction of his barons as one and the same: both have the potential to turn his subjects, who are depicted here as collectively grieving over these twin errors, against him (95). This emphasis on the political consequences of a king’s failure to properly respect his queen appears elsewhere in political history of the early modern period. The History of King Henry VII, as I demonstrate in chapter 5, is centrally preoccupied with Henry VII’s mistreatment of his consort, Elizabeth York. Bacon’s own revisions to his sources prioritize Henry’s failure to personally value his queen as a key weakness of his kingship. Bacon observes that Henry, motivated by an “aversion toward the house of Yorke” that finds its way “not only in his warres and Counsels, but in his chamber, and bed,” proves a bad husband to Elizabeth, even though she was “beautifull gentle and fruitefull” (15). The undeserved mistreatment of Henry’s queen has reverberations that negatively affect his ability to rule. Like Edward’s interior reflection on his cruelty to Isabel, which succinctly identifies rebellion as an impending effect, The History of King Henry VII hypothesizes the discontent of the king’s subjects—­“this did alienate the hearts of the Subiects from him dayly more and more” (Bacon 17)—­as an 198  So Masculine a Stile

end result of his failure to honor her with a public coronation. Embracing political history’s emphasis on the political effects of a king’s relationship to his consort, Cary morphs Marlowe’s adulterous woman, driven by private injuries to take a lover, into a wronged queen whose rejection by her sovereign husband and her own adulterous response are consciously theorized as both personal and political through the intrusive commentary common to historical narrative. As she adapts Marlowe’s early staging of Isabel’s sorrowful transfer of affection from Edward to Mortimer into a reaction that highlights Edward’s own political failures, Cary returns to Isabel the political legitimacy that Grafton’s chronicle history tradition first confers and that Marlowe’s play removes through his harsh critique of Isabel’s romantic and sexual attachment to Mortimer. Through a significant portion of Cary’s History of Edward II, she expands upon Grafton’s chronicle history tradition and modifies Marlowe’s lamenting private wife to create an extensive portrait of Isabel’s political interventions. She combines thorough depictions of Isabel’s clever political acumen and the international response to Edward’s mistreatment of both queen and country with a narrative voice that evaluates Isabel’s wit as admirable and her actions as justified. Realigning the somatic responses initially displayed in Grafton’s chronicle with the political context in which they first appear, and reshaping Marlowe’s sympathetic but essentialist view of Isabel’s adultery as female weakness into a critique of Edward’s errors and hypocrisy, Cary restores to her queen the intertwined public and personal subjectivities that her dramatic source material isolates. She also ironically redeploys maxims about women’s nature, used in the chronicle history tradition of Holinshed and Stow to indict Isabel’s gender and embodied in Marlowe’s staging of her female weakness, to legitimize Isabel’s political participation. Following the strong precedent of the political historians Thomas More and Francis Bacon, Cary presents Isabel’s enemies as foolishly dismissive of her superior wit and privileged historical knowledge, and highlights the political consequences of Edward’s failure to respect her dual public and private roles as queen consort. Cary thus carefully reckons with chronicle history sources and generic models, offering a navigation of prior history So Masculine a Stile  199

that becomes even more complex when her characterization of Isabel dramatically shifts. Quoted in the Margins of History Even critics interested in smoothing Cary’s disjointed depiction of Isabel into a consistent heroine note that the queen is eventually censured in The History of Edward II for her treatment of the Spencers and for her peripheral participation in her husband’s death.40 A shift in Cary’s assessment of Isabel’s passions coincides with the queen’s increasing power when she returns to England at the head of a growing army; it also coincides with Cary’s turn to a different chronicle tradition, that of Holinshed and Stow, for her continued characterization of Isabel. While Cary’s depiction of Isabel as a cruel tyrant in The History of Edward II’s final segment follows many of Stow’s cues, revealing her to be an angry, passion-­driven abuser of her enemies supported by an alternatively craven and pragmatic English public, the text’s modifications of this chronicle history tradition do not, as Marlowe’s adoption of it does, indict queenship itself as a structural position. Rather, The History of Edward II navigates the complexities of its intertextual sources and generic models to ultimately interrogate—­as political history commonly does—­essentializing perspectives about women’s nature. While Cary harshly critiques Isabel in The History of Edward II’s concluding segment, she does so by calling attention to the contrast between Isabel’s emerging tyrannical behavior and her earlier, principled and benevolent use of her queenly power. Through the censorious narrative voice that often functions as key evidence for Cary’s negative depiction of Isabel’s power, The History of Edward II provides a defense of queenship as a legitimate site of political influence. One of the first signs of the shift from the source precedent of Grafton to that of Holinshed and Stow emerges in The History of Edward II’s narrative evaluation of the destruction of Isabel’s enemy, the Bishop of Exeter, whose betrayal of the queen brought news of her flight to Hainault back to Edward’s court. When Isabel arrives in London, she takes control in much the same manner as in Holinshed’s Chronicles: through English citizens’ pragmatic realizations of her superior power and their desires for self-­preservation. 200  So Masculine a Stile

She sends “a fair, but mandatory Letter” to London demanding the city hand over her enemies; the Londoners’ response acknowledges that the odds are now in Isabel’s favor: “the general Cry, that observ’d the Tide turning, proclaim it reason to embrace the Queens Party, who was so strongly provided to reform the Disorders of the Kingdom” (121). Partly expressing justification for their politic decision-­making, the general cry’s support for the queen’s reformation of disorder is also represented as an expression of wishful thinking—­that Isabel might champion the cause she now has the power to advance—­on the part of England’s citizens. The History of Edward II here echoes the 1587 Chronicles’s exploration of the problems of authority foregrounded in that text through the example of the execution of Simon Reading, whose death demonstrates the dangers of opposing “higher powers” (1587 340). The Londoners in Cary’s text, who “proclaim it reason” to join the queen, are revealed by her narrative evaluation to be simply reacting to the turning of the tide toward Isabel’s victory, a response Cary critiques more fully later in The History of Edward II. Departing from Grafton’s view of the multitudes who “honorably and ioyfully receau[e]” Isabel (Grafton 214), execute her enemies, and then promise quiet and obedience, Cary follows Holinshed by presenting self-­interested, craven subjects whose complicity will be repeatedly evaluated as treasonous. The Bishop of Exeter is thus quickly delivered by the mayor of London “to the fury of the enraged multitude; who neither respecting the Gravity of his Years, or the Dignity of his Profession, strike off his Head, without either Arraignment, Tryal, or Condemnation” (121). Stapleton’s execution is depicted as a travesty for several reasons: he is severely punished when his association with the church and his age should afford him mercy, he is denied due process, and his death is achieved by a furious and angry mob. In expanding upon her predecessors’ accounts of Stapleton’s death, Cary moves beyond Stow, who simply notes that Stapleton is beheaded by the citizens because “he had gathered a great army to withstand the Queene” (Annals 339) and even Holinshed, who attributes the actions of the “furious people” who “laid violent hands” on Stapleton to the bishop’s mistreatment of Londoners and his raising of “a great multitude of armed men against the queene” (1587 338). Cary’s narrative voice outpaces her predecessors in its So Masculine a Stile  201

condemnation of this action, calling the execution a “brain-­sick and heady act” (121). Through extensive moralizing about the “monster Multitude,” Cary critiques the angry public as a mob that “never examine[s] the Justice, or the dependance, but are led by Passion and Opinion; which in fury leaves no Disorder unacted, and no Villany unattempted” (122). Stapleton’s death is described as an “inhumane and barbarous” act “that spilt, without Desert or Justice, the Blood of such a Reverend Prelate” (122). Cary pairs Holinshed’s less extensive critique of mob vigilantism with Stow’s emphasis on the queen’s own lack of due process as a key feature of Isabel’s cruelty. The History of Edward II combines these two sources’ different emphases when it sarcastically describes the meeting of four burghers who are selected to go to Isabel to be thanked “for their lawless bloody Fact, which was stiled an excellent piece of Justice” (122). Through much of this episode, Cary critiques the lawless violence of the citizenry that produces the inappropriate death of the bishop, but at its close, she observes that this act “ran with the sway of the time, and the Queens humour,” suggesting that an event held up by Grafton as a sign of the citizens’ delivery of justice and willingness to serve the queen and by Holinshed as an unsurprising effect of a momentary loss of order is in fact personally driven by Isabel (122–­23). While both Holinshed and Stow offer brief reports of Stapleton’s death that incriminate the London citizenry rather than the queen, Cary’s added evaluation of this moment as an extralegal tragedy clearly takes up and expands upon Stow’s critique of Isabel as a vengeful pursuer of the Spencers, and sets the stage for her account of their deaths, which also hews closely to Stow’s portrait of her abuse of power. Cary’s reshaping of citizen response and her evaluation of the execution of Stapleton in London, which prefigures the coming destruction of Isabel’s more important enemies, enhance the dramatic effect of Isabel’s siege at Bristol. The citizens of Bristol, like the citizens of London, face a conundrum upon the queen’s arrival: they see their families’ lives are at stake for Edward and the Spencers, “for the defence of those that had oppress’d them, and wrong’d the Kingdome by their foul Injustice,” but they also anticipate from the queen’s party “an unruly Conquest, where many look for Booty, all for Pillage” (124). Not trusting either side, the 202  So Masculine a Stile

town seeks a treaty with Isabel, but she refuses and offers peace only if they will turn over her enemies. The citizens possess a shared moral voice that readers should heed—­the people do not want to become “Actors in so foul a Treason”—­but lack the bravery needed to act upon what they know is right: “this smart proceeding melts their leaden Valour” and they yield the Earl of Arundel and Spencer the Elder, the Earl of Winchester, to the queen (124).41 The History of Edward II’s following censure indicts the townspeople, who err grievously: “all agree in this one point of Vertue, Not to betray, where they have vow’d assistance” (125). The failed collective response of the French nobles to Isabel’s pleas for justice earlier in The History of Edward II is transferred to England’s subjects, who cowardly betray those they vowed to protect. This prelude about the moral bankruptcy of English subjects, like Cary’s critique of the London multitude’s behavior during the Stapleton episode, highlights the personal cruelties the queen metes out to the Spencers. Cary pairs this view of a cowardly commons, drawn from Holinshed, with an expansion of Stow’s assertions that Isabel unjustly punishes Edward’s favorites to further magnify the queen’s mistreatment of them. Most striking is Cary’s manipulation of Thomas Wage’s reading of the indictment against Arundel and Winchester. While neither Holinshed nor Stow mention this proclamation, made by the queen’s marshal, against the two men, Grafton describes it in terms that make it appear like part of a legal process whereby Edward’s favorites are clearly given the justice they deserve. In A Chronicle at Large, the charges are made publicly and transparently and the judgment of their offenses is achieved through the combined counsel of an ancient knight in a prosecutorial role and the rest of the nobility present, who all conclude they “well deserued death” (Grafton 213). Cary, however, modifies Grafton’s detail about the marshal of the queen’s army reading the charges against the Earl of Winchester to function as evidence for Stow’s perspective, which identifies Isabel as angrily commanding the elder Spencer to be bound, tortured, and executed “without question or answere” (Annals 340). In The History of Edward II, Thomas Wage “draws up a short Information of many large offences, which are solemnly read to the attentive Army, with a Comment of all the harsh aggravations might make them more odious” So Masculine a Stile  203

while “the confused clamour of the Multitude, serves for Judge, Jury, and Verdict,” which calls for the “sharp Sentence” of execution by hanging (125–­26). Cary’s focus on the clamor of the multitude is an integration of Holinshed’s Chronicles, which attributes the action to the demands of the citizens rather than the queen: “through the instant calling upon of the people, the earl of Winchester was drawne forthe in his cote armor unto the common gallows, and there hanged” (1587 339). Cary redeploys Grafton’s own detail about Wage’s indictment to opposite effect, shaping it into evidence for the lack, rather than the presence, of justice. She pairs that reuse of Grafton with Holinshed’s report of a public demand for Winchester’s death, and finally, like Stow, she makes Isabel ultimately responsible by suggesting the fickle commons’ brutality is a tool Isabel uses to satisfy her own desires. The speed with which Winchester is executed underscores the act’s irregularity and the role of the commons, but it primarily connects the mechanism of the clamoring multitude to the motives driving Isabel’s use of them: “Revenge brooks no delay, no leisure Malice” (126). Calling the death of the elder Spencer a “Heart-­bleeding Tragedy so full of horrour” observed by the king and Spencer the Younger, Cary judges it as such not because of the Spencers’ innocence but because of the improper actions of the queen in her punishment of them. Spencer the Elder’s own dignity in death further contrasts with Isabel’s malice, and both behaviors become instructive for Spencer the Younger and Arundel, who are made to be “sad Spectators” to his execution (126). Spencer the Younger’s interior perspective expresses a series of certainties about his fate that clearly modify source narratives: Spencer had not a grain of hope for mercy: the Barons Deaths prejud’d his coming fortune. The Queen used not to jest where she was angry; his Fathers end assur’d her inclination, and bade him rather venture any hazard, than that which must rely on female pity. (126) Here, Cary has reformulated a moment in Stow, where the defeated Spencer the Elder gives himself to “the mercy of the angry and outragious woman,” Isabel, who summarily executes him without a trial (Annals 339). Reassigned in The History of Edward II to Spencer the Younger, his father’s surrender is 204  So Masculine a Stile

framed not as a resignation to Isabel’s nonexistent mercy but as a defiant acknowledgment of Isabel’s anger, which leads Spencer to hazard a quickly thwarted escape attempt with Edward. Both Cary and Stow rely upon the contrast between an expectation of female pity and the certainty that Isabel’s anger will foreclose such pity to heighten the pathos of Spencer the Younger’s impending death. Both writers’ articulations of this contrast between expectation and behavior are invested in the double bind of gendered essentialism: as a woman, Isabel should offer pity and mercy, and because she is a woman, she is bound to follow her anger instead. This begging of the question reveals female pity to be a wishful oxymoron reminiscent of Marlowe’s view of “unnatural” and “unconstant” queenship, a public role requiring constancy and fidelity that is problematic precisely because it is occupied by women whose gender renders them inconstant and unfaithful. As she repackages a detail from Stow to highlight Isabel’s failures, Cary embraces the aphorisms about female cruelty common to early modern discourses about gender. However, as I discuss below, Cary never fully adopts her sources’ aphoristic statements about women’s nature, but rather challenges their ability to condemn queenship as a structural position. When Cary recounts the death of the younger Spencer, she censures the queen in terms that are strongly indebted to both Stow’s view of Isabel’s cruelty and Marlowe’s critique of her private-­minded use of her political roles as queen consort and mother. With the war now ended and the king and his closest favorite captured, Isabel is wholly overcome by the disorderly, private emotions that earlier marred her victorious progress through England: “The Queen having thus attained to the full of her desire, resolves to use it to the best advantage: Ambition seis’d her strongly, yet resigneth to her incensed Passion the precedence” (127–­28). Isabel, her reason no longer overcoming either her sex’s weakness nor the incensed passion that is often a marker for such weakness in early modern discourse about gender, is now described in terms nearly opposite to those that Cary first used to characterize her. The acceptable motive of her ambition, which operates through a resolve that indicates reason, is overcome by her baser violent emotion. This angry and uncontrolled passion is primarily exemplified through her treatment of her captives, who are no longer villains but So Masculine a Stile  205

victims. Spencer, for example, “is hardly kept but often visited; ’twas not with pity, which befits a Prisoner, but with insulting joy, and base derision” (128). Driven now entirely by revenge and malice, the queen drags Spencer through a torturous progress, stopping at Hereford, “the last Journey of her condemned Prisoner” (128), where “he now receives the end of all his Torments; the Cruelty was such, unfit to be recorded” (130). Departing from all her narrative intertexts, which provide varying levels of detail about Spencer’s torture and execution, Cary refuses to elaborate upon his actual death, choosing instead to belabor the indignities engineered by the queen that precede his demise. The History of Edward II’s interior perspectives and interjected evaluations in its final segment thus guide readers to perceive the queen’s gender as a crucial component of her angry disorder; as Kennedy concludes, Isabel here “conforms to many of the dominant assumptions about women’s anger” in the early modern period, “particularly women’s capacity for violent, vengeful fury.”42 The most obvious iteration of Isabel’s gender as the root cause of her passionate anger appears when The History of Edward II describes the execution of the Earl of Arundel. In a rare use of the first person, the narrative voice observes that the earl has not deserved to be singled out for punishment: “If it were deemed a fault deep enough to be taken in company with those that were corrupt and wicked, I see yet no reason why he alone should suffer” (130). Unable to make sense of the harsh punishment Isabel metes out to Arundel, Cary drastically revises her earlier assessment of Isabel’s ability to moderate her emotions through reason in an interjected evaluation: “we may not properly expect Reason in Womens actions: It was enough the incensed Queen would have it so” (130).43 This aphorism, here leveled directly and unironically at Isabel, is akin to those proliferating The History of Edward II’s account of her escape to France, where such statements highlight the foolishness of her enemies’ gendered assumptions about the threat she poses. This moment is frequently understood as an important contradiction that both produces the inconsistency of character so prominent in The History of Edward II and invites readers to reflect upon that incoherence. Kennedy argues that “we can also see Isabel’s conformity to the early modern stereotype of the 206  So Masculine a Stile

furious woman as enabling Cary’s criticism of that image and the assumptions about women’s anger that inform it.”44 Perry, who finds the lack of consistent characterization in Isabel to be the result of the text’s focus on immoderate passions, argues that in this moment Cary “manufacture[s] [an] uneasiness” produced by her two opposite evaluations of Isabel’s ability to master her passions with reason in order to comment on “the vacuity of gendered language for passion.”45 The ready associations between violent passion and female weakness in early modern discourse implicate Isabel’s female nature as the cause of her savagery, but The History of Edward II censures all its characters—­Edward, Mortimer, Isabel, the Spencers, and the English people as a collective group—­at different points in the narrative because they all become susceptible to unruly passions that are not ultimately linked only to women. Perry’s astute examination of Cary’s gendering of Isabel’s emotion as a means of critiquing the “passionate imbalance that is already characteristic of the predominately masculine public sphere” cues us to see Cary’s aphorism on women’s lack of reason as a purposeful contradiction not only in the context of her repeated, earlier interrogations of masculine perspectives about women’s nature, but in the context of the possible critiques afforded by the political history genre, its narrative strategies, and the strong precedents of More and Bacon from which she has adopted those interrogative perspectives.46 The function of criticisms about gender stereotypes that Kennedy and Perry suggest are released by these contradictory aphoristic statements can be more fully understood through attention to Cary’s navigation of her intertexts’ expressions of queenship as a conceptual political position, which is clearly bound up with—­but not subsumed by—­early modern essentialisms about women. Cary’s Isabel, her predatory incensed passions leading her to chase Edward and his favorites like prey, seems to fully embody the cruel, angry woman first animated by Stow and to suggest that her gender—­filled with malice and lacking in pity and reason—­makes her, like Marlowe’s “unnatural queen,” morally weak and unfit to occupy positions of political power. Indeed, Cary’s historiographical techniques such as interjected evaluation—­used elsewhere to legitimize her political influence—­become the primary means to censure Isabel and mark her as So Masculine a Stile  207

a cruel tyrant. Sometimes minimized by critical approaches that prioritize Isabel’s distinctly positive representation earlier in The History of Edward II, this vexing transition to a violent ruler is, I contend, a crucial piece of the text’s nuanced view of queenship. The History of Edward II mobilizes extensive interjected evaluation to reflect upon Isabel’s mistreatment of the Spencers. In doing so, it demonstrates at length that Isabel becomes a tyrant not because of violent passions that are the natural expression of her female weakness but because she fails to embody the principles of queenship—­reason, justice, and an investment in the common good of the English nation—­attributed to her through Cary’s use of Grafton’s chronicle tradition and the narrative techniques of her political history precedents. Unlike Marlowe, who shows Isabel repeatedly misusing her political influence even in her role as a sympathetic, wronged wife, Cary identifies Isabel’s passionate failures as a different kind of misuse, one that does not preclude the legitimacy of queenship itself. Her failure is, like Edward’s, a failure to make proper political use of a legitimate monarchical position. Instead of ruling on behalf of her injured subjects and reforming her husband’s lapses in governance, Isabel is driven by personal revenge to punish her enemies too severely. Cary accentuates the contrast between the passion-­ driven queen and her former self in her description of Isabel’s movement toward Hereford and London with Spencer the Younger as her prisoner: She thus passeth on with a kind of insulting Tyranny, far short of the belief of her former Vertue and Goodness, she makes this poor unhappy man attend her Progress, not as the antient Romans did their vanquish’d Prisoners, for ostentation, to increase their Triumph; but merely for Revenge, Despite, and private Rancour. (128) Reminding readers of Isabel’s former virtue and goodness, The History of Edward II evaluates her behavior as unbecoming for a queen. What can be seen in ancient Roman culture as a dignified ornamentation to military victory—­the parade of one’s captives—­is explained, lest it be misinterpreted, as a sign of the private rancor that typifies Isabel in the later chronicle tradition. The same action, driven by a different motive, might be read as political but is vociferously underscored as a perversely visible expression 208  So Masculine a Stile

of private desire, an anger that “no longer encompass[es] causes beyond her own.”47 Isabel’s Roman progress is a public act that does not itself embody tyranny but requires an interjected interpretation of the passions motivating its enactment to be read as such. The flexible and potentially political meaning of the progress, laid bare by Cary’s explanation, also invites readers to separate its possible legitimate public function from Isabel’s use of it to satiate her own private rancor. Her personal motivations are the crucial component of her tyranny, and they are judged as unbefitting for a figure who has previously wielded legitimate political power for the sake of her suffering nation. Cary’s explanatory commentary further situates the younger Spencer’s prolonged sufferings in the context of what they reveal about Isabel. Reflecting upon Isabel’s error in allowing her anger free reign over her reason, The History of Edward II concludes that her decisions make her unfit to rule: Certainly this man was infinitely vicious, and deserv’d as much as could be laid upon him, for those many great and insolent Oppressions, acted with Injustice, Cruely and Blood; yet it had been much more to the Queens Honour, if she had given him a quicker Death, and a more honourable Tryal, free from these opprobrious and barbarous Disgraces, which savour’d more of a savage, tyrannical disposition, than a judgment fit to command, or sway the sword of Justice. (128–­29) Rehashing her evaluation of Spencer as a cruel, unjust, and bloody oppressor, Cary observes that he deserves “as much as could be laid upon him,” which presumably includes the torture and death Isabel prescribes. However deserving he is of it, Spencer’s death is deemed a travesty because it dishonors Isabel. Granting Spencer fair trial and a merciful death might have removed the opprobrium leveled against Isabel. Her private rancor has instead led to barbarous and disgraceful treatment that, like Edward’s earlier public denunciation of her adultery, taints the judgment of the accuser most of all. Isabel is thus revealed to possess a savage and tyrannical disposition where she might instead have demonstrated the judgment of a just ruler. The History of Edward II separates, through its contrasting characterizations of Isabel and the suggestion that she could have—­as she So Masculine a Stile  209

has done before—­properly commanded her troops and levied justice, the concept of queenship from the person of Isabel. When she behaves in a manner befitting a queen, The History of Edward II praises her statecraft and lambasts the male figures whose acceptance of stereotypes about women’s weakness leads them to underestimate her intelligence, wit, and power. When Isabel acts like a tyrant, the narrative indicts her for failing to rule properly, but it never links her failures to queenship as a position that is ineligible for political participation because of the gender of its constituent. Cary returns to the importance of the mercy and restraint of those who wield power when she identifies the mistreatment of those subject to judgment as a sign of cruelty and evil: “It is assuredly (give it what title you will) an argument of a Villanous Disposition, and a Devilish Nature, to tyrannize and abuse those wretched ruines which are under the Mercy of the Law, whose Severity is bitter enough without aggravation” (129). Cary’s recognition of her readers’ potential to hypothetically label the quality or entity she describes as possessing a villainous disposition or devilish nature is initially opaque: she never articulates the titles that might be thus assigned. But read in the context of her laborious emphasis on separating the political construct of queenship from the personal motivations of Isabel’s final abusive actions, it suggests an awareness of the likelihood that such a title might itself take the form of the aphorisms about women’s nature that her text both mobilizes and interrogates. Call it what Baldock and Spencer will—­“a woman’s passion”—­it is in fact behavior that Cary’s narrative strongly disassociates from gendered discourse. Cary’s incriminations of Isabel’s tyrannous “disposition” reframe Marlowe’s staging of Isabel’s wholly private desires by separating her behavior from her position as queen. She even more directly distances this disposition from queenship itself when she considers how history might evaluate Isabel: “To see such a Monster monstrously used, no question pleased the giddy Multitude, who scarcely know the civil grounds of Reason: the recollected Judgment that beheld it, censur’d it was at best too great and deep a blemish to suit a Queen, a Woman, and a Victor” (129). As Sir John’s words do when he describes Isabel as a noble lady, a mother to an heir, and a queen deserving of love, pity, and justice, Cary’s interjected 210  So Masculine a Stile

evaluation here identifies definable and overlapping but not synonymous categories that Isabel occupies and which are now tainted by her cruelty: woman, queen, and victor. Isabel is indicted not for being a weak woman who should not possess queenship because she will inevitably use it only for her private means, but as a queen who gives in to incensed passion and veers toward tyranny through acts that blemish the position of victorious queen Isabel has heretofore occupied. This is not a critique of queenship, like that produced by Marlowe, whose unnatural queen implicitly argues for the removal of women from the public realm of politics, but an assertion of it as a position capable of embodying just political action. Suzuki, in her analysis of Cary’s use and critique of Machiavelli’s political thought, observes that “the apposition of ‘a Woman’ and ‘a Victor’ indicates that the two terms are not in contradiction—­as they would be in Machiavelli.”48 To Suzuki, this is part of Cary’s “depart[ure] from [Machiavelli’s] strict gendering of political agency.”49 Whereas the political discourse of Machiavelli asserts gendered aphorisms similar to those I have examined in the later chronicle tradition and Marlowe’s play, Cary ultimately produces a “complex and multifaceted gendered critique of and intervention in Machiavellian political thought” when she indicts Isabel on ethical and political grounds.50 As Suzuki demonstrates, Cary’s history engages with and modifies Machiavellian political thought by ascribing to Isabel agency and political ability, and condemning her ethical lapses in the same terms she uses to indict other rulers, including Edward. I see Cary’s adapted depiction of Isabel, which reasserts the legitimacy of her queenship even as she is indicted as a tyrant, as the result of thoughtful selection of details, perspectives, and precedents from chronicle history sources and political history models that license queenship. Cary’s reflection that “we may not properly expect Reason in Womens actions” and her interrogation of Isabel’s tyrannical rule prompts readers for a final critique of the essentializing assessments of woman’s nature used by The History of Edward II’s villains. This critique comes when Isabel reflects and resists, through interior perspective and then invented dialogue, Mortimer’s plan to execute Edward. As discussed in chapter 3, the chronicle history traditions variably present Isabel’s culpability for her husband’s death. Grafton squarely blames Mortimer but never mentions So Masculine a Stile  211

the queen’s involvement, an approach largely reiterated by Holinshed’s 1577 edition. Fleming’s 1587 additions to the Chronicles include new evaluative commentary assigning her some shared responsibility for masterminding the murder. Stow’s 1580 text zeroes in on the Bishop of Hereford as the most culpable agent, but his 1592 revisions follow Fleming’s lead in accusing the queen, and additionally emphasize her cruel and passionate womanhood as the source of her personal desire for Edward’s death. Marlowe, as I have shown, adapts these two approaches by shifting the queen’s cruel passions to Mortimer and awarding him a devilish control over Isabel. Edward II reduces Isabel’s responsibility from that assigned to her by Fleming and Stow, but it also reduces her agency, depicting her cowardly concessions to Mortimer as the result of her personal affection for him and her female weakness: when she calls her lover “the life of Isabel” and “willingly subscribe[s]” to Mortimer’s desires, she does so to primarily persuade him of her love (Marlowe 21.15–­20). Mortimer’s numerous soliloquies and asides remind audiences of his control over the queen, and demonstrate that his power rests in Isabel’s personal and sexual love for him. Cary follows Grafton in blaming Mortimer, rejects Stow’s incrimination of Isabel, and embraces Marlowe’s characterization of the queen’s lover as an angry and irrational manipulator. Cary locates Mortimer’s culpability in his manipulation of the couple’s shared fears about the tenuousness of their control. With Edward II deposed and imprisoned, Isabel and Mortimer “reve[l] in the height of their Ambition,” but they also experience “unquiet and troubled thoughts” that are described as the byproduct of the pursuit of power: “What they wish’d they had obtain’d, yet there was still something wanting to give it perfection. Such is the vanity of our imagination, which fashions out a period to our desires, that being obtain’d, are yet as loose and restless” (150). The History of Edward II, as it does with so many other negative and all-­consuming emotions expressed by its characters, abstractly moralizes on the insatiability of ambition paired with the vanity of imagination: it “hath no end, but still goes upward, never content or fully satisfied” (150). The inevitable corruption of ambition combines with the grievances of “the dejected Kingdom” (150) that reads their authority as tyranny and leads Mortimer to conclude that they must act: “No longer can he mince his own Conceptions, but plainly tells 212  So Masculine a Stile

the Queen the cause must perish, Edward must dye; this is the only refuge must make all sure, and cleanse this sad suspicion; so long as he remain’d, their fear continues, as would the hope of them attempt their ruine” (151). Like Marlowe’s Mortimer, who advises Isabel to “take heed of childish fear” and follow his instruction, Cary’s Mortimer stokes his queen’s fear and posits Edward’s assassination as the only means to safely retain their lives and kingdom (21.6). While Edward II stages Isabel’s assent to Mortimer’s plans as a cowardly acquiescence driven by private affection for her lover, a sign of female weakness, and a symptom of royal women’s influence, The History of Edward II recounts the queen’s reasoned resistance to Mortimer’s desires. In doing so, the text critiques the discourse of essentialized female behavior through which Mortimer achieves his goals. The History of Edward II, as it conveys Isabel’s response to Mortimer’s demand, uncharacteristically muddles its narrative voice and interior perspectives, observing that “The Queen, whose heart was yet believed innocent of such foul Murther, is, or at least seems, highly discontented” (151). Allowing the possibility that Isabel is in fact what she seems—­discontented with Mortimer’s murderous proposition—­the narrative voice here suggests an outward display of discontent that might not match her interior emotions. But the text then jumps immediately to a uniquely forceful interior perspective that confirms her distress is genuine. She finds Edward’s great suffering incommensurate to his crimes or status as a king and husband, the proposed murder a “too too foul Injustice,” and the consequences too steep (151). The infamy of such an act would cast her son as a “Homicide” and herself as a “Monster,” and the vengeance it promises for its executors, she anticipates, would be inevitably realized by either human or divine means: The crimson Guilt of such a crying action could not escape the cruel hand of Vengeance: if it might be concealed from humane Knowledge, the All-­knowing Power of Heaven would lay it open. She thinks it more than an act of Bloud, to kill a Husband, and a King, that sometimes loved her: She thinks her Son not of so ill a nature, as to slip o’re his Fathers Death untouch’d, unpunish’d, when that he was grown up in power to sift it. (151) So Masculine a Stile  213

The thoughts Cary ascribes to Isabel here are not only an unusually assertive interior perspective—­“she thinks” is offered twice and the sentiments are directly linked to Isabel’s motives and later speech—­they are also an authorial perspective. The queen evaluates Mortimer’s plan to murder Edward with the moral repulsion Cary’s interjected evaluation expresses elsewhere in the narrative, and Isabel anticipates her son’s response and punishment of them both in a foreshadowing of historical events that positions her as an authorial agent. The text’s narrative voice acknowledges that “these motives made her thus return her Answer” (151) in an invented monologue to Mortimer that directly vocalizes the concerns Cary claims are in the queen’s thoughts: Let us resolve (dear Friend) to run all hazards, rather than this that is so foul and cruel; let us not stain our Souls with Royal Bloud and Murder, which seldome scapes unseen, but never unpunish’d, especially for such a fear as is but casual . . . If Edward do get loose, what need we fear him, that pull’d him down when he was great, at highest? Why should we then resolve his Death or Murder? This Help may serve when we are desperate of other Remedies, which yet appears not. To act so great a sin without compulsion, addes to the deed, and makes it far more odious; . . . Then think upon some other course as sure, more harmless; ne’re can my heart consent to kill my Husband. (151–­52) Isabel emphasizes the cruelty of assassination, but she also reasons that such a crime would have negative effects on their own psyches—­“our proper Guilt will bring continual terrour” (152)—­and is neither necessary nor efficacious in helping them defeat their enemies. Isabel’s speech is notable not just for the sympathy for Edward it expresses, but for its logical argument, which seeks to convince Mortimer of the dangers that killing Edward will produce for them. Motivated by compassion and respect for the inevitability of divine punishment, Isabel employs thoughtful reasoning aimed expressly at assuaging Mortimer’s fears. Cary reiterates Isabel’s brief reflection on Mortimer’s arrest in Marlowe’s play—­“I feared as much. Murder cannot be hid”—­and therefore presents Isabel’s sense of divine consequence as an accurate prediction she shares with Mortimer as a persuasive tactic 214  So Masculine a Stile

rather than as a reaction to a murder she has already been bullied into accepting (Marlowe 25.46). Isabel’s display of heart and intellect at this moment in The History of Edward II directly challenges the language her male enemies use to explain her political involvement as irrational anger and diminish her power through assertions of the “fact” of female weakness. Isabel’s reflection, paired with her vocal resistance, conveyed in a subsequent invented dialogue that focuses on the moral reprehension of an act that would stain their souls without clear necessity, clearly aligns in substance and argument with Cary’s surrounding critiques of Edward’s treatment. This is not the Isabel who, driven by incensed anger, tortures and humiliates the Spencers; it is a clear account of Isabel’s reason overcoming a passion that is here embodied by the paranoid, ambitious, and fearful Mortimer. It also provides a final depiction of Isabel more closely associated with the evaluative narrative voice of The History of Edward II than any other more “sympathetic” moment in the text. Just as Elizabeth Woodville does in More’s History of King Richard III, Isabel becomes a voice of history aligned with the authorial voice of Cary’s text. Isabel’s reasoned argument against killing Edward serves as a marked contrast to Mortimer, who “thought he would return the Queen as bitter a Pill, as she had given him to bite on; which makes him thus reply in anger” (152) with a scathing response that concludes, “Mortimer’s resolv’d, since you refuse his judgment, you neither prize his safety, nor his service; and therefore will he seek some other refuge before it be too late” (153). Though he briefly counters Isabel’s logical arguments in his dialogue, Mortimer’s response is one of incredulous anger at the queen’s failure to agree with him, and his winning move is to throw a tantrum—­“with this he flings away in discontentment, as if he meant with speed to quit the Kingdom” (153). Challenging Marlowe’s censorious portrait of Isabel’s cowardly acquiescence through a depiction of the queen’s extensive logical and moral resistance to Mortimer, Cary also adopts and extends Marlowe’s unique view of Mortimer’s corrupt ambition and his manipulation of the queen. The History of Edward II’s Mortimer finally prevails over Isabel’s objections when he makes potent use of the misogynistic language Cary earlier ascribes to Spencer the Younger and Baldock, telling her: “If you stick fast in this your tender So Masculine a Stile  215

pity, I must in justice then accuse my fortune, that gave my heart to such a female Weakness” (153). Mortimer decries Isabel’s tender pity as the key symptom of her female weakness, an association that recalls for readers The History of Edward II’s earlier, inverse critique—­modified from Stow—­of her lack of pity for Spencer the Elder as a sign of her uniquely female malice. This inversion makes visible the ideology of discourse that locates the source of emotions such as pity or malice in gender. When “the amazed Queen” chases after the pouting Mortimer, and immediately concedes to his demands using the same logic of inferiority he has leveled against her—­“I am a Woman, fitter to hear and take advice, than give it”—­it seems unlikely that Cary expects us to believe her (153). Whereas Marlowe’s play assesses Isabel’s concessions to Mortimer as confirmation of her female weakness and a cautionary tale against the problems of a queen consort’s access to power, Cary’s history interrogates the processes that lead the irrationally emotional Mortimer to limit Isabel’s power through gendered language. Often seen as a disappointing submission to Mortimer’s power, this moment in The History of Edward II in fact modifies the conclusions reached by Marlowe’s play by stressing that the advice Isabel is instructed to take is poisonous and logically unsound. Mortimer’s false words have been challenged already by Isabel’s own better reason and the historical hindsight evoked for readers through her accurate assessment of the future. Isabel’s too hasty, pat concession is, in light of Cary’s earlier nuanced critiques of misogyny, a moment when Cary asks us to consider the disastrous consequences of a politically powerful queen’s internalization of such views. We cannot, Cary seems to suggest, properly expect reason in women’s actions when they accept the narratives of irrationality that villainous, ambitious men like the Spencers and Mortimer deploy against them. Isabel errs most grievously not when she gives advice and overthrows her enemies through cunning and wit, but when she turns her attention from rescuing the English nation by falling prey to the “private rancor” that denigrates her legitimate queenship, and when she accepts the poisonous gendered assumptions of others that are repeatedly interrogated here through the narrative strategies of the political history genre. Whereas Marlowe’s play roots Isabel’s agreement in her private affection for Mortimer, Cary’s narrative 216  So Masculine a Stile

thoroughly interrogates the mechanisms Mortimer uses to manipulate her to go against her reason, conscience, and pity to “unwillingly consent” to her husband’s death (154). Cary’s depiction of Isabel’s acquiescence thus becomes her greatest critique of the essentializing perspectives first proposed by Holinshed and Stow and finally staged to implicate queenship by Marlowe. By frequently employing the political history genre’s ironic interrogation of gendered aphorisms and casting her queen in contrast to those gendered assumptions, Cary reasserts the legitimacy of queenship. Adhering to the historical tradition exemplified by Grafton, her narrative proposes that the political aspects of queenship—­including international diplomacy, military action, and the command of just government—­can be fully and ably inhabited by intelligent, influential female rulers, so long as they avoid, like their male counterparts, succumbing to the corruption of ambition and the bad advice of corrupt counselors. Perhaps the clearest example of Cary’s richly nuanced appropriation of conflicting historical precedents and political history models to produce this critique is her innovative treatment of Isabel’s final punishment. Grafton’s version of Isabel’s house arrest frames her confinement as an amicable arrangement that does not foreclose her position as queen mother. Holinshed, whose ambivalent narrative sometimes adheres to Grafton’s view of Isabel and at others prefigures Stow’s depiction of her, largely echoes Grafton in his account of Isabel’s punishment. Stow’s brief report avoids evaluative commentary, simply recording her punishment as a financial confiscation of her lands and wealth. As discussed at the outset of chapter 3, Marlowe dramatically hints at an impending trial and possible execution, creating for Isabel a harsher fate than any chronicle history allows. Cary rejects both Grafton’s strategic minimizing and Marlowe’s creative censure, making no mention of Edward III’s imprisonment of his mother. When she addresses the consequences of Isabel’s involvement in Edward II’s death, Cary instead highlights the effects of regicide in general terms: The Queen, who was guilty but in circumstance, and but an accessory to the Intention, not the Fact, tasted with a bitter time of Repentance, what it was but to be quoted in the Margent of such a Story. (155) So Masculine a Stile  217

The evaluative commentary here belabors the act itself while acknowledging the difficulty of uncovering Isabel’s motivations, so obvious in her mistreatment of the Spencers but extremely unclear in regard to her husband’s death. Cary’s formulation underscores Isabel’s limited responsibility—­she is guilty only by circumstance, an accessory, a peripheral participant—­even while it suggests the powerful historical taint of her involvement in such a story. Opting to pass over the “Actors and Consenters to this deed” because the evidence “differ[s] so mainly, that it may be better past over in silence, then so much as touch’d,” Cary instead alludes to the queen’s personal experience of felt repentance rather than a factual accounting of her known punishment (155). Isabel, according to Cary, suffers the taste of bitter repentance from her very partial role in the nasty business of Edward’s murder, while the truth of Isabel’s involvement is obscured by contradictory accounts in the historical record that shift her participation to a liminal space. The History of Edward II’s articulation of consequence in its description of Isabel’s punishment privileges the queen’s repentance and awareness of her own error over the details of her incarceration and its perception by others. As with her account of the “bitter Pill” Mortimer serves Isabel through his misogynistic attacks, Cary highlights here the internal perspectives of and effects upon her queen. Isabel’s fate as described by Cary is not a factual but a psychological one; it is her own recognition of her place in the historical record, quoted in the margins of a rebellion, deposition, and murder of a king. In the end, though, the final blow of Cary’s metaphor is perhaps harsher than Marlowe’s whispered execution, for relegating Isabel to the margins of the story disavows her active political participation and removes her from her place in the past. Cary’s final assessment of the bitterness the queen tastes is clearly meant to demonstrate that when she experiences “what it was but to be quoted in the Margent of such a Story,” she feels horror and regret at her marginal association with Edward’s murder. But a reader attentive to Isabel’s complex and contradictory representation in The History of Edward II’s myriad sources and Cary’s own nuanced appropriation of those intertexts might register in this metaphor an emphasis not on the “story” of regicide but on the “margent” to which Isabel is consigned, and imagine the queen here punished with the bitter taste not only of guilt but 218  So Masculine a Stile

of historical marginalization. Isabel, then, is uniquely disciplined by her historiographer, forced to experience her own relegation to the margins of history. For a text that so carefully navigates a rich historiographical tradition that privileges the interior perspectives of queens and licenses their political interventions, this account of Isabel’s punishment is an apt one. In her focus on what Isabel tastes, Cary reaffirms narrative historiography’s reliance on interior perspective to complexly represent the lives of historical royal women. In this evaluation of the results of Isabel’s political missteps, Cary continues to articulate the problem of women’s political participation explored, to different effect, in both narrative and dramatic history writing of the early modern period. Cary’s prefatory assertion that she has not “followed the dull Character of our Historians” is ultimately belied by her complicated use of two competing chronicle traditions and her text’s prominent similarities to two prime examples of early modern political history, particularly in her complex depiction of Isabel. Well-­read in these historians’ English chronicles, Cary makes careful, conscious use of the details and perspectives of her source intertexts. She vividly displays her knowledge of historiographical forms and indicates clear preferences for those historians, like Grafton, who license royal women’s political participation. Rather than ignoring the alternative tradition of representation exemplified by Holinshed and Stow and the dramatic intertext of Marlowe’s Edward II, Cary integrates and reframes their evidence and evaluative perspectives to offer a nuanced critique of condemnatory views of queenly influence through her story of Edward’s reign. And finally, she repackages her thoughtful engagements with contradictory source traditions into a different historiographical form, clearly drawing on the precedent of male historiographers writing political history to represent Isabel’s queenship and to comment on royal women’s political influence. Like More, she depicts her queen as a formidable challenger to the corrupt court favorites that The History of Edward II identifies as the true enemies of king and country, and like Bacon, she ironically challenges early modern perspectives about female irrationality that are used to rhetorically downplay women’s political efficacy. In her use of common narrative strategies, in her complex representation of royal women’s So Masculine a Stile  219

historical agency, and in her interrogation of gendered assumptions, Cary appears very like many of her historiographer predecessors. And if we are willing to countenance the revised view of early modern historiography as a genre genuinely interested in royal women’s political interventions and perspectives that is at the heart of this book, we might say that she does, in fact, write in “so masculine a stile.”

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5 You Must Be King of Me Queens and Rivals in Francis Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck

In act 3, scene 2 of John Ford’s 1634 play, Perkin Warbeck, the princess Katherine Gordon tearfully parts with her new husband, the English pretender, at the court of Scottish king James IV. As Perkin leaves to meet Henry VII’s forces in battle, he vows to his wife that he will “crown thee empress of the west” with his victory.1 In response to her husband’s assertion, Katherine articulates the play’s paradoxical credo on the role of a queen consort: You have a noble language, sir; your right In me is without question, and however Events of time may shorten my deserts In others’ pity, yet it shall not stagger Or constancy or duty in a wife. You must be king of me, and my poor heart Is all I can call mine. (3.2.163–­69) Katherine sidesteps the pressing concerns about Perkin’s legitimacy that are already turning his allies against him and describes a husband’s unquestionable right to his wife’s constancy as that which strips her of everything except her own heart while elevating him to the royal title he must fight for 221

elsewhere. Katherine’s most specific expression of subservience to Perkin valorizes the domestication of royal marriage while simultaneously using the discourse of royal authority to conceptualize a husband’s power over his wife. The play embraces Katherine’s apolitical wifely obedience by treating her valorization of private marriage as her most laudatory quality. This reshaping of a royal princess into a subject wife is an extreme expression of similar patterns of domestication undertaken in The True Tragedy, Edward IV, and Edward II. Whereas those plays delegitimize the political influence of queen consorts and mistresses and attempt to relegate royal women to private spheres by evaluating their power as either ineffective or dangerous to England’s national interest, Perkin Warbeck cuts out the real English queen altogether. Instead, it uses the language of monarchical hierarchy to shape royal marriage—­through the pairing of the truly royal Katherine Gordon and the imposter royal Perkin Warbeck—­into a wholly private relationship. As with the stage plays examined in previous chapters, Ford’s dramatic adaptation is striking in its difference from his primary narrative source, Francis Bacon’s 1622 The History of King Henry VII. This chapter reads Perkin Warbeck’s patriarchal dream vision of private royal marriage, expressed through the rhetorical will of Katherine Gordon, as an intertextual engagement with The History of King Henry VII’s promotion of the political dimensions of queenship to demonstrate how dramatic adaptations of narrative historiography directly responded to both the political concerns of their narrative sources and their own contemporary moments. Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII insists that readers view a king’s personal and public relationship with his queen consort as a crucial component of monarchical power and critiques Henry for his mistreatment of Elizabeth York, specifically by negatively depicting Henry’s paranoid perception of her as a rival threat to his throne and his calculated but disastrous suppression of her public role. The narrative historiography examined in earlier chapters has shown queenship to be central to the political crises of the Wars of the Roses and Edward II’s reign. Bacon’s history goes beyond these narrative predecessors to theorize the centrality of royal women to

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strategic and successful kingship. I argue that Bacon identifies a monarch’s policies toward his queen consort as central to that monarch’s successes or failures through his intentionally fictive account of Henry VII’s oppression and estrangement of Elizabeth York, a view of monarchical politics that emerges in response to James I’s negotiation of relationships with his female kin. As Perkin Warbeck answers the questions about royal marriage posed in The History of King Henry VII by promoting a fantasy of apolitical queenship, it also critiques the political influence of Queen Henrietta Maria in the early years of Charles I’s reign. Perkin Warbeck responds to the central concerns of Bacon’s source text by eliminating the role of Elizabeth York and other powerful female relatives of the king and developing the role of Katherine, child of George Gordon, the second earl of Huntley, and Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Scotland. Ford’s play creates in Katherine’s apolitical loyalty a new, less problematic fantasy of queenship specifically tailored to cancel the succession concerns and divided loyalties that constitute Henry’s greatest challenges in The History of King Henry VII. The play identifies Katherine Gordon’s loyalty to her traitorous husband as a virtue that earns her sympathy even from the monarch her husband endeavors to usurp. The play’s vision of an ideal queen consort, defined by her separation from politics and her wifely obedience to her husband, signifies a solution to two problems: the historical circumstances of Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth York and the contemporary circumstances of Charles I’s marriage, which generated fears about the potentially malignant influence of a queen consort under personal rule. Whereas Bacon uses the figure of Elizabeth York and her kinship networks to explicitly argue, for the edification of James I, that royal women’s political action is essential to kingship, Ford’s revisions to his source material challenge this view of queenship. The ideological contradictions within early modern views of a queen consort’s role as both an ideal, private wife and a political player with conflicting loyalties are revealed intertextually: as the play replaces Bacon’s Elizabeth York with Katherine Gordon, it exposes impossible cultural desires to recursively depoliticize queenship.

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Kingly Failures in The History of King Henry VII Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII has received serious critical attention for a narrative history: as I show in the introduction, scholars often read it as a Tacitean-­styled pragmatic lesson in politics and an innovative work of historiography employing psychological analysis.2 Drawing its events from previous chronicle histories, primarily Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (History of England) (1534, written ca. 1513), Edward Hall’s Union (1548 and 1550), John Stow’s Annals of England (1592), and John Speed’s The History of Great Britaine (1611), The History of King Henry VII adds sharp assessments of the political causes of those events through narrative strategies that offer insight into Henry’s thoughts.3 The result is a unique representation of a ruler who is a master of practical dissembling and artifice, who rules well but ruthlessly, and who is also a shortsighted, harmfully suspicious king given to avarice and paranoia. Bacon clarifies in his dedication to Prince Charles that this unflinching portrait of a flawed Henry is nevertheless intended as a model of kingship: Henry “was a Wise Man, and an Excellent King; . . . I haue not flattered him, but tooke him to life as well as I could.”4 As D. R. Woolf notes, Bacon promotes Henry as the Tudor ancestor he hoped James I and Prince Charles would improve upon through the acceptance of Bacon’s own astute advice and diagnosis of Henry’s mistakes.5 Made a scapegoat over James’s foreign policy debacles and struggles with Parliament, Bacon unsurprisingly offers James practical advice about managing public opinion through his account of Henry’s challenges and failures. James I’s claim of descent from the Tudors was dependent upon Henry VII, whose daughter Margaret married James IV of Scotland and became James I’s grandmother, and James made and encouraged symbolic comparisons between himself and Henry.6 In a letter to James accompanying the manuscript of The History of King Henry VII, Bacon describes Henry VII as “your forerunner,” “whose spirit, as well as his blood, is doubled upon your Majesty.”7 James saw in his ancestor’s joining of the houses of York and Lancaster a precedent for his own attempts to unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England and Bacon made use of James’s investment in these comparisons, beginning his dedication with just such a historical parallel: 224  You Must Be King of Me

I haue endeauored to doe Honour to the Memorie of the last King of England, that was Ancestour to the King your Father and Your selfe; and was that King to whom both Vnions may in a sort referre: That of the Roses beeing in him Consummate, and that of the Kingdomes by him begunne. (3) In The History of King Henry VII itself, Bacon records Henry VII’s musings about his daughter’s marriage to James IV “as an Oracle” predicting James I’s rule over both Scotland and England (145). The History of King Henry VII was a largely practical endeavor, meant to be a vendible example of Bacon’s own vast political knowledge that might regain the favor of Prince Charles and King James I after Bacon’s sentencing for taking bribes as lord chancellor and his subsequent removal from all his official government positions.8 According to Woolf, “Bacon’s ideas on history and his practical efforts at writing it have received more attention than those of any other Renaissance Englishman.”9 Yet studies of The History of King Henry VII rarely examine Henry’s relationship to his wife or his other female kin as part of the text’s political lessons.10 This neglect is peculiar, as The History of King Henry VII’s attribution of Henry’s political failures to his fear and subsequent ill-­treatment of Elizabeth is entirely unique: while scholars studying Elizabeth’s queenship concur that her image was carefully managed to downplay her superior claim to the throne and position her as a queen consort and mother, neither modern historians of Henry VII nor Bacon’s own sources see the consistent policy of oppression and estrangement toward her that Bacon describes in Henry’s actions and psychology.11 The History of King Henry VII’s attention to the political effects of the sovereign’s relationship with his wife was not only original, it was also an influential precedent for later political historians; as I demonstrate in chapter 4, Elizabeth Cary’s The History of Edward II follows Bacon in theorizing kingly inattention to the role of a queen consort as a grave political error and a sign of sovereign weakness. Bacon’s detailed invention of the political consequences of Henry’s personal and public stance toward his queen consort is perhaps overlooked because it is never paired with a full depiction of Elizabeth’s influence. Focusing on the interior perspective You Must Be King of Me  225

of the monarch and writing to provide practical political advice to James, Bacon does not assign Elizabeth speeches, interior perspectives, or even direct attributions of agency, as his fellow historiographers often do for her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, or for the earlier medieval queen consort Isabel. Instead, The History of King Henry VII modifies its own sources to depict the essential function of a queen consort’s public role and the consequences of a monarch’s suspicion of his own politically expedient marriage. In its emphasis not on the autonomous political agency of royal women but on the political necessity of a queen consort’s overlapping private and public roles, The History of King Henry VII argues for the importance of queenship to effective monarchical rule. Numerous historians have acknowledged the “political liability” Elizabeth’s Yorkist lineage posed for her husband.12 While legitimizing his children and securing needed aristocratic support, her bloodline and Henry’s own “tenuous claim to the throne” demanded her placement in a “weakened and subordinate role” that emphasized her motherhood and downplayed the image of joint rule celebrated in the pageantry for Elizabeth I’s own coronation.13 But readings of The History of King Henry VII have generally understood Henry’s attitude toward Elizabeth as simply an example of his dislike of Yorkists or his personal character. Judith Anderson, addressing Bacon’s fabrication of Henry’s antipathy for his wife, argues that Elizabeth becomes “the focus and symbol of a deep and repeatedly aggravated aversion Henry has to the house of York.”14 While Bacon does link Henry’s treatment of Elizabeth to this factionalism, he does so to emphasize the political consequences of a king’s relationship to his consort. One of The History of King Henry VII’s most pervasive and predominant lessons can be found in Henry’s inability to recognize or respond wisely to the significant political importance of his own personal relationships with female royalty. Bacon adds to the historical Henry’s representational subordination of Elizabeth York a pervasive indictment of that subordination as one of the gravest errors of his reign. He describes Henry’s antipathy toward Elizabeth in terms demonstrative of the overlap of personal and political concerns present in the structure of royal marriage: 226  You Must Be King of Me

he shewed himself noe verie indulgent husband towards her; though she was beautifull gentle and fruitefull. But his aversion toward the House of Yorke, was so predominant in him, as it found place not only in his warres and Counsels, but in his chamber, and bed. (15) Elizabeth fulfills all the seemingly personal wifely duties of a queen consort: she exhibits appropriate queenly behavior and produces two male heirs. But Henry’s abhorrence for his former rivals prevents him from embracing his wife as both domestic partner and political ally. Henry’s aversion to Yorkists does not simply move from the public realm to the private space of his bedchamber. The king’s personal relationship with Elizabeth moves outward, too, and leads the people to suspect his involvement in her younger brothers’ murders, to distrust his shows of goodwill toward her kin, and to become impatient with decisions perceived to punish Yorkists. These effects demonstrate that the royal bedchamber and the king’s council are never discrete public and private spheres. In Bacon’s eyes, Henry’s inability to recognize that his private relationship with Elizabeth has political repercussions for his own legitimacy and popularity is the greatest sign of his kingly failings and a weakness that creates rebellion and public discontentment. Bacon first dramatizes the impossibility of a purely personal marital relationship between Henry and Elizabeth early in The History of King Henry VII, when he shows that their marriage is at the core of Henry’s first, and perhaps most important, political decision. Henry must decide which of the available claims to the throne is most likely to assure his royal security as a new king: the title of his betrothed, Elizabeth York; his own title, precariously traced to the Lancastrian claim; or his victory by battle. According to Bacon, the first of these is “fairest, and most like to giue contentment to the People” (5). The downside of such a claim, as Henry sees “plaine before his Eyes,” is Elizabeth’s greater right: If he relied vpon that Title, he could be but a King at Curtesie, and haue rather a Matrimoniall then a Regall power: the right remayning in his Queene, vpon whose decease, either with Issue or without Issue, he was to giue place, and be remoued. (5–­6) You Must Be King of Me  227

While his wife’s right is more secure than his own, and thus a potential support to his control over England, to rule on her behalf would make Henry only a vulnerable joint monarch. So “liking that Title best which made him independent,” Henry “assumed the Stile of King in his owne name, without mention of the Lady elizabeth at all, or any relation thereunto” (7). Bacon’s account of this decision leads Charles T. Wood to conclude that Elizabeth York’s queenship suggests “if a woman wanted to have influence and to exercise genuine power, then it was far better not to have any legitimate claim to them.”15 But Bacon’s narrative does not simply suggest that Elizabeth’s family alliances and proximity to the throne become an obstacle to her own political power; rather, it critiques Henry for his attempts to limit her power on these grounds. The decision to reign independently is, in Bacon’s view, “a course hee euer after persisted, which did spin him a threed of many seditions and troubles” (7). Henry’s lack of wisdom is regularly demonstrated in The History of King Henry VII via examples of his efforts to suppress Elizabeth York’s claim, such as his ill-­fated early support for the rumor of a living son of Edward IV. A rumor “(at the first) of his owne nourishing; because hee would haue more Reason not to raigne in the Right of his vvife,” it exposes the king’s inability to “waigh [his suspicions] aright in their proportions” (167). Henry’s hopes that rumors of a living male Yorkist heir would nullify Elizabeth’s blood title show that her claim was initially more threatening to him than the emergence of pretenders.16 Ironically, Henry’s attempts to suppress Elizabeth’s claim lead to its emergence in opposition to rather than in support of his own, because his subjects perceive it as unfair treatment of his wife and queen consort. Bacon clarifies the political ramifications of Henry’s personal treatment of Elizabeth by identifying her as the central focus of Henry’s antagonistic relationship with the English people. He generally conceives of Henry’s subjects, including the gentry and the king’s own advisers, as usually unaware of the intricacies of Henry’s statecraft. Bacon describes the English people as an unsophisticated, crude, public group, too often taken by frivolous affections for the house of York and the emptiness of royal spectacle, but he also acknowledges the power of their public opinion. Writing of Henry’s 228  You Must Be King of Me

early popularity, Bacon claims that the English thought “hee was a Prince as ordayned and sent downe from Heauen, to vnite and put to an end the long dissentions of the two Houses” (8). Historiographers before Bacon promoted this concept of divine union through the marriage of Henry and Elizabeth York, as it was the ideological underpinning of the Tudor claim to the throne. As narrator, Bacon does not directly voice this Tudor-­ myth perspective, but like the Stuarts, he recognizes its pragmatic uses and ascribes prior historians’ providential beliefs to the people in his history. He suggests that the public’s investment in this ideology should be important to Henry and understands as a central truth what the king fails to realize: belief in Henry as an anointed ruler is predicated upon the promised marriage alliance with Elizabeth that initially motivated Yorkists to support him.17 Bacon’s own interjected evaluation identifies Elizabeth as the key to Henry’s ascension: “she had presented him with diuers children: and with a Crowne also, though he would not acknowledg it” (165). Bacon thus reiterates the public’s perspective, one that sees Elizabeth not as a rival but as a buttress to Henry’s claim and resents Henry’s treatment of her. Paired with an evaluation of Elizabeth’s fecundity, this assessment of her role in securing Henry’s throne underscores one of Bacon’s key lessons about royal marriage: a queen consort’s position is always both personal and political, and it is in a king’s best interest to acknowledge his consort’s lineage, popularity, and fertility. Bacon explains how the king’s planned marriage alliance could provide Henry with two essential components of secure kingship and solidify his own shaky claim: “And as his victorie gaue him the Knee, so his purpose of marriage with the Lady elizabeth, gaue him the Heart; so that both Knee and Heart did truely bow before him” (8). Joining himself to the well-­ loved daughter of the house of York promises to give Henry love as well as obedience. By accentuating the people’s happiness at Henry’s arrival in London and their view of his union with Elizabeth as a divinely inspired national healing, Bacon demonstrates their eagerness to accept Henry as rightful king. This record of early acceptance accentuates Henry’s poor judgment when he fails to give the people what they want: their Yorkist queen, who embodies a public symbol not of a greater Yorkist right, but of You Must Be King of Me  229

a restorative union ordained by heaven. Bacon’s concluding evaluation of Henry at the end of The History of King Henry VII (as well as the record of rebellion and discontent throughout it) shows that the early, easy promise of an obedient and loving people is not realized: As for the disposition of his Subiects in generall toward him, it stood thus with him; That of the three affections which naturally tye the heartes of the Subiects to their Soueraignes, loue; feare, and reverence; he had the last in height; the second in good measure; and ‘so’ little of the first, as he was beholding to the other two. (167) Henry is unable to retain the heart of his people, and his reception as a rightful king is quickly diminished by the immediate decisions he makes about his title, his marriage, and the coronation of his queen. The History of King Henry VII’s description of Henry’s belated wedding to Elizabeth York, which took place nearly five months after his victory at Bosworth and three months after his own coronation, emphasizes the people’s desire for an official union, highlights further public response to Henry’s repression of her public presence, and reveals Henry’s view of his wife’s popularity as a threat to his own:18 At last [ . . . ] was solemnized the soe long expected and so much desired mariage, between the King and the lady Elizabeth; which day of mariage was celebrated with greater tryumph and demonstrations, (especially on the Peoples part) of ioy and gladnesse, then the daies, either of his entrie or Coronation; which the King rather noted, than liked. (15) Bacon here expands upon Speed’s description of this event in The History of Great Britaine as “the most wished and most welcome day of marriage” to include Henry’s own powerful response.19 By comparing the wedding to other moments of spectacle in Henry’s reign, Bacon attributes strong political value to royal marriage as one of a few public spectacles that bring a king and his common subjects together. This public moment, centered on Henry’s bride, is of greater consequence and happiness to the general public than any that have come before it. The History of King Henry VII theorizes the public function of queenship that feminist historians of medieval 230  You Must Be King of Me

rulership have long identified as a key aspect of a male sovereign’s rule.20 Henry, however, notes the public’s outward display of affection and finds it suspiciously directed at his wife rather than himself. Instead of recognizing this public celebration of his marriage as further support for a union that ultimately reinforces his control, Henry imagines that it indicates an unequal division of loyalty that weighs against him. Bacon again raises the possibility that Henry might use his queen’s public favor in his own interest; indeed, he broadly suggests that her queenship can uphold the legitimacy of Henry’s kingship and effectively confirm his rule. There is nothing directly divisive or seditious in the rejoicing Bacon records; Henry’s jealousy and suspicion are his own creation, unsupported by public action and certainly not by Elizabeth’s. However, Henry responds to his people’s support for Elizabeth with decisions that create a real division where he once only imagined one. Shortly after the king registers political danger in the people’s exuberant rejoicing over his marriage, Bacon notes that Henry is “not without much hatred throughout the Realme” (17). The cause of this hatred is Henry’s failure to crown Elizabeth queen until two years after his own coronation: This [delay] did alienate the hearts of the Subiects from him dayly more and more, especially when they saw, that after his Marriage, and after a Sonne borne, the King did neuerthelesse not so much as proceed to the Coronation of the Queene, not vouchsafing her the honour of a Matrimoniall Crowne. (17) Valuing the queen’s role as consort might have pacified a public uninterested in seeing her rule but strongly invested in seeing her praised for producing an heir and establishing continuity for the commonwealth. Instead, Henry is driven to delay her coronation by his view of Elizabeth as a potential rival. Hoping to protect his own independent rule through such a delay, Henry only manages to fuel his own unpopularity and generate sedition and rebellion because of the perceived dishonor to his obedient and fruitful wife. According to Bacon, Elizabeth’s coronation is not fulfilled until after “Danger,” in the form of the pretender Lambert Simnel in 1486, “had taught [Henry] what to doe” (17). In identifying Elizabeth’s coronation as You Must Be King of Me  231

a reactionary attempt to contain national unrest over Henry’s repression of his wife’s public role, Bacon suggests that a dissatisfied public, alienated by Henry’s failure to properly honor his Yorkist wife, was more likely to accept the romantic possibility of a living Yorkist heir. The king’s failure to consider the political import of his own marital alliance registers as a significant cause of rebellion in The History of King Henry VII. Public support for the pretenders to Henry’s throne, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, is largely generated by the king’s failures to properly manage his relationship with his Yorkist wife. It is also stoked by the clever machinations of his wife’s Yorkist aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, whose presence in The History of King Henry VII underscores Bacon’s lessons about a king’s antagonistic relationship with powerful female kin and demonstrates how a queen’s kinship networks function as complicated spaces of political agency for royal women. Critical accounts of Margaret in The History of King Henry VII have understood her actions as unsuccessful and her representation as a parody of witchcraft, as she “raised vp the Ghost of Richard Duke of Yorke (second sonne to King Edward the Fourth) to walke and vex the King” (80). Anderson argues that Margaret is “an ineffectual parody of the mythic enchantress,” driven by irrational motives.21 Anderson rightly identifies Bacon’s descriptions of Margaret as evocative images characteristic of Bacon’s use of myth. These images do not, however, make Margaret into parody; she is a serious force to be reckoned with from Bacon’s perspective, and his derision is directed not at Margaret herself but at those who perceive her efficacy as the result of dark magic and personal vendetta rather than political enmity. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, Bacon ironically implicates responses to Margaret—­including those present in some of his own earlier narrative sources—­that characterize women’s involvement in politics in demonic and monstrous terms in order to unwisely discount their influence. Bacon’s parody responds, in part, to Thomas Gainsford’s 1618 True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, which labels Margaret a “Viper,” “Scorpion,” “Spider,” “devilish Woman,” and a “Dog” returning to its own vomit, and routinely laments that “ever a Woman should be the Author of such Devilish Devices and hellish projects.”22 While Gainsford’s is 232  You Must Be King of Me

perhaps the most extensive dehumanizing account of Margaret’s diabolical anger, the narrative histories of Vergil, Hall, and Speed all similarly record her animosity toward Henry and frame her actions as emerging from women’s ungovernable and malicious nature.23 Bacon’s narrative, in contrast, positions Margaret as one of Henry’s chief rivals and echoes the language of its narrative predecessors primarily to underscore the dangers of underestimating a political enemy based on gender. The sister of the late Edward IV and Richard III, Margaret is represented as the primary agent behind both pretenders—­she styles herself the “Soueraigne Patronesse and Protectress of the enterprize” to raise up Simnel—­and her status as the widow of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, has bestowed her with “great loue and authoritie” among the Burgundians, including the financial and military power she levels against Henry (24). She seeks, with the help of her own spies, known counterfeits, educating Perkin Warbeck about private family details, directly protecting him in Flanders, and using her own resources to support him. Henry’s ambassadors to the Flemish archduke Philip, sent to convince Philip to expel Warbeck and punish Margaret, represent their requests as a matter of paternalistic interest in her personal reform that, like William Warham’s aphoristic assessments of her monstrous maternity discussed in chapter 4, attempt to dismiss her political power: We stay vnwillingly vpon this Part: we would to God, that Ladie would once taste the ioyes, which God Almightie doth serue vp vnto her, in beholding her Neece to raigne in such honour, and with soe much Royall Issue, which she might be pleased to account as her owne. (91) Philip, in response, concedes to Henry’s request that he shun Warbeck but insists he cannot instruct Margaret to remove her support, as she remained “absolute in the lands of her Dowery,” and can command her own resources (91).24 The problem of Margaret’s autonomy within Flanders is thoroughly recorded in Bacon’s sources—­Vergil calls her a “free agent” and Hall notes that she “might frankely and freely do and ordre all thynges at her awne wyll”—­but only Bacon turns his focus to Henry’s response to Margaret and acknowledges the archduke’s continued support.25 Bacon’s interjected evaluation that the king “was nothing satisfied with this Answere: for well You Must Be King of Me  233

he knewe, that a Patrimoniall Dowery caried no Parte of Soueraignetie or Commaund of Forces” conveys the king’s awareness of Margaret’s political influence and belies his ambassadors’ stated desires for Margaret to align her familial loyalty with Elizabeth York (91). Henry concedes that Margaret influences the archduke’s counsel and, in spite of his critique of the privileges extended by her dowry, recognizes that Philip will continue to aid Warbeck behind his back. The History of King Henry VII’s interjected evaluations of Margaret’s earthly power refute the gendered, mythical, and magical descriptions of Henry’s ambassadors and explain Margaret’s involvement in emphatically political terms. Bacon’s account of Margaret’s sovereign power, broad public support, and disinterest in a narrowly defined familial loyalty highlights Henry’s own anxieties about Elizabeth York, suggesting a cautionary model of Yorkist women turned against the English king. Bacon only briefly treats Margaret’s manly spirit and female malevolence seriously, when he follows earlier chronicle accounts to describe Margaret’s own motivation as an irrational aberration of familial loyalty that leads her to hate her own kinswoman: She bare such a mortall hatred to the house of Lancaster and personally to the King, as she was no waies mollified by the coniunc‘t’ion of the houses in her ‘Neeces’ marriage; but rather hated her Neece, as the meanes of the Kings ascent to the Crowne, and assurance therein. (24–­25) A sole holdout who refuses to accept the union of the houses, Margaret prefers to support fake Yorkists over the marriage that ends English civil war. Her dislike of Henry springs from a fanatical loyalty that Bacon distinguishes from the English people’s loyalty to Elizabeth York. The moderate allegiances of the English public, which accept the principle of union but critique Henry for his treatment of Elizabeth, are treated as valid in The History of King Henry VII, but Bacon severely judges Henry himself for failing to understand the importance of reasonable loyalties to the house of York. Margaret’s uncompromising and emotional opposition to Henry is characterized as a stubborn investment in the ideology of civil war. It also parallels Henry’s own irrational “aversion toward the House of Yorke,” which finds 234  You Must Be King of Me

its way into his war councils, his chamber, and his bed. Margaret’s presence in The History of King Henry VII thus amplifies the import of Henry’s mistreatment of his queen. As a malevolent and autonomous Yorkist woman, Margaret is a refracted image of Elizabeth York, a vision of what pervasive public support for Yorkist rule turned against Henry might look like, and an embodiment of the rivalry with Elizabeth York that Henry concocts when he registers public rejoicing over his marriage with suspicion. In the few places where Bacon concurs with his narrative sources to critique her irrationality without irony, he turns her into a foil for Henry—­a sovereign figure acting against England due to an unfounded aversion—­and a reminder of Bacon’s largest political lesson in The History of King Henry VII. After Margaret’s first protégé, Lambert Simnel, is defeated, Henry decides to “extirpat[e] [ . . . ] the rootes and causes of the like Commotions in tyme to come” (30). The potential root of further rebellion is found in his subjects’ love for their still crownless queen: The King beganne to finde where his shoe did wring him: And that it was his depressing of the House of Yorke that did ranckle and fester the affections of his People. And therefore being now too wise to disdaine perils any longer, and willinge to giue some contentment in that kinde, (at least in ceremony) he resolued at last to proceed to the Coronation of his Queene. (30) The coronation of Elizabeth York in November 1487 is too little too late, and Bacon faults Henry for not acknowledging his own mistakes and failing to successfully hide his own motivations from a public capable, in this case at least, of reading his inner feelings from his outer actions: the “strange and vnusuall distance of time made it subiect to euery mans note, that it was an act against his stomacke, and put vpon him by necessitie and reason of state” (31). Henry’s distaste is almost as damning as his original failure of action; the public perceives the coronation as a hollow honor devoid of proper sentiment. While Bacon’s assessment of Henry’s antipathy toward his wife as a major factor in his political failures is, according to most modern historians, an invention, historical accounts of Elizabeth York’s coronation verify the You Must Be King of Me  235

extent to which the official state spectacles of Henry’s reign support Bacon’s hypothesis. J. L. Laynesmith argues that Elizabeth’s unique coronation procession to the Tower of London by barge might have been devised to downplay her claim and reinforce Henry’s by figuring her as an outsider to the realm, as it allowed Henry to “welcom[e] his queen to his kingdom as if she were the foreigner and he the sovereign who had always been in England.”26 Bacon’s record of the coronation itself is brief—­“the Queene was with great solemnitie crowned at Westminster”—­but Laynesmith’s description indicates how the event could have informed his portrait of a king who saw potential danger in public spectacles focused on Elizabeth York (30).27 The danger Henry sought to avoid by finally crowning his queen is in fact unavoidable: when a second pretender emerges, Henry’s subjects are swayed to his cause by now familiar reasons: “chiefely they fell vpon the wronge that he did his Queen, in that he did not Reigne in her Right” (86). They understand the appearance of Perkin Warbeck, who calls himself Edward IV’s son, the Duke of York, as a divine intervention on behalf of their queen and the duke’s victimized sister: “wherefore they said that God had now brought to light a Masculine Branch of the House of Yorke,” who “would not be at [Henry’s] Curtesie, howsoeuer he did depresse his poore lady” (86). Replaced in his public’s eyes by a new, familial figure of divine union who will properly value Elizabeth, Henry must fight a long, costly rebellion that pits him against foreign rulers, his own disaffected nobles, and Margaret’s significant power. Bacon further emphasizes Henry’s fear of Elizabeth’s rival claim and his subsequent failure to acknowledge her importance in English politics through his record of the succession crisis created in Castile upon the death of Queen Isabella, who ruled jointly with her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragon (Ferdinando). The 1504 death of Isabella greatly interests Henry “not for Newes at large” but because “it had a great relation to his owne Affaires”: he sees Ferdinando’s case as “his owne case after the death of his owne Queen” and the case of Ferdinando’s daughter Joanna ( Joan) as “the Case of his owne sonne Prince Henrie” (152). A year after the death of Elizabeth York in 1503, Bacon’s Henry is still preoccupied with the potential loss of his kingdom through his wife’s greater claim. He is primarily 236  You Must Be King of Me

concerned about the possibility of Prince Henry’s premature succession over him, a situation for which Isabella’s death offers precedent: “For if both of the Kings had their Kingdomes in the right of their Wiues; they descended to the Heyres and did not accrue to the Husbands” (152). Still fearing he holds the kingdom in the right of his now-­dead queen in spite of his own claims to the contrary, Bacon’s paranoid Henry thinks he might be pushed aside by his son. While Bacon states that Henry’s “owne Case had both Steele and Parchment more than [King Ferdinando’s], That is to say, a Conquest in the Feild, and an Acte of Parliament,” he emphasizes Henry’s disproportionate concern (152). Henry is keenly interested in the arguments Ferdinando might use to retain power, and through interior perspective he speculates that Ferdinando might “hold it in his owne Right, or as Administrator to his daughter,” both preferable scenarios that would prevent him from being “put out by his Son-­in-­lawe” Philip (152). Henry’s steel and parchment claims face the greatest threat from his own mind: the “naturall Title of Discent in Bloud” he does not have “did (in the imagination euen of a wise man) breed a doubt; That the other two were not safe nor sufficient” (152). Though Elizabeth’s death the year before did not generate the crisis of succession he worries over, Henry, still personally valuing the blood right Elizabeth possessed and haunted by the series of rebellions stirred up by the power of “the naturall Title” that marked his early rule, watches Castile with renewed fear. King Ferdinando gives up his title as regent to his daughter Joan but acts as her administrator in a role enabled by his wife’s will as well as the “Custome of the Kingdome, (as he pretended.)” (154). Through this course, Ferdinando “meante to hold the Kingdome without accompt and in absolute Commaund,” shutting out both his daughter and his son-­in-­law (154). The History of King Henry VII’s account of Ferdinando’s struggle to retain power after Isabella’s death highlights two actions strongly relevant to the role of female kinship relations in Bacon’s psychological portrait of Henry. First, Joan becomes infirm and “distracted of her wittes” by her beloved husband Philip’s death, an illness that, according to Bacon, her father did “no wayes to endeuour the Cure, the better to hold his Regall Power in Castile” (158). Second, in the midst of his daughter’s illness, Ferdinando falsely reports You Must Be King of Me  237

that “Philip vsed her not well,” in order to “make Philip ill beloued of the People of Spaine” (158). The content of Ferdinando’s slander against Philip is reminiscent of the English public’s perception of Henry’s poor treatment of Elizabeth. In yet another context, Bacon shows readers that the “use” a king makes of his wife is political strategy capable of influencing subjects’ relationships to their sovereign and turning public opinion against him. At turns unaware of the political power of his wife’s image and overly suspicious of it, Bacon’s Henry is haunted by his failure to recognize the consequences of both his public and personal repression of Elizabeth York, and he suffers numerous challenges to his throne as a result. Finally free from external threats in the waning years of his rule, Henry remains troubled by the legacy of his failed policy toward his queen: he fears the ghost of his wife might depose him in the form of his grown son. By ascribing many of Henry’s kingly failures to his inability to navigate the politics of royal marriage, Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII instructs rulers to value their wives as potential political allies or enemies who possess an autonomous relationship with the English people. Through interiority and interjected evaluation that turn from the queen consort’s perspectives—­ foregrounded in the earlier narrative historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—­to those of the king who registers her political agency as a primary source of power and concern, Bacon theorizes the importance of queenship to successful kingship, arguing directly for the agency and effect that prior historiographers establish through narrative. Why might Bacon intentionally fictionalize this particular aspect of Henry VII’s rule, and in the process identify a monarch’s policies toward his consort as central to his political success or failure? While he drafted a short outline of his History of King Henry VII during Elizabeth’s reign, Bacon wrote and finished the work in 1621, three years after the death of James’s own queen but in the midst of several political crises involving royal marriage and religion. Bacon thus had ample reason to emphasize the importance of public opinion about royal marriage and queen consorts in his narrative. David M. Bergeron sees the marriage between Henry and Elizabeth in The History of King Henry VII as parallel to that of James and Anna, and he explains Bacon’s invention of Henry’s bad husbandry as a backward 238  You Must Be King of Me

projection of the historiographer’s observations about his own sovereign’s marriage: “Bacon imposed the fiction of Henry’s lack of loving loyalty to [Elizabeth], drawing on the reality of his experience with King James.”28 Bergeron indicates that James’s treatment of Anna informed Bacon’s biggest (unconscious) invention about Henry VII. However, Bergeron describes the dynastic marriage between James and Anna in purely personal terms and finds parallels between the Stuarts and the first Tudors only in their domestic lives.29 Yet Bacon’s narrative insists that a king’s relationship with his wife can never be perceived as wholly personal and that perceptions of a monarch’s affection for his spouse can also become politically important, and his projection of James and Anna’s marriage onto Henry and Elizabeth’s is at least as evocative of the political problems of James’s reign as it is of the nature of James’s personal feelings for his wife. The History of King Henry VII’s conclusions about royal marriage, which center on its potential for alliance or competition, establish the importance of a queen’s autonomous relationship with her husband’s subjects, and emphasize public perception, are all suggestive of issues that did pose problems for James throughout his rule. In many cases, Bacon was intimately involved in James’s negotiation of these issues, and the political agency of James’s female relatives, including his wife Anna and daughter Elizabeth, affected Bacon’s own career at James’s court. Bacon did have a model for his depiction of Henry’s rivalry with Elizabeth in his sovereign’s marriage, even though James’s union with Anna was never integral to James’s claim to the throne. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski identifies Anna’s participation in court masquing as political subversion of her husband’s policies and sees her separate court, patronage, religion, and royal identity as locations of opposition to James.30 Anna emphasized her independent lineage and status as part of this oppositional stance; representations of Anna designed to please her highlighted her heirs and her royal lineage, depictions that prefigure those qualities that the public most praised in Bacon’s account of Elizabeth York.31 James, however, seemed to reject this self-­conscious depiction in his own 1603 correspondence with Anna: “I thank God, I carry that love and respect unto you which, by the law of God and nature, I ought to do to my wife and mother of my children. But not for that ye are a king’s daughter, for, whether ye were a king’s or a You Must Be King of Me  239

cook’s daughter, ye must be all alike to me, being once my wife.”32 In this letter, which also reveals James and Anna’s disagreements about the raising of their son Henry by the Earl of Mar, James negates the value of Anna’s independent royalty and tells her the love he bears her “is for that ye are my married wife and so partaker of my honour.”33 Critical work on James’s resistant responses to Anna’s self-­representation and the correspondence between James and Anna suggests that Bacon had a clear royal cue for his account of Henry’s attempts to minimize Elizabeth York’s autonomous royal identity in The History of King Henry VII. Bacon’s interactions with Anna also likely influenced his depiction of a queen consort’s political influence in The History of King Henry VII. Bacon and Anna were neither consistent allies nor rivals. On major issues of Stuart governance, they were often in opposition: Bacon was a supporter of James’s proposed union of Scotland and England, while the queen’s faction successfully opposed it.34 Anna was initially pro-­Spanish and against her daughter’s marriage to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, but Bacon arranged a masque for the wedding and encouraged military intervention on the couple’s behalf when they were ousted from Bohemia.35 Bacon funded The Masque of Flowers for the 1613 wedding of Frances Howard to Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, celebrating the union of the queen’s most hated enemies, and three years later navigated his prosecution of the couple for the murder of Thomas Overbury so that James could pardon them.36 The two most certainly differed, if not in opinion, than at least in action, over the cases of Arbella Stuart and Walter Raleigh.37 Yet the queen and Bacon were also both early supporters of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.38 Bacon was at least once at the center of Anna’s political struggles with James. During the spring of 1617, James I departed for Scotland, and Anna lobbied to be named as regent in what Lewalski argues was the queen’s “highest political ambition.”39 Bacon, lord chancellor, was chosen instead to lead the council of regency, though Anna remained a member and retained a great deal of influence.40 Accounts of Anna as an influential and sometimes oppositional figure at court help explain why Bacon might have modified his sources for The History of King Henry VII to write a narrative preoccupied with a queen’s potential influence. Bacon’s emphasis on a 240  You Must Be King of Me

queen consort’s political power as a core issue in Henry’s reign and as a central theme of The History of King Henry VII could stem, in part, from the necessity of recognizing the influence of Anna’s court faction, and his awareness of the queen as a potential competitor or ally in his own quest for influence with James.41 While Bacon’s intersections with Anna at James’s court five years before his composition of The History of King Henry VII might have subtly contributed to his depiction of Elizabeth York, it seems more likely that Bacon’s narrative reflects the political crises of 1620–­21, which entangled James’s daughter, Elizabeth, as well as Bacon himself. The international events that involved Elizabeth and her husband Frederick immediately before and during Bacon’s writing of The History of King Henry VII provide a timely example of the importance of a royal woman’s independent relationship with the monarch’s subjects, while James’s responses to his daughter’s plight demonstrate a monarch’s fearful reaction to public adoration of a female relative and potential rival. Bacon’s private support of Elizabeth’s political cause and the harm he suffered as a result of James’s mismanagement of public opinion over multiple foreign policy events suggest that these issues informed his portrait of a monarch’s relationship with his female relatives in The History of King Henry VII. For many of James’s English subjects, Elizabeth and Frederick—­crowned king and queen of Bohemia by Protestant nobles who ousted the Catholic king Ferdinand in 1618—­modeled the Protestantism they had hoped to find in James and then in Prince Henry. The reclamation of Frederick’s homeland, the Palatinate, invaded in retaliation by Ferdinand and Catholic Habsburg forces, was widely viewed as a religious imperative that required English support.42 Kevin Curran, writing in the context of Elizabeth’s wedding celebration, notes that “the ideology of militant Protestantism became more sharply focused on Princess Elizabeth’s marriage” after the death of Prince Henry, whose court had maintained an “alternative political culture” invested in Continental Protestantism.43 Pauline Croft finds that during the Bohemia crisis, Frederick and Elizabeth appeared as “heroic standard-­ bearers of the Protestant cause” to much of the English public.44 James’s response—­he objected to Frederick’s initial interventions in Bohemia, did You Must Be King of Me  241

not support his son-­in-­law’s acceptance of the crown, and only belatedly called Parliament in 1621 to discuss reclaiming the Palatinate—­and his simultaneous pursuit of a Spanish Catholic marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria were particularly troublesome to subjects who saw the cause of Frederick and Elizabeth as the cause of the Protestant religion. Bacon seems to have shared the political perspective that military intervention on behalf of Frederick, Elizabeth, and European Protestantism was necessary, and he cultivated a personal relationship with Elizabeth. When James called Parliament to discuss the possibility of war, Bacon drafted an initial proclamation on the matter.45 Though as lord chancellor his written responses to Frederick’s pleas for assistance were nonspecific, he was privately “committed to an alliance between England and the Low Countries against Spain,” and produced a tract, A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain, advising James to intervene even before the Palatinate was invaded.46 His negotiations on behalf of their common cause suggest that Bacon might have been sympathetic to Elizabeth’s autonomy and critical of James’s neglect of her, as does the record of Bacon’s written exchanges with and about her. Bacon’s correspondence to Buckingham praises Elizabeth and laments her misfortune, calling her “that excellent Lady whose fortune is so distant from her merit and virtue.”47 In a letter to Bacon praising the newly written The History of King Henry VII, Elizabeth offers him support in his own misfortune: “I am very sorry that I cannot show otherwise than by my letters my gratitude [ . . . ] and though your fortunes are changed (for which I grieve) believe that I shall not change to be what I am, your very affectionate friend, Elizabeth.”48 Nieves Mathews claims that Bacon “enjoyed the disinterested friendship and favour, as well as the admiration, of James’s daughter, [ . . . ] whose fall he grieved for, as she did for his.”49 While their communications were not disinterested, as Mathews claims—­both hoped for assistance from the other in repairing their relationships with the king and his favorites—­they do show mutual personal and political support, suggesting Elizabeth was a more consistent ally of Bacon’s than Anna. James’s responses to his daughter in the spring of 1621 share a great deal with Bacon’s portrait of Henry’s attitude toward Elizabeth York in 242  You Must Be King of Me

The History of King Henry VII. In addition to denying Frederick and Elizabeth refuge, James refused to allow Elizabeth to even visit his court. In a 1621 letter to Dudley Carleton, James provides instructions to divert, or if necessary, forbid Elizabeth from coming to England: If our daughter also do come into those parts, with any intention to transport herself hither, you do use all possible means at this time to divert her; and rather than fail, to charge her, in our name and upon our blessing, that she do not come, without our good liking and pleasure first signified unto her.50 According to Bergeron, in May 1621 the French ambassador explains James’s objections in terms of the threat posed by Elizabeth’s relationship with the English public: “James feared, said the ambassador, that Elizabeth would stir the passions of the people, rousing the Puritans and others opposed to Spain.”51 Lewalski notes, “James evidently feared that her presence, as an emblem of dashed Protestant hopes, would exacerbate domestic discord and offer a rallying point for resistance.”52 James’s view of Elizabeth as a potential instigator of dissent and a rival for the affections of his subjects contributed to a rejection of his daughter that like Henry’s fear-­driven treatment of Elizabeth in The History of King Henry VII generated more problems than it solved. The king’s early foot-­dragging, only provisional participation in recovering the Palatinate lands, and refusal to offer Frederick and Elizabeth refuge in England further damaged James’s already battered public image.53 Bacon’s awareness of Elizabeth Stuart’s appeals to English nobles and the public’s support of her Protestant cause seems to have informed The History of King Henry VII’s depiction of England’s collective affection for its Yorkist queen consort. Elizabeth’s political involvement as Frederick’s queen consort was extensive: outspokenly opposing and critiquing her father’s pacific policies and repeatedly requesting military intervention from England on her husband’s behalf, she maintained correspondence with English subjects who directly defied James by honoring her coronation as queen of Bohemia.54 Thus, Elizabeth Stuart “came to represent true English, Elizabethan, and Protestant virtue and valor, embodied in a woman and You Must Be King of Me  243

poised against a vacillating, impotent, decadent male monarch in thrall to Spain.”55 Linked to her namesake since her arrival in England, Elizabeth’s gender became an important component of this symbolic identity for Protestants nostalgic for the religious policies of Elizabeth I.56 Bacon’s advice for James on managing public opinion, couched in a historical narrative about a Tudor predecessor and underscoring the pitfalls of a sovereign’s paranoid rivalry with a popular female relative, is highly topical in this context. Bacon’s involvement in the political crises of 1620–­21 suggests they would have been at the forefront of his mind as he finished writing The History of King Henry VII. More than any other nobleman, he suffered the fallout from James’s public opinion problems and he wrote his history to regain James’s favor through useful instruction on managing public perception. Some of the public dissatisfaction over James’s foreign policies with Spain and Bohemia crystalized around the Protestant symbol of Princess Elizabeth, and Bacon seems to have paid attention. Sometimes imagined by subjects as the beleaguered figurative daughter of Elizabeth I, Elizabeth of Bohemia resembles Elizabeth York, who is depicted in The History of King Henry VII as a well-­loved symbolic figure of union. For both Bacon’s imagined and real monarchs, relationships with female relatives could be full of possibility and politically important for their ability to strengthen alliances, achieve shared goals, and garner public support, but they could also be threatening to a monarch’s own legitimacy and authority and very dangerous to mismanage. Fantasies of Queenship in John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck Drawing primarily from Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and Thomas Gainsford’s True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, John Ford’s stage play, the Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, differs most obviously from both sources in its portrayal of Perkin Warbeck and Henry VII. Ford’s Warbeck becomes a sympathetic, albeit false, claimant to Henry’s throne. His king, retaining the pragmatism of Bacon’s Henry, does not suffer from the latter’s lack of foresight and avarice, although critics still debate the extent to which the play answers the question of Henry’s right to rule.57 Ford’s Henry, unlike Bacon’s, is not immediately concerned about the frailty of his Lancastrian claim and expresses no spoken worry over his wife’s 244  You Must Be King of Me

potential right, though, as I will argue, the play itself does exhibit these concerns. The play does not establish an influential relationship between Henry, his subjects, and his wife—­indeed, the queen is entirely absent from the play. Jean E. Howard argues that Ford “does not deal directly with the question of Elizabeth” but instead displaces “fears of a Yorkist female’s claims to the throne” onto Elizabeth’s aunt Margaret.58 In Howard’s view, the play scapegoats the witch-­like Margaret as “a demonized version of the feminine” to neutralize Perkin’s challenge and establish Henry as the only legitimate authority.59 Perkin Warbeck, like its history play predecessors written by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Heywood, follows the dramatic pattern of adaptation this book traces when the play appropriates its narrative sources to reduce the legitimacy of women’s political power. In the case of Margaret, Ford modifies his sources to create a much-­discussed but never seen duchess whose challenges to Henry signal a monstrous, diabolical use of power very different from the political acumen Bacon’s Margaret demonstrates. Bacon’s description of Margaret as an unnatural mother to counterfeit children is repeated by male characters in Ford’s play, but to different effect, and she has little direct influence on her recovered “nephew” as she does in The History of King Henry VII. William Warham’s oration on her monstrous maternity, which first emerges in narrative historiography in Hall’s Union, is delivered in Perkin Warbeck by the Earl of Oxford at Henry’s court in England rather than at the archduke Philip’s court in Flanders: In her age, (Great sir, observe the wonder) she grows fruitful, Who in her strength of youth was always barren. Nor are her births as other mothers’ are, At nine or ten months’ end. She has been with child Eight or seven years at least, whose twins being born (A prodigy in nature) even the youngest Is fifteen years of age at his first entrance As soon known i’th’ world, tall striplings, strong And able to give battle unto kings, Idols of Yorkist malice. (1.1.52–­62) You Must Be King of Me  245

Drawn from Warham’s invented speech, the Earl of Oxford’s words are never refuted, as Warham’s are by Bacon’s ironic narrative voice and his interjected evaluation of Margaret’s political influence. Instead, Oxford’s monstrous woman description remains the pervading assessment of Margaret throughout the play, a monolithic perspective maintained by all of the characters who speak of her. Lord Dawnbey explains that Richard III is “brother to her nature,” calls Margaret a “woman-­monster,” and claims that she “from the unbottom’d mine / Of devilish policies doth vent the ore / Of troubles and sedition” (1.1.47–­52). Henry himself furthers this image of Margaret, labeling her as “the dam / That nurs’d this eager whelp,” and vowing to hunt Perkin “even in the beldam’s closet” (1.1.119–­22). His chaplain, Urswick, tells the informer Clifford to “remember not the witchcraft or the magic, / The charms and incantations which the sorceress / Of Burgundy hath cast upon your reason” when he counsels Clifford to win back Henry’s goodwill by revealing the traitorous behavior of other nobles (1.3.12–­14). While Bacon represents Margaret’s challenges to Henry’s rule as legitimate political practice and identifies descriptions like Oxford’s as rhetorical strategies serving political ends, Ford’s play, like Gainsford’s narrative, engages in that rhetoric; all his characters espouse the belief that Margaret threatens Henry’s security through witchcraft and monstrosity.60 Ford’s marginalization of Margaret to an off-­stage witch with no cause to challenge Henry except her own hatred aligns with Gainsford’s depiction and adopts Bacon’s own memorable language gleaned from chronicle history, but it rejects the nuanced perspectives provided by Bacon’s interjected evaluation and his ironic uses of such language. Thus, Ford offers a circumscribed version of Margaret’s political involvement and an expanded view of her monstrous meddling, following the earlier precedent of Elizabethan dramatists adapting narrative history for the commercial stage. Ford’s monstrous representation of Margaret thus adapts his most prominent source narrative to reduce the validity of an autonomous royal woman’s political influence. Margaret’s demonized femininity is certainly a displacement of anxieties about royal women as Howard attests. However, the greatest displacement of Elizabeth York’s politicized queenship takes shape in the expanded narrative of James IV’s kinswoman, Katherine 246  You Must Be King of Me

Gordon, whose substantial rhetorical agency voices a marital loyalty to her husband Perkin that challenges and ultimately trumps political and familial loyalties. The play thus responds to the problems of royal marriage highlighted in The History of King Henry VII by proposing a fantasy of willful female compliance and apolitical queenship devoid of any familial ties. Paradoxically, the erasure of a real queen, Elizabeth York, and her replacement with a symbol of private wifely submission addresses the threat of another historical consort, Queen Henrietta Maria. Ford fleshes out a one-­sentence mention of Katherine’s devotion in Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII—­“in all fortunes she entirely loved [Perkin] adding the vertues of a wife to the vertues of her Sexe”—­into eight scenes that depict her loyalty to her pretender husband as the source of her virtue (128).61 Though critical debate frequently centers on whether the play condones or condemns Perkin’s claim, scholars identify Katherine as the play’s moral center whose faithfulness to her husband is the chief means by which the pretender is shown to be potentially kingly or decent.62 Susannah Brietz Monta, for example, sees Katherine’s wifely devotion to her husband as the result of an unsolvable conflict of loyalty between political and domestic duty, which ultimately challenges Henry’s victory and renders Perkin sympathetic.63 While much of the play’s sympathy for Perkin is located in the virtues of his wife, this sympathy does not necessarily highlight an irreconcilable conflict in Katherine’s duties. Rather, the play depicts her as a corrective solution to the ideological contradictions of queenly loyalty because she willingly chooses domestic submission over politically determined loyalty, a decision that ultimately seeks to solve the specific conflict of domestic and political duties that Bacon’s Henry fears from Elizabeth. The conflicts within early modern views of a queen consort’s role are belied by medieval and early modern commentaries on queenship that represent ideal royal wives much as they represent ideal wives from other social spectrums. Laynesmith argues that a lack of direct references to queens in advice literature indicates consorts’ roles as wives were not regularly defined separately from other women’s roles in the period, though they were clearly quite functionally different.64 As Monta’s analysis of Katherine’s adherence to domestic loyalties makes clear, early modern marriage You Must Be King of Me  247

manuals associated submission to husbands and fathers across all classes (including royalty) as a mirror of the larger social order. William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, for example, includes queens among all married women who must exhibit subjection to and reverence for one’s husband, while Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum argues that all wives, including queens, should be “noble, beautiful, virtuous, temperate, chaste, and not given to idleness.”65 These emphases on queens’ similarities to other married women ignore the unique royal situations that complicate domestic directives, such as joint rule, female succession, or marital alliances with former political enemies. As discussed in the introduction, one of the primary characteristics of medieval queenship is its commingling of a queen consort’s public and private spheres of influence. Wood additionally argues that the position of medieval and early modern queen consort was fraught with competing interests, defined by “family allegiances that were both double and potentially contradictory” and understood “within the context of a dual kinship relationship.”66 Social directives about queenly behavior fail to acknowledge the ideological contradictions implicit in a queen consort’s role and her expressions of power, while the ambiguities produced by overlaps of domestic and political authority and by the unique, often transnational dual loyalties of queen consorts make interpretations of queenship particularly malleable. Ford confronts this dissonance between social directives for wives and the realities of a queen consort’s competing loyalties to kinship networks through Katherine, who foregrounds private wifely subjection as a solution to such social incoherence. Perkin Warbeck begins to establish Katherine as an ideal pseudo-­queen by dramatizing a struggle between three kinds of patriarchal compliance that all demand demonstrations of womanly behavior defined by loyalty and submission to men. Katherine exhibits appropriate obedience to, in turn, her father, her king, and her husband, but the play does not suggest that obedience to all can or should occur at the same time. Her demonstrations of obedience to her cousin King James IV of Scotland conflict with and ultimately supersede her obedience to her father, as her obedience and loyalty to her husband in turn challenges her obedience as a subject to both James IV and Henry VII. The play exhibits these varying claims on 248  You Must Be King of Me

her loyalty in order to ultimately praise her submission to her husband and emphasize marital duties as priorities royal wives should privilege when faced with choices that include paternal and kingly power. Ford first sets up Katherine as a queenly fantasy when she exhibits the appropriately dutiful behavior of a well-­brought up daughter. Her father, the Earl of Huntley, expressing faith that she will not yield “to a common servile rage / Of female wantonness,” allows her to choose her husband, telling her, “thou art thine own” (1.2.111–­12, 124). He has, of course, instructed her not to settle for her current suitor, the too-­common Daliell, and she follows her father’s wishes: My worthiest lord and father, the indulgence Of your sweet composition thus commands The lowest of obedience. You have granted A liberty so large that I want skill To choose without direction of example: From which I daily learn, by how much more You take off from the roughness of a father, By so much more I am engag’d to tender The duty of a daughter. (1.2.126–­34) Katherine’s freedom of choice becomes a means to strengthen patriarchal will; it is only given when her father is assured she will follow his instruction, and she acknowledges it as a gift given in exchange for obedience. She defers answering Daliell, a response that so pleases her father that he immediately reclaims her: “Oh, Kate, thou art mine own!” (1.2.174). When the wishes of her father conflict with the wishes of her kinsman and king, James IV, who urges her to marry Perkin, Katherine must shift her loyalty and act as a subject rather than a daughter. Like her father, who distrusts Perkin’s claim but acknowledges him because James “must not be cross’d,” Katherine accepts her king’s imperative: “The duke / Must then be entertain’d, the king obey’d / It is our duty” (2.1.8, 122–­24). Later scenes emphasize Katherine’s required allegiance to the king’s authority rather than a courtship process focused on romantic desire. The betrothal is introduced via an argument about the obedience of subjects You Must Be King of Me  249

between James and Huntley; Katherine’s father offers his own head to prevent it, and James reminds him that Katherine is the king’s to give: “Tis our pleasure / To give our cousin York for wife our kinswoman” (2.3.40–­41). James tempers his royal prerogative with assurances that Katherine freely consents, and he represents his own participation in the courtship as that of romantic go-­between rather than political pander: “I have play’d the orator / For kingly York to virtuous Kate” (2.3.59–­60). Yet his assertion that he “violate[s] no pawns of faiths,” and “intrude[s] not / On private loves” is unintentionally ironic; he has provided Katherine with her own desires, but they are the desires of a subject hoping to serve her king (2.3.58–­59). Although this marriage alliance is predicated upon political expedience and patriarchal ties designed to demonstrate the seriousness of Scotland’s support for Perkin, James attempts to describe it as a purely private matter of affection untouched by his own authority or political necessity. Yet his pervasive language of ownership repeats that of Huntley and emphasizes the fact that Katherine’s love and duty does, in fact, belong to her monarch, to use as currency in his diplomatic negotiations. James’s disavowals of royal intrusion into the business of love and marriage are undermined by the ubiquitous male rhetoric of Katherine-­as-­gift, which locates affection as only secondarily important to the establishment of political alliances between men through royal marriage, an evaluation that echoes Bacon’s critique of Henry’s politically crippling lack of personal affection for Elizabeth. James formalizes the latest exchange of Katherine when he tells Perkin: “Cousin, yes, / Enjoy her. From my hand accept your bride” and Perkin himself responds in kind: “Thus I take seizure of mine own” (2.3.85–­86, 90). Katherine’s own discussion of her participation is limited to an articulation of duty. Instructed by Perkin to “acknowledge me but sovereign of this kingdom,” Katherine replies by redefining love as that which dutifully follows her obedience: “Where my obedience is, my lord, a duty, / Love owes true service” (2.3.81, 84–­85). The ostensible transparency of the political function of marriage in the language of the play’s betrothal scene is belied by the continuing consolidation of Katherine’s duty as a private service she owes only to her husband. The play glosses over the conflicting loyalties inherent in such a political exchange, highlights the primacy of marital 250  You Must Be King of Me

loyalty above all other kinds, and downplays the political dimensions of royal marriage made so visible in Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII. The competing directives of Katherine’s father, king, and husband generate multiple excisions of familial bonds that remove the possibility of divided loyalties. Huntley, forced by James to accept a “straggler,” rejects Katherine’s own acquiescence to her king and vehemently disowns her: “This new queen-­bride must henceforth be no more / My daughter” (2.3.35, 3.2.14–­15). Huntley regrets dissuading Katherine from Daliell and repetitively figures her marriage to Perkin as the end of their parent-­child relationship. The cutting of Katherine’s family bonds by her marriage makes her the ideal queen for a king threatened by his wife’s potentially conflicting duties to her kin. By dramatizing the familial conflict between Katherine and Huntley as a division that leads her to confirm the primacy of her husband’s claim, Ford creates a fantasy rejection of all kin ties for royal women. The play initially extends this Henrician dream of consolidated loyalty, and further excises competing claims for Katherine’s allegiance, when Perkin is finally forced out of Scotland. Perkin leaves with only one request, that James not take what the king has “given” to him: Katherine. James is unlikely to refuse, but he is forestalled by Katherine’s own intervention. She clarifies that James no longer has the power to give her as gift: “I am your wife; / No human power can or shall divorce / My faith from duty” (4.3.101–­3). Just as her king’s power cannot divorce husband from wife, it cannot nullify the duty she owes to her husband. Her language values her obligation to Perkin over her obligation to James, finalizing an opposition between husband and sovereign that persists throughout the play. This latest crisis of obedience insists upon the primacy of an unshakeable, private marital duty that disavows the imperatives of sovereignty. Katherine here speaks as a feminine subject who adheres to Kathryn Schwarz’s concept of “willful acquiescence”: her insistence on obedience to a conventional feminine script—­in this case, marital subservience—­is an expression of agency that “confounds the process of objectification as it answers the demand for compliance.”67 Katherine uses the sacrament of marriage to articulate her chosen path of submission and to privilege her husband over her king. All human power, including kingly power, has no authority against God. You Must Be King of Me  251

Though James assures Perkin that he “gave her, cousin / And must avow the gift,” Katherine preempts the king’s claim over her with God’s claim, rating her marriage pact above her status as subject and kinswoman (4.3.104–­5). Katherine repeats this argument when she visits her captured husband in the stocks, where Henry’s English nobles expect her to act appropriately like a royal kinswoman of James IV and reject the now-­disgraced Perkin. Instructed by Henry’s follower Urswick to remember her place, Katherine replies by defining herself as Perkin’s sanctified wife: You abuse us: For when the holy churchman join’d our hands, Our vows were real then; the ceremony Was not in apparition, but in act.—­ Be what these people term thee, I am certain Thou art my husband. No divorce in heaven Has been sued out between us; ’tis injustice For any earthly power to divide us. (5.3.112–­19) Katherine’s explanation of her marriage vows locates her own loyalty to Perkin as indisputably sanctioned by God. Ford’s play endorses this assertion that the mere “earthly power” of monarchy cannot overrule the private ties of godly marriage and the superseding of those private ties over other loyalties. These disavowals of the power of one’s sovereign, rather than sounding like disloyalty, model an apolitical marriage that solves the problem Henry faces in The History of King Henry VII. Katherine accentuates the play’s division of domestic and political loyalty and prioritizes her domestic obligations in further interactions with Henry and his followers after Perkin’s defeat. She emphasizes her status as a prisoner of war, labels Henry’s messenger the Earl of Oxford, “our jailer,” and rejects the opportunity to quietly distance herself from her husband and align her fortunes with the English court (5.1.73). Her language heightens the conflict of loyalties between king and husband that Henry himself appears ready to ignore, and demands that her exhibition of duty to her husband be recognized. She calls Henry a tyrant, interprets his invitation of “a gracious entertainment” as a demand for compliance, and explicitly 252  You Must Be King of Me

rejects that demand: “we shall not be his subjects” (5.1.81, 85). This denial of Henry’s sovereign power signals her choice of wifely obedience over that of a subject. Her refusal to submit as a subject is a willful obedience to Perkin and the patriarchal imperatives of the institution of marriage that could be simultaneously threatening to Henry’s rule and perhaps even to the hierarchies of monarchical governance itself. Katherine’s mouthy articulation of marital submission as a sacred demand out of reach of the sovereign’s authority exemplifies Schwarz’s sense of the potentially unsettling effects of “intentional virtue,” namely, that “women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions.”68 The disruptive potential of such a paradox—­compliance as agency—­is managed in Perkin Warbeck through its transformation into a sign of ideal queenship, whereby Katherine’s own valuation of her spousal obligations becomes an agential desire that serves sovereign ends as it minimizes her potential political power as a queen consort. Katherine’s wifely obedience demands an act of treason, but that act is surprisingly admired by Henry and subsumed as evidence of her queenly virtue. Katherine’s choices are, of course, never apolitical, but through her willful deference, the play celebrates her as a fantasy of an apolitical queen consort in response to both Elizabeth York and Henrietta Maria. Katherine’s choice of husband over monarch becomes a sign of ideal queenship even to the monarch himself, which Ford celebrates through Henry’s chivalric “courting” of her. Henry responds to Katherine’s unswerving loyalty by trivializing her marriage to Perkin in favor of her royal status and potential relationship to Henry as her sovereign. Henry’s attempts to redirect Katherine’s attachments from her husband to himself demonstrate the strong appeal her model of wifely devotion holds for the king. On behalf of Henry, the Earl of Oxford praises Katherine’s beauty and royal birth and promises her protection and treatment suited to her blood: ’tis King Henry’s pleasure That you, and all that have relation t’ee, Be guarded as becomes your birth and greatness For rest assur’d, sweet princess, that not aught Of what you do call yours shall find disturbance, You Must Be King of Me  253

Or any welcome other than what suits Your highest condition. (5.1.87–­93) These words are meant to position Henry as a heroic defender and Katherine as possessor of those queenly attributes of breeding, beauty and behavior that Laynesmith identifies as most necessary to bolster a king’s sovereignty, but they do not solicit her allegiance. Henry continues to use this language of praise when Katherine appears before him at court, and he refuses to allow her to kneel before him, assuring her that “you shall find us / But guardian to your fortune and your honors” (5.2.147–­48). Katherine’s attempts to kneel and her insistent question, “But my husband?” are formal appeals to the king on Perkin’s behalf through an act of intercession, the primary means of exerting unofficial influence for medieval queen consorts (5.2.161).69 Henry willingly accepts this mode of influence predicated upon the submission of the “queen” before him, and plays out a kingly acquiescence to Katherine’s plea, but he purposely misinterprets Daliell as the object of her intercession. He instructs his nobles to embrace Daliell, and tells Katherine “Whoever calls you mistress / is lifted in our charge,” a promise that does not extend to Perkin (5.2.168–­69). Katherine continues to position herself as a prisoner rather than a royal lady when she appeals to Henry’s clemency. Henry, in turn, employs chivalric rhetoric that describes Katherine as an ideal queen: “Our arms / Shall circle them from malice.—­A sweet lady! / Beauty incomparable! Here lives majesty / At league with love” (5.2.151–­54). In spite of Katherine’s exasperated attempts to communicate like a captive, Henry acts out a one-­sided courtship that renders her marriage inconsequential and denies the political dimensions of both her marriage to Perkin and her relationship to Henry as her captor. Anne Barton sees in Henry’s treatment of Katherine as “a young, unmarried beauty” a wishful attempt to ignore her “politically inconvenient” marriage into nonexistence, while Philip Edwards understands it as a “thinly veiled offer to make Katherine his mistress.”70 Yet Henry’s rhetoric moves beyond conveniently identifying her as unmarried woman or a possible sexual dalliance to imagining her as a wife.71 He responds to her frustrated

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“O sir, I have a husband!” by vowing, “We’ll prove your father, husband, friend, and servant” (5.2.154–­55). Henry’s promise to be Katherine’s “all” uses a formulation reminiscent of those crises of obedience Katherine faced earlier in the play, the competing claims leveled by Huntley, Daliell, James, and then Perkin, but it suggests that these separate allegiances might be combined, for Henry’s benefit, in Katherine’s loyalty to his own royal body.72 Indeed, this productive replacing of Katherine’s royal kin explicitly removes the divided and problematic loyalties inherent in queenship that the play has attempted to resolve throughout. Henry does not include “king” in his list, substituting instead “servant,” a word that belies his immediate power over her in favor of a discourse of romantic love (much like James’s convenient fiction of “private loves”) where kings can safely serve their royal ladies without fear of losing their kingdoms. The true function of Henry’s appeal to serve Katherine reappears in his assertion that “our own court your home, / Our subjects your servants” (5.2.160–­61). Making Katherine’s home his court and Henry’s subjects her servants elevates her above all other English subjects and imagines her served by them as his wife. This transformation defeats Perkin’s challenge by stripping the pretender of his own wifely subject and adopts an alternative to the web of familial challenges created through Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth York by imagining a woman obligated to her husband regardless of his political position or her own. The play reveals a king wooing his rival’s loyal wife because her loyalty to that rival usefully obscures the political dimensions of royal marriage. For a king fearful of his own wife’s dual political allegiances, this willful acquiescence and exaltation of wifely duty placed above politics would be an attractive counterpoint to the realities of royal marital alliances. Ford thus comments on the concerns of Bacon’s text through his invention of a Katherine whose specific wifely virtues rewrite Henry’s attraction to her as one of amorous and political fantasy. Paradoxically, Katherine’s apolitical stance is itself politically expedient to the monarch. Ford initiates this fantasy in ways uniquely valuable to Bacon’s Henry by separating Katherine’s devotion to Perkin from romantic love or political

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concerns and demonstrating her lack of trust in Perkin’s royal claims. While Katherine’s language at the end of Perkin Warbeck suggests she may have grown to love Perkin, her personal feelings are represented as both ambivalent and beside the point when she first accepts James’s matchmaking.73 Her initial assessments of Perkin at James’s court are focused on the possible consequences of his failure, and even when Perkin’s words move her to claim that she “should pity him / If ’a should prove another than he seems,” Katherine remains aware of both the possibility and the repercussions of his imposture (2.1.119–­20). Katherine’s doubt about Perkin’s identity here demonstrates that her later pledges of obedience to her husband are made in spite of what she knows about his political life. After his capture, Katherine accepts the fact of Perkin’s imposture and discards it as irrelevant: “be what these people term thee, I am certain / Thou art my husband” (5.3.116–­17). Her conception of holy matrimony renders Perkin’s treason (as well as her own) unimportant and suggests that wifely loyalty should extend to royal husbands regardless of the validity or fraudulency of their kingship claims. Thus, Katherine’s unswerving loyalty is offered in explicit contrast to potential political motives; the play’s praise of it as such redefines ideal wifely devotion as superseding obedience to one’s sovereign as well as common sense. Her ultimate loyalty to a man she first suspects and then accepts as a fraud would appeal to a king who fears the label of counterfeit from a wife with a superior royal claim, as Bacon’s imagined Henry does. The play’s particular vision of wifely obedience is presented through language tinged by monarchical concerns and expressed most vociferously in Katherine’s assertion of her husband’s rights in her as her king upon their first parting at the Scottish court. When she next sees Perkin, it is to visit him in the stocks after his capture, where she asks to “partake / Th’ infliction of this penance” (5.3.85–­86). Her desire to share his punishment and the fidelity it indicates leads Perkin to claim victory over Henry: “Harry Richmond, / A woman’s faith hath robb’d thy fame of triumph!” (5.3.101–­2). He further clarifies Katherine’s contribution to his (clearly metaphorical) success over the king in a speech that rearticulates Katherine’s previous understanding of a wife’s role in her husband’s kingship: 256  You Must Be King of Me

Spite of tyranny We reign in our affections, blessed woman! Read in my destiny the wrack of honor; Point out, in my contempt of death, to memory Some miserable happiness, since herein, Even when I fell, I stood enthron’d a monarch Of one chaste wife’s troth, pure and uncorrupted. (5.3.121–­27) Perkin describes the transformative effects of his wife’s devotion as no less than king-­making. He becomes a monarch with one subject, a subject who has already rejected Henry’s sovereignty. In the context of Henry’s own legitimacy these lines not only give voice to an exalted vision of female marital devotion underscored by the common comparison of husband and king; they also offer a well-­tailored solution to Henry’s conundrum as recorded by Bacon. A wife, willingly acting out duties toward her husband in a fashion that leaves no debate about the primacy of private loyalty over political loyalty, and thus making her husband a monarch in the process, is a fantasy that resolves Henry’s concerns about Elizabeth York once and for all. Here, a wife can make her husband king, but not through a messy political marriage alliance and a birthright that can threaten his own legitimacy. Perkin’s interpretation of Katherine’s devotion and compliance makes concrete the common early modern conception of the husband as ruler and ruler as husband, and it emphasizes the chastity, purity, and submission to the husband king that form the central tenets of good queenship as wifehood. For Henry, it is an interpretation uniquely suited to defining marriage as a private relationship which demands constancy, suffering, and above all, duty while simultaneously signaling marriage as the means to solidifying legitimacy. Ford creates in Katherine Gordon the wife that Bacon’s Henry needs. With a model of ideal queenship that reframes the role’s political credence by emphasizing God’s imperative for wifely obedience, Ford’s Henry need not face the challenge of his wife’s actual claim to the throne or the threat of her family associations. The play imagines in Katherine Gordon a queen who can model and then “replace” Henry’s politically important Yorkist wife and fantastically erase the potentially You Must Be King of Me  257

divided loyalties inherent in the myriad familial networks of queen consorts in general and Elizabeth York in particular. While Perkin Warbeck responds to Bacon’s particular representation of the royal marriage between Henry and Elizabeth, its promotion of the fantasy of a wholly domestic marriage alliance also responds to the political influence of Queen Henrietta Maria in the early years of Charles I’s reign.74 The play generally critiques Henrietta Maria’s perceived role in replacing male aristocratic counsel to Charles with sexually driven, hierarchically disruptive, and family-­motivated influence by promoting ideal queenship as apolitical submission.75 Ford’s alternative exemplar of wifely loyalty may also respond to Henrietta Maria’s disastrous involvement in a failed conspiracy in 1633 involving her French family, providing a contrast and perhaps a bold warning to Charles’s queen after one of her first forays into politics. There is some disagreement about whether Perkin Warbeck was written in the last years of James I’s reign or during the early Caroline period; most recently, Lisa Hopkins has argued that the play’s highly specific topicality places the date of composition in 1633, one year before its publication.76 While cultural anxieties about Henrietta Maria’s influence over the king that I see expressed in Perkin Warbeck heightened in the late 1630s, concerns about her potential power began as early as their marriage and were current throughout the early 1630s, which all recent scholarly work on the play identifies as the time period when it was most likely written. Hopkins’s research on Ford’s coterie of aristocratic dedicatees, for example, has uncovered Perkin Warbeck’s subtle criticisms of Charles I and helped to date the play’s composition. According to Hopkins, Ford wrote for a “very tightly defined group of people” including those 1630s figures whose ancestors are depicted favorably in Perkin Warbeck, such as Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, Penelope Devereux, and William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, to whom he dedicated the play.77 She convincingly argues that the play is meant to remind Charles of both his debt to old nobility and the role that nobility should play as counsel in his government. By depicting the ancestors of 1630s nobility as influential to the making or breaking of kings, Perkin Warbeck speaks for disaffected aristocrats defined by their opposition to Charles I in the early Caroline 258  You Must Be King of Me

period.78 The play’s image of apolitical queenship that I have explored here extends Perkin Warbeck’s promotion of some of these same oppositional politics and also positions Henrietta Maria—­who had complex relationships with a few members of Ford’s proposed coterie—­at the center of this opposition. After the 1628 assassination of Charles’s favorite, Buckingham, the marriage between the king and queen became notoriously romantic, and Henrietta Maria was seen to have taken Buckingham’s place as a detrimental counselor with intimate, personal access to the king. Particularly during Charles’s personal rule from 1629–­40, when he did not call a parliament, aristocratic access to the king was limited.79 Anti-­Charles and anti-­Catholic discourses throughout this period condemned Henrietta Maria’s proximity to the king and characterized her as “the quintessential evil counsellor—­a foreign intruder, meddlesome, and wielding dangerous sexual power.”80 As Frances E. Dolan argues, in Henrietta Maria’s case the process of displacing blame from “sovereigns to their ‘evil counselors’” focused on exposing the danger of gender inversions that disrupted a king’s traditional reliance on male aristocratic advice.81 The concerns of Ford’s coterie as explicated by Hopkins dovetail with this discourse focused on the queen, rooted as they were in the belief that “the old nobility were naturally entitled to first place in the councils and confidence of the king.”82 Members of Ford’s coterie were not, however, directly opposed to the queen, and were sometimes publicly aligned with her. The Earl of Arundel, a Catholic, was an early favorite of the queen and shared common cause with her as an enemy of Buckingham; his wife was one of two English servants she accepted into her household.83 Other Ford dedicatees, including the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert) and the Earl of Northumberland (Henry Percy) were part of a court faction that actively sought a pro-­French, pro-­Palatinate, anti-­Spanish alliance with the queen at the urging of the French ambassador Châteauneuf. While Hopkins argues for the Catholic leanings of Ford’s dedicatees and Malcolm Smuts and Karen Britland alternatively identify many of these same members of the aristocracy as a firmly Protestant faction, what is clear is that when Ford was writing his play, many of these English nobles unsuccessfully attempted to work You Must Be King of Me  259

toward shared goals with Henrietta Maria and some even suffered from her political missteps.84 By 1632, Henrietta Maria’s French allegiances were purely familial, on the side of her exiled mother and brother, Marie de Medici and Gaston d’Orleans, rather than with her brother, the king Louis XIII, and Cardinal Richelieu, who had expelled her mother from France in 1630. Her familial loyalty to her mother created an unlikely alliance between Henrietta Maria and English courtiers, such as Henry Rich, the Earl of Holland (the son of Penelope Devereux Rich, another Ford dedicatee) and the Earls of Northumberland, Warwick, and Bedford. These Englishmen were opposed to the Lord Treasurer Richard Weston’s pro-­Spanish agenda and hoped an alliance with part of the fractured Bourbon dynasty in France would lead to English military intervention against the Spanish and restore the Palatinate. Working toward the common cause of destroying Lord Weston, the Earl of Portland, in England and Cardinal Richelieu in France, this court faction even became embroiled in a plan to provide military support for Gaston d’Orleans to use against his brother.85 When the French seized Châteauneuf ’s papers in February 1633, they discovered compromising documents, including, “enough letters to implicate Henrietta Maria in the intrigue and to link her manoeuvres against Weston to the activities of a Protestant faction in England that included the earls of Warwick, Bedford, and Holland.”86 After the conspiracy disastrously collapsed in the same year Hopkins precisely dates Perkin Warbeck’s composition, Henrietta Maria’s party “was shattered, and her own credit, at least with respect to politics, badly damaged.”87 The Earl of Holland was banished from court and placed under house arrest for a confrontation with Weston’s son Jerome over the confiscation of suspicious letters from Henrietta Maria. Charles was furious at his wife over the incident and “a dismayed Henrietta Maria faced the prospect of seeing ‘her principal servant ruined and, what is worse, herself greatly discredited, from which she will have difficulty recovering.’”88 Weston emerged as the victor at court; Henrietta Maria had to “put all her affairs into Portland’s hands” and her “influence remained in eclipse” through 1634 and did not begin to recover until 1635.89 The failure of the Châteauneuf plot in 1633 revealed both the 260  You Must Be King of Me

danger and ineffectiveness of Henrietta Maria’s attempts at international political intrigue early in Charles’s reign. Ford’s insistence on Katherine Gordon’s exaggerated apolitical stance as a domestic wife who never makes political use of her role as queen consort becomes more intelligible as a warning to Henrietta Maria when we consider that the localized negative effects of her political maneuvering in 1633 might have reached some of his dedicatees and their families. The pseudo-­queen Katherine, devoted to wifely duty and functioning prominently as an intercessor to royalty, does embody many of the qualities that were publicly praised in Henrietta Maria. Defenses of Henrietta Maria’s political interventions appropriated conventional gender categories and emphasized the queen’s traditional roles as a wife and mother to justify her influence.90 By “defending the queen consort’s engagement in political action as a form of wifely duty,” supporters of Henrietta Maria attempted to depoliticize the queenly interventions that they nevertheless hoped would influence religious or political policy on their behalf.91 And the play, performed by Queen Henrietta’s Men, may seem likely to please her and her supporters because it valorizes the image of appropriate wifely behavior they sought to attach to the contentious queen. Yet Perkin Warbeck is not a partisan advocacy of Henrietta Maria as an ideal wife. Its image of wifely submission, in addition to promoting official, male counsel in political matters over intimate female influence, also explicitly dramatizes the problem of conflicting domestic loyalties and asserts the value of loyalty to one’s husband over all other loyalties, particularly family alliances and kinship networks. To both Catholic and Protestant supporters of the queen this aspect of wifely duty would have been inconvenient at best. Hopes of Charles’s leniency toward Catholics and even his own possible conversion were rooted in Henrietta Maria’s persuasion of her husband, not her obedience to him at the expense of her larger familial ties. Henrietta Maria faced competing loyalties upon her marriage—­she was obliged by both her mother and the Pope to serve as a Catholic missionary in England—­which were first highlighted by her refusal to attend her husband’s Protestant coronation.92 These competing loyalties only deepened in the early 1630s, when Henrietta Maria responded to her mother’s exile and You Must Be King of Me  261

Lord Weston’s pro-­Spanish agenda by working against French authority and her husband’s appointed treasurer without Charles’s knowledge. Perkin Warbeck’s repeated insistence on the primacy of marital loyalty over family ties and Katherine’s own articulation of God’s role in condoning such priorities suggests that the play’s model of queenship is in opposition to discourse that identified Henrietta Maria as an ideal wife and queen and defined her political involvement as appropriate wifely duty.93 Rather, the play seems aligned with discourse critical of the queen’s influence on Charles and directly and negatively responsive to her autonomous political interventions in the 1630s. Ford is not alone in offering coded instruction about family loyalties and wifely duties to Henrietta Maria and in favoring queenly abrogation of politics in response to her early international intrigues.94 Britland argues that the November 1633 King’s Company performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III for Henrietta Maria’s twenty-­fourth birthday took place at a time when “the Châteauneuf conspiracy was still having repercussions that could damage the English queen” and “served as a warning” to her “not to become embroiled in her family’s problems”: Queen Margaret especially (like Henrietta Maria, a Frenchwoman who was also an English queen) bears witness to the dispossession that can result from a woman’s active political involvement. The only properly political role a royal woman can take up, the play seems to conclude, is as a peaceweaver, cementing alliances between opposing parties, and bearing the promise of generation.95 At the precise moment when Henrietta Maria’s wider family loyalties promised to cause continuing difficulties for Charles and had already damaged the reputations of some in Ford’s coterie, Richard III and Perkin Warbeck provided timely instruction about the danger of such loyalties. Nor is Perkin Warbeck Ford’s only dramatic admonition of the queen.96 In her examination of the Medici family in Renaissance drama, Hopkins claims that the queen “lies behind the Medici-­related events and references in the plays of John Ford,” where he “portrays [the public sphere] as fatal” for women and offers “a warning to a Medici queen.”97 In light of Martin Butler’s thorough 262  You Must Be King of Me

examination of the ways playwrights of both courtly and commercial drama in the Caroline period cautiously navigated and responded to restrictions of political expression, Ford’s commentaries about the negative effects of Henrietta Maria’s real and potential involvement in politics—­particularly those he makes through the alternative exemplar figure of Katherine Gordon I have explored here—­are surprisingly bold ones.98 Attempts to vilify Henrietta Maria’s autonomous political interventions and her personal access to Charles were strongly contradictory, as were attempts to promote her wifely influence through a denial of its political valence. Predicated upon emergent assumptions that private and public spheres of influence should and could be kept separate and that a queen consort might fulfill only the political obligation of providing an heir and no other, these contradictions were at the heart of cultural unease over a consort’s role as wife, mother, and queen.99 The conflicting discourses surrounding Henrietta Maria’s potential and actual influence are mirrored in Perkin Warbeck’s elevation of Katherine Gordon, even as the play provides a “solution” to the same problems of royal marriage outlined in The History of King Henry VII and critiques Charles’s queen. Katherine’s zealous and willful compliance to the duties of private marriage—­directed in support of a traitor through her own powerful rhetoric—­pervasively threatens political disruption. As the play elevates willful feminine compliance and its attendant disruptions to the masculinist order, it insists upon the potential value of apolitical queenship to patriarchal monarchy, and in doing so reminds us that such fantasies of the purely personal are impossible. Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck rework preceding accounts of the reign of Henry VII and imagine royal women’s influence as a political locus to be embraced or wished away. The strength of this imagining demands more attention to the royal women of the Stuart period as both sources and targets of literary visions preoccupied with the problems of royal marriage alliances. As these texts demonstrate, depictions of royal women’s participation in dynastic rule were still a crucial part of historiography’s intertextual revisions and dramatic adaptations in the later years of James’s rule and into Charles’s reign. Bacon follows his predecessor narrative historians in depicting dynastic marriages as sources of great power You Must Be King of Me  263

for royal women. The History of King Henry VII’s somewhat cynical depiction of monarchical rule does not demonstrate Elizabeth York’s political agency as prior historiographers do for her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, or for Queen Isabel. Rather, Bacon’s pragmatic account details the dangers of ignoring or minimizing a queen consort’s public role and theorizes her centrality to good kingship. While many earlier historiographers, such as More and Grafton, record queen consorts’ political agency as a fully legitimate and routine part of dynastic government, Bacon traces the consequences of denying that legitimacy, a focus that suggests royal women’s political influence was no longer an unremarkable feature of government to historiographers but a site of growing contention over questions of political inclusion. Perkin Warbeck also takes a different approach from its generic predecessors: as it responds to its narrative intertexts, it extends the domestication of royal women’s political agency undertaken in plays written at the end of Elizabeth’s reign not only through valorizing the exclusion of royal women from politics but also through depicting ideal royal marriage as a purely domestic relationship taking precedence over all other kinship ties and political allegiances.

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Coda Double Drowned in the Gulf of Forgetfulness

When I first studied Shakespeare’s Richard III, I found his telltale women to be compelling and intriguing figures, weighed down by a history that was, at the time, blurry and unsubstantiated to me. I turned to his source materials to learn more about them, and I was confronted in those chronicles with accounts of queen consorts, queen mothers, queen dowagers, and royal mistresses that in their complexity of representation challenged my assumptions about royal women’s presence in the sixteenth-­century historical record. Continued reading soon challenged my assumptions about Shakespeare’s history plays, about early modern historiographers, and about dramatic and narrative form. This book is an account of overturning those assumptions and a theorizing of their existence. I have examined women’s changing representation in early modern historiography with a view to exploring what reevaluating the historical record and its relationship to drama can offer readers interested in the history of queenship and power, genre and source study, chronicle and political histories, and the early modern history play. This study thus directs critical attention to the relationship between historical narratives and historical drama to dispute accepted evaluations 265

of historiography as a genre disinterested in women’s roles in politics. The nuanced representations of royal women that are characteristic of narrative historiography emerge from the personal, political, and religious concerns of collaborative writers and the construction of the texts themselves, which often interpolate previous historical material and are revised significantly across printed editions. By treating narrative historiography as a genre with visible political investments, unique rhetorical techniques, discernable strategies of intertextual engagement, and notable patterns of gendered representation, I propose a new understanding of narrative history’s significance in shaping early modern thought about queenship. As each chapter turns to historical drama’s adaptive practices, I offer readers of early modern drama insights into how dramatists revised their intertextual source material into the familiar history plays that have received sustained critical attention. I rely on critics who have theorized the history play’s nationalist stances and its treatment of women’s agency, personal lives, and political influence, not to revise their readings completely anew but to contextualize those readings with a genealogy of adaptation that provides new assessments of the genre’s shared features and patterns of revision that might allow us to see the genre, and its crucially important gender politics, in a new light. Understanding dramatic exclusions of women as related to differing conceptions of access to the monarchy under dynastic and national models expressed in contrasting generic forms has many implications, including overturning our placement of the Shakespearean history play at the center of discussions of women in early modern history writing. Shakespeare’s adaptive practices, which explore the problems of women’s political participation, are revealed to have much in common with Marlowe’s own practices, regardless of the historical events transformed into theatrical performance. The later, more “domestic” or “civic” histories often seen as completely separate from the genre as Shakespeare expressed it, are in fact a fuller development of the longer arc of the history play genre. My study thus indicates that generic definitions that include playwrights’ adaptations of intertextual historical representations of women for the stage might be fuller and more complete assessments of the genre. One of the features used to define non-­Shakespearean history plays as domestic 266  Coda

hybrids uninterested in questions of kingship and succession—­a focus on personal relationships involving women—­in fact reveals historical drama’s consistent patterns of adaptation. The conclusions I have reached here about the major history plays of the early modern period call for additional study of playwrights, theater companies, and subgenres to develop our understanding of adaptive practices and adjust the vocabularies of source study. The taxonomies of source study need to be widened to include considerations of intertextuality that can both acknowledge the unique techniques, power, and reach of theatrical performance and avoid reifying hierarchies of value. Finally, the transition of historical female figures into fictive women through recursive adaptations in narrative and dramatic historiography encodes social demands that are bound up in questions of political inclusion important to early modern historians and dramatists recording history. The alternative representations available in narrative history writing reveal that the most familiar dramatic accounts of early modern women are neither accurate nor inevitable ones, but products of the demands made upon history by specific cultural desires. The attendant patterns of scholarly reading that have produced commonplace arguments about a masculine historical record uninterested in women are likewise not inevitable, but rather constructed by developments within literary criticism. By valuing the intertextual relationships between historical narratives and history plays, this project reveals a broad view of early modern history writing’s manifold representations of royal women as historical players and the manifold possible meanings those representations might hold for early modern audiences and readers. While these genres write female figures into history in widely different ways—­from crafting royal women as authorial voices of historical evaluation and active political players to staging them as censorious critical voices of female authority and fantasies of apolitical queenship—­women have always been integral to historiographical constructions of early modern England’s recent past. Treating narrative and dramatic history as intertexts shows how these genres’ disparate visions of women in history are crucial to some of the largest political debates of the period and how audiences’ and readers’ potential receptions of alternative Coda  267

historical accounts are part of this historiographical work. I propose in the introduction that William Baldwin’s metaphor of the Duke of Exeter’s double drowning in the gulf of forgetfulness is an apt frame for considering the contingencies of history, its inevitable losses, and its gains—­including the presence of vibrant, contrastive historical perspectives about early modern royal women. I return to Baldwin’s metaphor to remind us that many of the imaginative contributions to this multiplicity of historical perspectives are our own. This project is generated by my own imaginative and intertextual engagement with early modern historiography; it is only one of many histories, and I hope other, more capacious versions will follow.

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Not e s

Introduction 1. Lydgate’s text is an English version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. The Mirror was revised and republished in 1563, 1578, and 1587. On its publishing history, see Archer and Hadfield, “A Mirror for Magistrates” in Context, 2–­4, and Lily B. Campbell, “Introduction,” 3–­12. On its collaborative creation, see Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, 83–­85. 2. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 69. 3. As Angus Vine observes, Baldwin’s epistle establishes “the larger interpretative context” of The Mirror as “one characterised by engaged reading of history and robust historiographical debate,” “Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror,” 89. 4. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 219. 5. See Vine on the Mirror’s exploration of what it means to create history in terms of the material presence of its sources, texts, readers, and authors. The Mirror authors, as Vine notes, understand “that history is sometimes contested, and that the historical record is often discordant and even contradictory,” “Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror,” 98. 6. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 219. 7. Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.127. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 8. Rackin, “Misogyny Is Everywhere,” 71. 9. Schwarz, What You Will, 15.

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10. Schwarz, What You Will, 15–­16. See Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 21, and Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women, 13–­14. 11. Schwarz, What You Will, 15. 12. For an excellent recent overview of the field, see Earenfight’s “Medieval Queenship,” 1–­9. J. L. Laynesmith’s The Last Medieval Queens provides a definitive examination of queenship in regard to two figures significant to this study, Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth York. 13. Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 6. On aristocratic women’s political interventions and the lack of distinction between public and private spheres of influence at the Tudor court, see Harris, “Women and Politics,” 281. 14. Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 27. 15. On the interrelationship of the domestic and the political within queenship specifically, see Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 20. John Carmi Parsons observes that the “validity of the public-­private distinction in the history of medieval women has been questioned, especially for medieval and early modern queens”—­and argues for new terminologies, suggesting Louise Olga Fradenburg’s more “flexible and inclusory” use of “interstitial,” “Family, Sex, and Power,” 9, 10. See Fradenburg, “Introduction: Rethinking Queenship,” 5–­6. 16. Parsons, “Family, Sex, and Power,” 10. 17. Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 25. 18. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 265. 19. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 30. 20. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 179. 21. See Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 10. 22. See Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 95–­119. See also Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 12. 23. Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 11–­12. 24. See Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 12; and Parsons, who observes that queenly intercession “was an important element in the public personae of both king and queen that could betoken an intimate and suspect influence,” “Family, Sex, and Power,” 9–­10. Strohm discusses a reduction of queenly power and influence with the rise of “intercessory models of queenship,” Hochon’s Arrow, 95. 25. Parsons, “Ritual and Symbol,” 61. 26. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 195. Though Elizabeth Woodville is a strong example, Laynesmith notes that “no queen’s kin were entirely unproblematic” because of their potential to destabilize the monarchy, 191. On Elizabeth Woodville’s kinship networks, see Wood, “The First Two Queens Elizabeth,” 127. 27. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 218. 270  Notes to Pages 4–10

28. See Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe, 19–­20. See also Parsons, “Family, Sex, and Power,” 9–­10; Oakley-­Brown and Wilkinson, The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship, 11–­14; Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 47. 29. See Duggan, Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, on conceptualizing queenly power, xix; see also Constance Jordan’s discussion of power and authority as conceptual terms, Renaissance Feminism, 4. On the limitations of conceptual divisions between public and private beyond discussions of queenship, see Harris’s study of English aristocratic women, which “underscores how much of the distribution of resources and exercise of power took place outside formal institutions, particularly in the great household and the court, and how little distinction existed between the personal and the political, the private and the public,” “Women and Politics,” 281. 30. Hartman and Messer-­Davidow, (En)Gendering Knowledge, 2. 31. Stafford quoted in Duggan, Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, xix. 32. See Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 4–­5, and Schwarz, What You Will, 9–­16. Schwarz offers a generous survey of feminist criticism theorizing agency to resist “totalizing accounts of subordination and containment,” 10. Traub’s more recent “Feminist Shakespeare Studies” briefly outlines some of these debates as well as new work that explores agency’s problems and revises its terms, 26–­27. 33. Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 4. 34. Campbell’s definition argues, like Hartman and Messer-­Davidow’s, that agency is a “capacity to act”; it acknowledges, as Traub does, the constraints of culture: agency “is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic,” “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 3, 1. 35. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 12; 14. The common title for Truth’s speech, delivered at the 1851 woman’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, is drawn from the probably fictive line, “Ain’t I a woman?,” which appeared in the printed version published by Gage in 1863. 36. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 153. 37. Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 5. 38. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 14. 39. See Campbell on the relationship between agency and form, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 7. 40. Britton and Walter, “Introduction,” 2. 41. Newcomb “Toward a Sustainable Source Study,” 23. 42. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 14. 43. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 13. Notes to Pages 11–14  271

44. Quoted in Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 3. For an overview of this critical denigration, see Archer, Heal, and Kewes, “Prologue” to the Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, xxxi; two monographs that exemplify this approach to narrative sources for Shakespeare include Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian, and Goy-­Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Key titles that explore the merits of narrative historiography include Patterson; Djordjevic, Holinshed’s Nation; Kewes, Archer, and Heal, The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles; and Gadd and Gillespie, John Stow. 45. Goy-­Blanquet observes that “if Shakespeare could create sense out of the chroniclers’ profusion of anecdotes, he was no less able to weave his fellow playwrights’ contributions into a meaningful design,” an assessment that indicates the tenacity of such hierarchies within source study, as it precedes Goy-­Blanquet’s insightful account of the contributions of historiography to Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 17. 46. Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 51. 47. Levine, Women’s Matters, 23, 20, 18. Alison Thorne assumes the same dynamic of adaptation, noting that Shakespeare “went out of his way to amplify the political dimensions of the female roles” in Richard III, King John, and Henry VIII by “expanding on existing details in the chronicles or by inventing a public profile for them to offset the absence of such material in his sources,” “‘O, lawful let it be,’” 108. 48. See Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality, 1–­34. Richard Hillman’s Intertextuality and Romance in Renaissance Drama explores the interpretive possibilities of the reader and audience responding to intertextual recognition; see in particular 4–­11. Janet Clare’s study of the intertextuality among plays attends to the “dual axes of composition/production and reception/interpretation” that are important here, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic, 20. Robert Miola enumerates useful intertextual categories for source study, including the “source coincident,” “source proximate,” and “source remote,” “Seven Types,” 19–­20. 49. Drakakis, “Afterword,” 322. See also Maguire and Smith, “What Is a Source?,” 16–­17. 50. Schaar, The Full Voic’d Quire Below, 17. 51. Schaar, “Linear Sequence,” 382. 52. Schaar, “Linear Sequence,” 385. 53. Maguire and Smith, “What Is a Source?,” 27. Barbara Mowat applies Schaar’s “vertical context system” to Shakespeare’s drama in her analyses of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed,” 59–­69; and “‘Knowing I loved my books,’” 34. The attention to reader recognition in such approaches to intertextuality are counterpoints to those, including 272  Notes to Pages 15–17

Miola’s, that focus on the author, whose “reading and remembering still directs the transaction,” “Seven Types,” 19. 54. Harris, Untimely Matter, 68–­69. See also Karremann, The Drama of Memory, 25–­31; and Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, 8–­9. 55. Harris, Untimely Matter, 68–­69. 56. Karremann likewise acknowledges that early modern audiences’ familiarity with history would have “added to the attractions of a play” and “opened up the possibility that specific deviations from the familiar facts of English history would have been noticed as meaningful,” The Drama of Memory, 26. 57. The poststructuralist intertextuality initiated by Julia Kristeva can obscure the historical specificity of literary texts and generic innovation through a privileging of the genotext’s resistance to and disruption of communication. For an overview, see Allen, Intertextuality, 50–­56. See Maguire and Smith for a useful critique of poststructuralist intertextuality in the context of source study, “What Is a Source?,” 16. 58. Woolf, Reading History, 11–­78. On the challenge of classifying narrative historiography, see Ivo Kamps’s description of the innovations in early modern historiography as “haphazard” and “contradictory,” emerging as eclectic prose history forms expanded to integrate humanistic thinking alongside medieval methods and a cyclical view of the past, “The Writing of History,” 11. Neema Parvini more recently finds that historiography was “too diverse and fragmented to have a general character,” while his classification of historiographical types still relies on the most common divisions between providentialist, humanist, and antiquarian history writing, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 96. 59. Woolf’s estimation of the two subgenres—­the chronicle as a “moribund medieval chronicle tradition” and the political history as “a more sophisticated and elegant political narrative” influenced by humanism—­reflects scholarly tendencies to overstate their differences, The Idea of History, 14. See also F. J. Levy on Tudor chronicle histories as throwbacks to the medieval chronicle, Tudor Historical Thought, 167. Breen traces the tendency in literary criticism to elevate humanist history above chronicle history and deny the latter’s inclusion of humanist thinking, “Early Modern Historiography,” 1–­14. 60. On the distinctive features of the humanist political history, see Stuart Clark, “Bacon’s Henry VII,” 103–­8; Weinberger, “Introduction,” 12–­14; Vickers, “Introduction,” xv–­x xiii; and Woolf, The Idea of History, 143–­44. See also Logan, who identifies More’s The History of King Richard III as the prime example of “rhetorical historiography” emerging from Renaissance humanist historians’ use of classical precedents, and labels Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII as its only “worthy successor,” in “Introduction,” xxxi, xlv. Notes to Pages 17–19  273

61. On the chronicles’ perceived formlessness, as well as characterizations of narrative history as Tudor propaganda, see Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 167–­201. 62. See, for example, on Thomas More, Judith Anderson’s Biographical Truth and on Elizabeth Cary, Gwynne Kennedy’s Just Anger. 63. Breen provides an excellent account of these appraisals and argues that such hierarchical classifications are “largely artificial” and rooted in our perceptions about what is humanist and modern, “Early Modern Historiography,” 2. 64. John Donne records this last viewpoint in Satire 4: “More than ten Hollensheads, or Halls, or Stowes, / Of trivial household trash he knows,” quoted in Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 3. Since Patterson’s landmark study, Djordjevic’s Holinshed’s Nation and Kewes, Archer, and Heal’s The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles have expanded the study of Holinshed’s Chronicles in particular. 65. Key titles include Woolf, Reading History and The Idea of History; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss. 66. Dillon traces Hall’s description of spectacle in his account of Henry VIII’s reign, finding his “highly performative rhetoric” a narrative technique that “predominately shapes action as performance” and allows new conceptions of the monarchy, “Hall’s Rhetoric of Performance,” 17, 10. 67. See Herman, “Henrician Historiography,” 259–­75; and Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays. 68. Patterson critiques common paradoxical assessments of chronicle histories’ ideologies as simultaneously entirely providential and entirely political, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 5. Breen similarly describes a “curiously bifurcated critical reputation” of a different sort: chroniclers “have been identified as polemicists responsible for creating and sustaining the ‘Tudor myth’” while at the same time failing to apply “any discernable principle of selection” to the process of writing, “Early Modern Historiography,” 6. 69. See Woolf, The Idea of History, 3–­44; Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 237–­85; and Kamps, Historiography and Ideology, 26–­50. 70. Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories, 5. In spite of Heminge and Condell’s imposition of the term histories in the First Folio, Irving Ribner observes that the history play is still a modern construct applied to a set of somewhat homogenous plays never precisely defined during the period, The English History Play, 11. See also Hattaway, “The Shakespearean History Play,” 3; and Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, 7–­9. 71. Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 11. For an important counterpoint, see Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play.” 72. Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, 11–­13. 274  Notes to Pages 19–21

73. On Shakespeare’s ten plays as the primary representatives and the origin of the genre, see Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, 6; Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, 10. Ralf Hertel’s excellent Staging England is a recent example of such overvaluation: his study examines four Shakespeare plays and one Marlowe play to provide an overview of the Elizabethan history play. 74. Brian Walsh has recently argued for an inclusive definition of the genre that considers the staging of historical material in the context of the early modern period’s “playing industry” as well as “its historical consciousness” to produce “a commonsense category of the history play that can bend to accommodate the range of ‘pasts’ represented on the early modern stage,” “The History Play,” 373. 75. See Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, 9 and McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 33. Walsh also finds Shakespeare indebted to the Queen’s Men’s repertoire of history plays for his explorations of historical consciousness in more well-­known historical drama, noting that the Queen’s Men provided up to six narrative models for Shakespeare’s history plays, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 30–­40. 76. On theatricality and the idea of history, see Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 1–­40; on religious change and historical and national identity, see Walsh, “The History Play,” 380–­83; Hertel, Staging England, 126–­31; and Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, 6–­8. 77. Ostovich, Syme, and Griffin, “Introduction,” 21. 78. On Edward IV’s generic hybridity, see Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 119; McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood, 91; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 127; Howard, “Other Englands,” 141; Lander, “Faith in Me Unto this Commonwealth,” 48. 79. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 195–­245. 80. The prologue to Ford’s play labels the genre “out of fashion” (Prologue 2); it is one of only three extant history plays from the years 1610–­42. Barton highlights the play’s glorification of ideal royalty, while Miles Taylor emphasizes its active reflection on the outmoded status of the genre. Barton, “He That Plays the King,” 72–­73; Taylor, “The End of the English History Play,” 395. 81. In addition to Taylor and Barton, see Barish, “Perkin Warbeck as Anti-­History,” 168; Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, 174–­87; and Candido, “The ‘Strange Truth’ of Perkin Warbeck,” 306–­14. 82. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 193–­245. I follow Howard in seeing Helgerson’s division between playwrights as either monarch focused or inclusive of commoners as too stark, “Other Englands,” 136–­39. Helgerson, Rackin and Howard, and Levine all discuss Shakespeare’s nationalism; on the nationalism Notes to Pages 21–23  275

in non-­Shakespearean history plays, see Howard’s “Other Englands” on Edward IV and Ostovich, Syme, and Griffin’s Locating the Queen’s Men on The True Tragedy,15. 83. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 12. Rackin and Howard connect the history play’s popularity in the 1590s to burgeoning interest in a national self-­conception, Engendering a Nation, 14. See also Howard, “Other Englands,” 136, and Rackin, Stages of History, 4. Parvini notes that it is now an “almost commonplace” position for scholars to read the genre through a “lens of nation-­building,” Shakespeare’s History Plays, 101. 84. Hertel’s useful theorizing of the term “national consciousness” in the most recent book on the Elizabethan history play’s shaping of national identity is also applicable to considerations of sixteenth-­century narrative historiography, as it theorizes the existence of national sentiments in the collective imagination prior to the consolidations of state power of the Tudor period most prominently explored in the early modern history play, Staging England, 21–­22. 85. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 11. 86. The degree to which early modern nationalism resembles modern nationalism has been widely debated; see Sauer and Wright, “Introduction,” 2–­16; Escobedo, “No Early Modern Nations?,” 203–­10; Greenfeld, Nationalism, 18–­47; and McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 5–­6. On this ideological shift from dynasty to nation in the literature of the period, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 12; Rackin, Stages of History 4; Escobedo, Nationalism and Historic Loss, 206; and Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 18. See Hertel’s summary overview of early modern nationalism, Staging England, 5–­23; as well as Baldo’s, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, 7–­8. Cathy Shrank examines the impact of the Reformation on national consciousness to make the case that writers from the 1530s to 1580s were already using the “rhetoric, motifs, and themes” of nationhood in their work, Writing the Nation, 19. 87. Rackin and Howard note that “the Tudors’ relative success at building a more unified and centralized state created conditions in which the centrality of the monarch as the focus of allegiance could diminish,” Engendering a Nation, 12. See also Greenfeld, Nationalism, 74, and Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 10. 88. See Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 24–­25, 99–­134; Levine, Women’s Matters, 14–­15; and Hertel, Staging England, 194–­212. 89. Levine finds that Shakespeare’s first tetralogy stages a “‘drama of nation’ that is more inclusive, and more iconoclastic, than either the dynastic histories set forth in the Tudor chronicles or the celebrations of power produced by the Elizabethan court,” while other critics turning to the same history plays more frequently demonstrate how performative ideals of masculinity associated with

276  Notes to Pages 23–24

the nation render female agency as a suspect threat to the integrity of a fraternal England, Women’s Matters, 15; see also 146–­47. See Rackin, Stages of History, 197; Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 53; Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 135–­75. 90. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women, 227. 91. See Earenfight on early shifts in the structure of medieval queenship from 1100–­1300: “Rising literacy, university education, and increasingly bureaucratic, professional and meritocratic royal offices (such as the chancery and treasury) excluded women from official public political office and limited them to a more domestic, familial, maternal role in court,” Queenship in Medieval Europe, 19. See also Parsons, “Family, Sex, and Power,” 10; and Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 104. 92. Oakley-­Brown and Wilkinson, The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship, 12. 93. Oakley-­Brown and Wilkinson, The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship, 12. 1. A Very Prey to Time 1. The Quenes Maiesties Passage, 33. 2. The Quenes Maiesties Passage, 31, 34. 3. Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch,” 148. Helen Hackett also sees in the pageant a refutation of  “dissent against rule by a woman,” Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, 41. 4. Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch,” 149. 5. King, “Queen Elizabeth I,” 39. King argues that Elizabethan iconography extends beyond the familiar cult of the perpetual virgin queen; in the 1560s and 1570s, Elizabethan iconography used her chastity to signal she was a marriageable queen, “Queen Elizabeth I,” 32–­39. 6. See Rackin, Stages of History, xi, 147; and Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 46–­51. 7. For a discussion of Elizabeth York’s absence from Richard III, see Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 152, and Nina Levine, Women’s Matters, 99–­100. 8. On the complicated compositional and printing history of More’s English text, see Richard Sylvester’s “Introduction,” xvii–­x xxii. I rely on Sylvester’s edition, which draws primarily from William Rastell’s 1557 English edition while indicating variants in Grafton and Hall and setting the English text alongside the Latin version printed in 1565. See also Logan, “Introduction,” xliii–­xlv. 9. While many scholars note More’s dislike of the first Tudor king and his history’s skeptical attitude toward Tudor rule, the text furthered the Tudor dynasty’s view of Richard as a Yorkist tyrant. See Marius, Thomas More: A Biography, 52, and Rudnytsky, “More’s History of King Richard III,” 149–­72. 10. Two notable exceptions are Shepard, “‘Female Perversity,’ Male Entitlement,” 311–­28, and especially Kavita Mudan Finn, who redresses critical neglect

Notes to Pages 24–31  277

of Elizabeth Woodville’s representation in historiography and offers counterpoints to my readings of her agency in More’s text, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 65–­73. 11. See Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 454–­55; Scott, Re-­Presenting “Jane” Shore, 13–­19; and Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 127–­31. 12. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 219–­20. 13. More offers explanations for Mistress Shore’s easy “enclin[ation] vnto ye kings appetite”—­citing her too-­early marriage and Edward’s “abuse” of her—­that sympathetically excuse her sexual transgressions, The History of King Richard III, 55. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 14. While Curtis Perry’s analysis of the controversies surrounding royal favoritism shows that the most familiar literary representations of it focus on royal favorites as “agents of socio-­political corruption,” he also traces a significant counter-­ discourse that saw favoritism as “a normal aspect of functional monarchy” and depicted virtuous favorites, Literature and Favoritism, 55. See also 55–­70. 15. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 68. 16. Donno, “Thomas More and Richard III,” 423. 17. Donno, “Thomas More and Richard III,” 423. 18. Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 455; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 129. 19. Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 129. 20. Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 454. 21. See Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 219–­20; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 127–­29; and Scott, Re-­presenting “Jane” Shore, 13–­19. 22. Judith Anderson identifies More’s “recognition of anomaly in Mistress Shore’s presence” as Tacitean, and sees it rooted in the traditions of Tacitean history as well as religious life-­writing, Biographical Truth, 98. 23. Shepard, “‘Female Perversity,’ Male Entitlement,” 326. 24. The queen argues that her son’s land holdings are not by knight’s service, so he is not legally independent but her ward. See Logan, “Introduction,” 44n34 and Sylvester, “Introduction,” 205. 25. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 92. 26. Vergil’s text was commissioned by Henry VII around 1506–­7; on its status as the source of the “Tudor myth,” see Logan, “Introduction,” xxx and xlv. Logan and F. J. Levy assert that More and Vergil were unlikely to have read each other’s concurrent histories. See Logan, “Introduction,” xxxi, and Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 53. See also Sylvester, “Introduction,” lxxv–­lxxviii. Dominique Goy-­ Blanquet alternatively claims that More did use Vergil as one of his sources, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 210.

278  Notes to Pages 32–42

27. For a counterpoint comparison of Elizabeth’s representation in Vergil, see Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 64 and 73. 28. Vergil, Three Books, 175. 29. Vergil, Three Books, 178. 30. Vergil, Three Books, 178. 31. See Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 91. 32. Both Hall and Holinshed discuss, with much concern and some variation, Henry VII’s punishment of Elizabeth Woodville for her eventual acquiescence to Richard, while Francis Bacon traces this action to her suspected involvement in Lambert Simnel’s rebellion, The History of King Henry VII, 19. See also Loades, The Tudor Court, 149, and for a critique of this interpretation of Elizabeth’s retirement from court, see Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 215–­16. 33. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 19. 34. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 147. 35. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 7. 36. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 7, 151. 37. See Janel Mueller on the ambivalent position of women in More’s Utopia, “‘The Whole Island like a Single Family’”; see Hogrefe, Tudor Women, 98–­102, on More’s contributions to women’s education in the sixteenth century. 38. Khanna, “Images of Women,” 78. Also see Khanna’s other article on a similar subject, “No Less Real than Ideal.” 39. On the compositional circumstances of the poem immediately after Elizabeth’s death and its form and genre, see Anthony S. G. Edwards’s introduction to More’s English Poems, xxi–­x xvi. 40. Tromly, “‘A Rueful Lamentation,’” 45–­56; Khanna, “Images of Women,” 78–­88. 41. Khanna, “Images of Women,” 86. 42. More, “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth,” 65–­66; 61; 64. 43. More, “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth,” 44–­50. 44. More, “On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII,” 101. 45. More, “On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII,” 111. The critique of Henry VII offered in this coronation poem did not damage More’s relationship with the new king; Marius argues it might have endeared More to Henry VIII, who reputedly had a tense relationship with Henry VII, 52. It did, however, attract notice from the French humanist Germanus Brixius, who later accused More of slander and advised Henry VIII to banish him for the poem. See Marius for an analysis of More’s coronation poems and his feud with Brixius over their alleged slander, Thomas More: A Biography, 50–­53 and 246–­47.

Notes to Pages 42–47  279

46. See Donno on the elder More’s political loyalty to Edward IV, “Thomas More and Richard III,” 408. 47. The texts of The History of King Richard III found in Grafton’s 1543 Continuation and Hall’s Union are very similar; Sylvester surmises that while Hall’s text does not reproduce the Harding continuation verbatim and differs from it in places, it is most likely drawn from the same manuscript Grafton used for his two 1543 editions. This common manuscript, according to Sylvester, differs from the fair copy manuscript that Rastell later used to print his 1557 edition. The primary differences between the Rastell edition and the 1543 Grafton and 1548/50 Hall versions of The History of King Richard III are found in the rearranged order of the text’s opening paragraphs, some transitional passages, and Rastell’s inclusion of a few lengthy passages he translates from More’s Latin Historia. Grafton’s later Chronicle at Large, printed in 1569, uses Rastell’s version rather than reproducing the version of More’s text he printed in the Continuation. See Sylvester, “Introduction,” xix–­x xxii; see also Goy-­Blanquet on More’s transmission to Hall’s Union through Grafton’s chronicle, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 212–­14. 48. Lucas, “Holinshed and Hall,” 203, 215. 49. See the Oxford Shakespeare Richard III’s editor John Jowett, “Introduction,” 13; and the Norton Richard III editor Thomas Cartelli, “Preface,” xi–­xii. Goy-­ Blanquet traces Hall’s use of More and Vergil, and Holinshed’s use of the latter as they pertain to Richard III, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 197–­288, especially 209–­15. 50. Hall, The Union, 406. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. Shakespeare gives Elizabeth dialogue reminiscent of Hall: “Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs, / And throw them in the entrails of the wolf?” (4.4.17–­18). The First Folio includes a repetition in Elizabeth’s similar words to Richard: “No doubt the murd’rous knife was dull and blunt / Till it was whetted on thy stone-­hard heart / To revel in the entrails of my lambs” (4.4.216–­18). Both authors are echoing More, who observes that Richard’s protectorship was as if “the lamb was betaken to the wolfe to kepe,” The History of King Richard III, 24–­25. According to Rackin and Howard, Shakespeare “appropriates for Elizabeth’s use against Richard the very arguments, and even the terms, by which the authoritative narrative voice in Hall’s chronicle condemns her action,” Engendering a Nation, 108. 51. For an alternative reading, see Finn, who addresses the potential effects of Hall’s interpolation of More’s account of Elizabeth but concludes that Hall returns to a negative characterization based on Vergil, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 100; and 94–­102. 52. Hall uses Vergil’s Anglica Historia as his key source, following Vergil’s text closely and for much of his text simply translating from Vergil’s Latin. He differs from

280  Notes to Pages 47–49

Vergil primarily in his account of Edward V’s and Richard III’s reigns, where he inserts More’s History of King Richard III. See Lucas, “Holinshed and Hall,” 205; Goy-­Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 209–­15; and Kelly, Divine Providence, 119–­37. 53. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 117. See Kelly on Hall’s reluctance, in contrast to some of his contemporaries, such as Fabyan, to claim God’s displeasure with Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth, Divine Providence, 126–­27. 54. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 17. 55. Hall’s rearrangements include adding a heading, “The Tragical Doynges of Kyng Richard the Thirde,” and a subsequent introduction describing Richard’s coronation before returning, unacknowledged, to More’s text, Union, 374. 56. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 189. 57. Vergil also mentions the queen’s solicitation of Richmond’s promise to marry either of her living daughters, Anglica Historia, 195–­96. 58. Hodgdon, The End Crowns All, 109. 59. Herman, “Hall, Edward,” 4, 6. E. M. W. Tillyard and F. J. Levy argue for Hall’s endorsement of the Tudor myth, and while their similar claims about other historiographers, including Shakespeare, have been repeatedly challenged, that has not often been the case for Hall’s work. See Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 42–­45, and Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 173–­77. Graham Holderness is an exception, Shakespeare Recycled, 7. 60. Herman, “Henrician Historiography,” 259–­75. 61. Vergil’s shorter narrative also combines a charge of female inconstancy—­“for so mutable is their sex”—­with Richard’s difficulties in persuading Elizabeth, Anglica Historia, 210. 62. Vergil describes this same episode in lesser detail, and he observes that Elizabeth’s reduced circumstances, a transformation from those “accounted most wealthy and fortunate” to a life of “misery,” reveals “the inconstancy of human affairs,” Anglica Historia, 19. 63. On the Chronicles’s use of Hall’s Union for the historical period 1399 to 1509, see Scott Lucas, “Holinshed and Hall,” 212–­15; on the 1577 Chronicles’s use of Hall and especially More, see Summerson, “Sources: 1577,” 69–­70. 64. On the Chronicles’s inclusion of three supplementary passages translated from More’s Latin Historia, see Summerson, “Sources: 1577,” 70. See also Sylvester, “Introduction,” xxix–­x xxii. 65. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 720. 66. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 750. 67. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 765. 68. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 102.

Notes to Pages 50–58  281

69. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 44. 70. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 47. 71. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 10. 72. On changes in government, see Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government. On Elizabethan national identity, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity, and McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood. 73. DiGangi, “Competitive Mourning,” 428. 74. Miner, “‘Neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen,’” 35–­55. 75. Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 105. 76. Levine, Women’s Matters, 102. Miner and Finn both similarly argue for a greater degree of theatrical and moral power in these women’s positions of maternal authority than do Rackin and Howard. See Miner, “‘Neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen,’” 48–­52, and Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 163–­72. 77. Phillippy, Women, Death, and Literature, 110. 78. Goodland, Female Mourning, 136. 79. Thorne, “‘O, lawful let it be,’” 106. 80. DiGangi, “Competitive Mourning,” 430, 438. For an excellent current summary of the major feminist accounts of women’s mourning in the play, see DiGangi, “Competitive Mourning,” 430–­31. 81. DiGangi, “Competitive Mourning,” 438. 82. For example, the two articles on Richard III in the 2018 Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens are both focused solely on Margaret. Even in approaches that consider Margaret individually, there is disagreement about the play’s portrayal of her political power. Liberty S. Stanavage reads Margaret as a “political agent” whose disruptive and dangerous vengeance challenges gender binaries, while in the same edited collection, Bella Mirabella sees Shakespeare granting Margaret “a political presence” through his positive portrayal of her justified anger. Stanavage, “Margaret of Anjou and the Rhetoric of Sovereign Vengeance,” 163; Mirabella, “‘I Can No Longer Hold Me Patient!’” 183. 83. Phillippy, Women, Death, and Literature, 136. See also Rackin and Howard, who find that the communal mourning of the play’s women turns them into “an undifferentiated chorus of ritual lamentation, curse, and prophecy,” Engendering a Nation, 116. 84. Goodland, Female Mourning, 148, 153. 85. Thorne, “‘O, lawful let it be,’” 110. 86. While feminist critics have read Richard III’s depiction of Elizabeth as lacking subversive power but generative of sympathetic evaluation, as discussed, they do 282  Notes to Pages 59–62

not see this evocation of sympathy or affect emerging from the play’s narrative sources. Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 106. 87. Levine, Women’s Matters, 97. 88. Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 462 and 455. 89. John Jowett’s note to the word “gossips” offers two relevant readings: “(a) idle women’s talk has undue political power; (b) the Queen and Shore are gossips in the sense ‘godparents’, which enables them to challenge the King’s authority as the country’s ‘natural’ parent,” 152n83. 90. Goodland, Female Mourning, 152. 91. Karremann, The Drama of Memory, 185. 92. Phillippy, Women, Death, and Literature, 134. 93. See chap1n50. 94. The First Folio substitutes the word barren for withered at line 314. 95. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 57–­76; Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 51–­96; Levine, Women’s Matters, 97–­122. More recently, Phillippy has similarly found Richard III “inscrib[ing] the anxiety surrounding [Elizabeth I’s] imminent death and the uncertain succession it implied,” Women, Death, and Literature, 126. 96. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 74. 97. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 73–­76. 98. See Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye,’” 424. 99. Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye,’” 424. 100. Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye,’” 424; see also King, “Queen Elizabeth I,” 49–­50. 101. See Rackin and Howard, Engendering a Nation, 111–­12, and Levine, Women’s Matters, 104, 107–­9. 102. Watkins, “Losing France and Becoming England,” 87. 103. Watkins, “Losing France and Becoming England” 87–­88. 104. Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 150. 105. Vanhoutte, Strange Communion, 152. 106. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 75. 107. Such emerging national identity was not even conditionally separate from the monarch, as Greenfeld notes, but the sovereign under this national schema had greater obligations to a collective nation defined by a public character than to a dynasty defined by blood, Nationalism, 74. 2. Your Hope Is Gone 1. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 377, l.113; 379, ll.169–­75. 2. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 380, l.204; 379, l.180. 3. Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, 379, l.181. Notes to Pages 62–78  283

4. Budra, “A Mirror for Magistrates” and the de casibus tradition, 64. For a counterpoint reading, see Nora Corrigan, who argues that Shore is cast as “a genuinely able ruler,” “‘But Smythes Must Speake,’” 88. 5. Budra, “A Mirror for Magistrates” and the de casibus tradition, 67. 6. Both plays also draw on popular ballads; see Philip Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, for the True Tragedy’s use of the Stanley ballads, 200–­201. I follow Edward IV’s most recent editor, Richard Rowland, in treating the two-­part play as a single work, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 57–­58. 7. See Budra, “A Mirror for Magistrates” and the de casibus tradition, 64–­71; Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 115–­16; Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 456–­62; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 131–­35. 8. Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third 1594,” 300. 9. Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, 200. 10. For a recent overview on dating the play see Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, 198. Roslyn Knutson argues in The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–­1613 for sometime prior to 1588, and Brian Walsh reasons that it was perhaps written after Richard Tarleton’s death in 1588, in Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 76. 11. See Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare; Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third 1594,” 299–­306; and Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Goy-­Blanquet provides an overview of this viewpoint among earlier critics, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 271. 12. Goy-­Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 271–­74; Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 76–­77; see also Lull and Jowett Richard III, 24–­25. The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 47, and Anthony Hammond are notable exceptions, arguing for Richard III’s earlier composition; Hammond’s edition attributes any similarities to material from the Mirror used by both playwrights, Richard III, 83–­84. 13. Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, 203. Finn assesses the influence of The True Tragedy on Richard III as minimal, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 127. 14. On Edward IV’s sources see Rowland, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 11–­15, 43–­48; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 127–­35; and Corrigan, “The Merry Tanner,” 27–­41. 15. Rowland, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 79. 16. Rowland, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 58.

284  Notes to Pages 78–80

17. On The True Tragedy’s sympathy for Shore, see Pratt, “Jane Shore and the Elizabethans,” 1304. See also Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 95. On Edward IV see Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 122; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 126; and Howard, “Other Englands,” 149. 18. Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 463. 19. Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 462. Helgerson does not discuss The True Tragedy, but places the play alongside Edward IV as representative plays that contrast Shakespeare’s in their attentions to Mistress Shore, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 475n18. See also Finn, who sees both plays as quite different from Richard III, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 127. 20. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, for a discussion of the contrast between Shakespeare and the Henslowe playwrights, 228–­40. See Corrigan for a contrasting view, “The Merry Tanner,” 29–­30. 21. Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 126. 22. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 127. 23. The True Tragedy of Richard III, ll.1076–­79. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 24. Wonderful: “full of wonder; such as to excite wonder or astonishment; marvelous; sometimes used trivially = surprisingly large, fine, excellent, etc” (oed). 25. For a contrasting view that sees Lodwicke’s perspective as “distinctly at odds with the completely sympathetic portrayal of Shore’s wife” in the play, see Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 95. 26. Greenberg, “Women and the Theatre,” 84. 27. Greenberg, “Women and the Theatre,” 87. 28. Critics generally agree that this title page description contrasts with the actual play’s sympathetic account of Mistress Shore. See Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, 95 and Pratt, “Jane Shore and the Elizabethans,” 1304. An exception is Scott, Re-­Presenting “Jane” Shore, 51–­54. 29. Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare, 433. 30. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 138. 31. “Strange”: “distant or cold in demeanour; reserved; not affable, familiar, or encouraging; uncomplying, unwilling to accede to a request or desire,” (oed). 32. Both Churchill and Goy-­Blanquet view the conversations and subsequent scenes depicting Elizabeth’s overtures to Richmond in both plays as similar in effects, producing equal uncertainty about her consent; I see that uncertainty as foreclosed through the play’s use of staged report. See Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare, 451 and Goy-­Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 272.

Notes to Pages 80–93  285

33. See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 26–­29; Roberts-­ Smith, “‘What Makes Thou Upon a Stage?,’” 201; and Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic, 54–­55. 34. Ostovich, Syme, and Griffin, Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–­1603, 15. See also Roberts-­Smith, who finds that the play’s provincial performances used audiences’ affective responses to the actors’ evocation of the vulnerable bodies of children as a key unifying element within a compulsory nationhood, “‘What Makes Thou Upon a Stage?,’” 201. 35. See Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience,’” 33. 36. Kristin M. S. Bezio argues that The True Tragedy’s final lines turn to Tudor history to depict “Elizabeth as the apotheosis of English sovereignty,” producing an ending that “adheres to a propagandistic and orthodox ideology” of monarchy devoted to spreading nationalism, Staging Power, 73. See also Clare, who sees the play’s final scene as “in line with the Protestant, nationalist, and royal agenda of the Queen’s Men” and calls the encomium a “tacking-­on of propaganda,” Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic, 54. 37. Lewis Mott looks to these lines celebrating Elizabeth’s defeat of the Antichrist, among others, to locate the play’s composition as post-­Armada; specifically, he argues that the unknown Queen’s Men play performed before court on December 26, 1589, was a recently composed True Tragedy, “Foreign Politics in an Old Play,” 65–­71. 38. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 139. Finn points to Walsh’s explanations of casting and or printed misattribution of speeches as one potential answer. 39. Roberts-­Smith proposes this doubling of actors as an alternative to that forwarded by McMillan and MacLean and followed by Walsh, which assigns to one prepubescent boy the roles of Truth and the Queen Mother, and to a different child actor the roles of Shore’s Wife and Prince Edward, “‘What Makes Thou Upon a Stage?,’” 198. 40. Bezio, Staging Power, 74. 41. Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience,’” 80. 42. Lyons, “Male Birth Fantasies and Maternal Monarchs,” 185. 43. Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience,’” 64. 44. Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience,’” 71. 45. Walsh, “‘Deep Prescience,’” 80. 46. Greenberg, “Women and the Theatre,” 82. 47. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 138. 48. Goy-­Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 273. 49. See Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 119; McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood, 91; Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 127; Howard, “Other Englands,” 141; and Lander, “‘Faith in Me Unto this Commonwealth,’” 48. 286  Notes to Pages 95–101

50. Helgerson contrasts the two plays’ competing models of history, seeing in Richard III a “fascination with power” and in Edward IV a focus on its victims in Forms of Nationhood, 235. Bezio sees the play largely supporting the doctrine of divine right through its staging of a king “whose abuses of power are permitted and even authorized by his status,” Staging Power, 123. She concludes that while Heywood’s “ideological stance is more orthodox” than many of his contemporaries, he is “aware of the increasing power of subjects in the changing shape of the English government,” 124–­25. 51. Howard, “Other Englands,” 145. Wall argues that the play “subordinates monarchical history” to tales of London’s citizens, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 135 52. See Lander, “‘Faith in Me Unto this Commonwealth,’” 47, 69. 53. Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 125. 54. See Wall, “Forgetting and Keeping,” 126. 55. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 141. 56. Howard, “Other Englands,” 148–­149. 57. Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 1e4.1.22–­23. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 58. Finn, The Last Plantagenet Consorts, 141. 59. Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 122. 60. Howard, “Other Englands,” 149. 61. Corrigan, “The Merry Tanner,” 39. 62. Greenberg, “Women and the Theatre,” 84. 63. Greenberg, “Women and the Theatre,” 85. 64. See Lander, “‘Faith in Me Unto this Commonwealth,’” 47–­48; and Howard, “Other Englands,” 149. 65. Dolan, “‘Gentlemen, I have one more thing to say,’” 159. 3. From Noble Lady to Unnatural Queen 1. Marlowe, Edward II, 25.78–­82. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 2. See Grafton, A Chronicle at Large (1569), 224; Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 349; and Stow, Annals of England (1592), 351. 3. Curtis Perry observes that Edward III “displays a commitment to the public good by refusing to protect his own mother” and “thus exerts command symbolically over his own potential for effeminate frailty,” Literature and Favoritism, 201. Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman similarly note that by the end of the play Edward III is “in marked contrast to his father—­an embodiment of justice and of filial piety, who exercises his power wisely and with the loyal support of his barons,” Christopher Marlowe, 350. See also Haber, “Submitting to History,” 178–­79; and Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire, 179–­80. Notes to Pages 101–122  287

4. Niamh Pattwell suggests that even narrative accounts of Isabel’s imprisonment are likely overstated, “Reinterpreting the Later Life of Isabelle of France,” 78–­81. 5. The commonplace that historical drama shapes unwieldy chronicle material into aesthetically powerful recuperations—­pervasive in criticism of Shakespeare’s plays—­is also borne out in approaches to Marlowe’s play. See Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 344; and Brown, “Tampering with the Records,” 167. 6. Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 346. 7. Marlowe also used Fabyan’s 1559 Chronicle. Source study typically argues for Marlowe’s use of the later editions of Holinshed and Stow, but it also frequently finds few meaningful differences, as I do, between editions of each text. See Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 341–­50; Forker, “Introduction,” 41–­66; Martin, “Introduction,” 21–­26; and Parks, “History, Tragedy, and Truth,” 275–­90. 8. Forker concludes that “the probability of Marlowe’s having read Grafton, in addition to Holinshed, Fabyan, and Stowe, is substantial,” “Introduction,” 66. Irving Ribner does not directly suggest Grafton as a source, but he insists that Marlowe “had read in at least several places accounts of a highly varied period in English history” for Edward II, “Marlowe’s Edward II,” 245. 9. Grafton, A Chronicle at Large, 194. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 10. Froissart’s Chroniques was translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and printed in 1523, 1542 and 1563. On Berners’s translation of Froissart, see Echard, Printing the Middle Ages, 163–­71; Boro, “Lord Berners and His Books,” 240–­42; Kane, “An Accident of History,” 217–­25; Benson, “The Use of a Physical Viewpoint in Berners’ Froissart,” 333–­38. 11. Sponsler, “The King’s Boyfriend,” 148–­49. The first volume of Froissart’s Chroniques, which includes the segment translated by Berners and used by Grafton, is itself taken from the chronicle of Jean Le Bel, Vrayes Chroniques. Le Bel’s and Froissart’s active Isabel is partly attributable to their ties to Hainault. See Sponsler, “The King’s Boyfriend,” 146, 149; Nachtwey, “Scapegoats and Conspirators,” 104; Croenen, “The Reception of Froissart’s Writings,” 409–­19. 12. Critics who attend to Grafton most often do so in relation to Elizabeth Cary’s use of his text as a source. See Tina Krontiris’s study of Cary’s history, “Style and Gender” 140; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski discusses narrative and poetic intertexts for Cary’s work, but does not mention Grafton, Writing Women, 201; see also Parks’s “Elizabeth Cary’s Domestic History,” 178, 180, and her “History, Tragedy, and Truth,” 279. Gywnne Kennedy helpfully distinguishes differences in representation among Cary’s historiographical sources, “Reform or Rebellion?,” 209–­10. 288  Notes to Pages 122–125

See also Skura, “Elizabeth Cary and Edward II,” 86; and Britland, “‘Kings are But Men,’” para 15–­16. 13. Fabyan, Chronicle (1559), 180. 14. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 96 and 95. 15. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 95–­96. 16. Kennedy, “Reform or Rebellion?,” 211. 17. See Phillips, Edward II, 506–­12. 18. Froissart, The Chronicle of Froissart, 75. 19. Heal and Summerson, “The Genesis of the Two Editions,” 14–­15. 20. For the best overview of the Chronicles’s composition, publishing, and printing history, see The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, particularly Heal and Summerson, “The Genesis of the Two Editions,” 3–­19. See also Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 22–­31 and Igor Djordjevic, Holinshed’s Nation, 5–­9. 21. Lewalski argues that in the 1587 Chronicles, Isabel “is not brought into focus, but she is presented with some sympathy as a much-­abused wife and an effective leader, along with Mortimer, of the invasion and revolt against Edward. Yet both are strongly condemned for usurping power and for the regicide,” Writing Women, 203. Parks notes that in chronicle history, Isabel receives “meager but positive” attention until she invades the realm, when “she is presented as ruled by her passions, seeking revenge rather than justice,” “History, Tragedy, and Truth,” 279. 22. Holinshed relies on Fabyan’s Chronicle and Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia as well as the medieval manuscript or Latin sources of William Caxton, Thomas Walsingham, and Geoffrey Baker (Thomas de la More) for his account of Edward II’s reign. See Summerson, “Sources: 1577,” 67–­68. 23. Lewalski, Writing Women, 203–­4. 24. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), 327. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 25. See Patterson on the multivocality of the Chronicles, 40–­47, and on Fleming’s “intrusive moral voice,” Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 217; see also Summerson, “Sources: 1587,” 80–­83. 26. Plautus, Truculentus, 2.5.465–­70, editor’s translation by Martin, “Appendix A,” 178. 27. Heal and Summerson, “The Genesis of the Two Editions,” 15; Summerson, “Sources: 1587,” 80–­83. 28. The Fleming passages about the lamentable case of division between kings and queens and the Plautus quotation on women’s nature are the only excerpted sections from Holinshed pertaining to Isabel in Martin’s edition of Marlowe’s play, “Appendix A,” 177–­78. They include a bracketed heading, “Commentary on Isabella’s reluctance to return to England,” a description that belies the focus of Martin’s chosen excerpt, which only contains the 1587 edition’s digression and Notes to Pages 126–143  289

its abstractions, and not the multiple possibilities the Chronicles proposes for Isabel’s reluctance, 177. 29. See Summerson, “Sources: 1587,” 84–­86. 30. Stow, Annals of England (1592), 338. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 31. Stow likely expands on a cue from Fabyan’s short mention that Spencer is “beheaded without processe of the law” for this version of the execution, Chronicle, 182. 32. See, for example, the execution of Simon Reading in the Chronicles, who “had used the queene very uncourteouslie, giuing her manie reprochfull words, which now were remembred” (1587), 340. Reading functions as an example of “how dangerous a thing it is to speake euill of the higher powers,” a view that foregrounds personal animosity as a driving force behind the exertion of dynastic authority (1587), 340. 33. This assessment of conflicting reports is drawn from Fabyan, as is the list of articles against Mortimer, which subsequently appear in all the chronicle histories I discuss here, Chronicle, 197. 34. Stow and Grafton fought for readers and the patronage of the Earl of Leicester; each made disparaging personal attacks and charged the other with plagiarism and shoddy source use in successive printed prefaces to their abridgments. This feud has been astutely examined by Devereux, “Empty Tuns and Unfruitful Grafts,” 33–­56, Kastan, “Opening Gates and Stopping Hedges,” 66–­79, Archer, “John Stow, Citizen and Historian,” 13–­26, and Hiatt, “Stow, Grafton, and Fifteenth-­Century Historiography,” 45–­56. Modern history reflexively evaluates Stow as a “critical historian” and Grafton as a “derivative hack,” a divisive judgment Kastan valuably challenges, “Opening Gates and Stopping Hedges,” 68; see also Devereux, “Empty Tuns and Unfruitful Grafts,” 34–­35. 35. Both historiographers’ language about Isabel is nearly identical to Cooper’s Chronicle; Grafton’s two details not present in Stow—­that Charles “forsoke his sisters quarrell,” and the accusation of Mortimer being “ouer familier” with Isabel—­come from Cooper, An Abridgement (1563) 75v, 76v. While historians more often credit Stow’s accusation against Grafton, Grafton’s charge against Stow for plagiarizing his 1562 edition, leveled in his 1565 preface to A Manuell, seems more likely. See Kastan, who notes that Stow’s 1565 preface avoids calling attention to Cooper as one of Grafton’s sources due to their shared indebtedness to Cooper’s work, “Opening Gates and Stopping Hedges,” 78n21. On Stow’s use of Cooper, see Hiatt, “Stow, Grafton, and Fifteenth-­Century Historiography,” 53–­54. 36. The 1566 A Summarie varies only slightly from Stow’s three other editions, which are identical in their representation of Isabel; it adds a paragraph about the execution of Stapleton and the additional accusation against Mortimer: “he was

290  Notes to Pages 146–153

more secret with quene Isabel the kynges mother then was to godds pleasure or the kynges honore,” 119. 37. Stow, A Summarie (1565), 110. 38. Stow, A Summarie (1565), 110. 39. Grafton’s 1565 A Manuell of the Chronicles of Englande, even briefer than its predecessors, only minimally modifies his previous three printings of An Abridgement. 40. Stow, A Summarie (1570), 193r. 41. Stow, A Summarie (1570), 195r. Even the very brief 1579 The Summarie follows this new view of Isabel found in Stow’s 1570s abridgments, blaming Isabel for the deaths of Edward and Kent. 42. Stow, A Summarie (1575), 261. 43. On the print competition for abridgments, see Hiatt, “Stow, Grafton, and Fifteenth-­ Century Historiography,” 51. 44. Hiatt, “Stow, Grafton, and Fifteenth-­Century Historiography,” 55. 45. The play was first printed in quarto in 1594, a year after Marlowe’s death. On dating the play, see Forker, “Introduction,” 14–­17; and Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 343. 46. Brown argues that Edward II “challenges the version of English identity that is based on the assertion of masculine values that trivialize privacy and emotion” by incorporating lyrical narrative, a form that “gives voice to women and to passionate men, to the marginal elements that had been suppressed in Holinshed,” “Tampering with the Records,” 166. 47. Parks, “History, Tragedy, and Truth,” 283. Parks’s analysis admirably seeks to read the play “against a conception of the chronicle not as mere ‘material’ but as a coherent and influential projection of national identity and historical process,” 275; she does not include Grafton and concludes that the narratives of Edward’s reign all similarly treat Isabel as a “primarily public figure” before condemning her for “seeking revenge rather than justice,” 283, 279. 48. Perry situates the play’s expanded account of Isabel’s and Mortimer’s erotic passions alongside Edward’s, and finds that Isabel’s resistance to the disordered government springing from Edward’s personal relationships with Gaveston and Spencer is itself revealed to be “warped by passion” through her affair with Mortimer, Literature and Favoritism, 200. 49. As Thomas and Tydeman note, Marlowe’s primary chronicle sources—­Fabyan, Holinshed, and Stow—­do not depict Isabel’s conflicts with Edward over Gaveston, but Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana and Foxe’s Actes and Monuments record her grieving over Edward’s departure with Gaveston, Christopher Marlowe, 342. 50. Kennedy, Just Anger, 82. Brown calls this lament “thoroughly Ovidian,” and indebted to the The Heroides’s privileging of female voices; she argues these lyric modes

Notes to Pages 153–158  291

are excluded from narrative history, “Tampering with the Records,” 180. I see Isabel’s lament at least as much indebted to chronicle history as to other literary intertexts. 51. Kennedy, Just Anger, 81. 52. Marlowe also recycles Grafton’s attention to queenly supplication to emphasize affection between Edward and Gaveston. See Forker, who reads Charles’s rejection of Isabel’s attempted kneeling in Grafton transformed by Marlowe into Edward’s words to Gaveston upon their reunion: “Why shouldst thou kneel?” (1.1.140–­141), “Introduction,” 66. 53. Kennedy, Just Anger, 83, 84. 54. David Bevington argues that Isabel is a vicelike figure whose changing representation is an unmasking of her fixed and innately immoral character, From “Mankind” to Marlowe, 241. Joyce Karpay similarly identifies Isabel as a negative exemplar, “A Study in Ambivalence,” 88. In contrast, some scholars claim for Isabel a redemptive political acumen. See Gibbs, “Marlowe’s Politic Women,” 165–­66; Chedgzoy, “Marlowe’s Men and Women,” 250–­51; and Findlay, “Marlowe and Women,” 244–­45. Still others, like Deats, reconcile evident contradictions in Isabel’s character through analyses of early modern gender ideologies, Sex, Gender, and Desire, 167; see also Feldmann, “The Constructions and Deconstructions of Gendered Bodies,” 29. 55. See Thomas Cartelli, who reads this interruption as Mortimer’s rhetorical attempt to disassociate passion from their cause, “Edward II,” 167–­68; and Kennedy, who sees Mortimer claiming “the political arena as a male domain” whereby his “disparagement of her emotional (feminine) language underscore[s] her unsuitability for both military and rhetorical command,” Just Anger, 82. Parks calls Isabel’s speech a “tragic complaint” and finds in Mortimer’s response an invocation of “reason and laws,” “History, Tragedy, and Truth,” 288. 56. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 201. 57. Ribner calls Mortimer “an embodiment of Machiavellian self-­sufficiency” and a parallel to Edward’s character, suggesting his centrality over Isabel’s, “Marlowe’s Edward II,” 248. 58. Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 345. 59. Ralf Hertel, Staging England, 224, 225. 60. Hertel, Staging England, 194. 4. So Masculine a Stile 1. Cary, The History of Edward II, A2v. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 2. The question of Elizabeth Cary’s authorship has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere; Gywnne Kennedy’s “Appendix” provides a useful survey of critical

292  Notes to Pages 158–175

arguments, Just Anger, 112–­14, as does Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s Writing Women, 201–­3, 317–­20, and Karen Raber’s “Gender and Property,” 199–­201. 3. See Stauffer, “A Deep and Sad Passion.” Such evidence frequently focuses on the sympathy and agency afforded to Isabel or traces biographical connections to Cary’s life. On the former, see Krontiris, “Style and Gender,” Lewalski, Writing Women, and Nelson, “Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II”; on the latter, see Raber, “Gender and Property,” and Parks, “Elizabeth Cary’s Domestic History.” 4. Hodgson-­Wright, “The Canonization of Elizabeth Cary,” 64. 5. Hodgson-­Wright, “The Canonization of Elizabeth Cary,” 62. 6. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 217. 7. Raber, “Gender and Property,” 202. 8. Nelson, “Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II,” 159. 9. Lewalski, Writing Women, 201. Krontiris notes that in contrast to Marlowe and other writers, Cary “treats Isabel with a great deal of sympathy, provides justification for her adultery, and labors to develop her into a consistent character,” “Style and Gender,” 140. Mihoko Suzuki sees Cary’s depiction, which “grant[s] Isabel agency as well as responsibility for her actions,” as differing strongly from both Marlowe and Samuel Daniel, in “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 97. 10. Skura, “Elizabeth Cary and Edward II,” 86. Katherine Pilhuj likewise sees commonalities between Cary and Marlowe here: “Cary follows the example of Christopher Marlowe in creating a sympathetic portrayal” of Isabel, “‘A Queen, a Woman, and a Victor,’” 111. 11. Kennedy, “Reform or Rebellion?,” 211. Stauffer, however, sees Cary’s Isabel “far more convincing in her consistent cruelty than Marlowe’s puzzling and perfunctorily sketched lady,” “A Deep and Sad Passion,” 303. 12. Nelson, “Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II,” 159; Suzuki, “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 100. 13. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 219. 14. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 223. 15. Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 217. 16. Edward II was first performed in 1592 and printed in 1594, but it was reissued in 1612 and revived onstage in 1622, just a few years prior to Cary’s composition of her history in 1627, which suggests the play’s popularity and a renewed interest in the topical relevance of Marlowe’s rendition of Edward’s reign under the Stuarts. See Anderson, “‘Stab As Occasion Serves,’” 31, and Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect,” 25–­26. 17. Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, 212. 18. Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, 212. 19. Parks, “Elizabeth Cary’s Domestic History,” 176. 20. Skura, “Elizabeth Cary and Edward II,” 81–­82.

Notes to Pages 176–180  293

21. For example, even Suzuki’s excellent analysis of Cary’s use of Machiavelli and other political theorists to intervene in seventeenth-­century political thought does not examine The History of Edward II’s generic similarities to written political history. The exception is Perry, who extends his observation about Cary’s knowledge of political history—­Cary read history widely, “so was certainly aware of the kind of meticulous, poker-­faced, topical commentary associated with the Tacitean mode”—­to an analysis of her text as a commentary on misrule in the 1620s, Literature and Favoritism, 217. 22. Britland, “‘Kings are But Men,’” para 3. 23. Breen, “Early Modern Historiography,” 4. 24. Weinberger, “Introduction,” 11. 25. George M. Logan calls More’s text the prime example of “rhetorical historiography revived by the humanist historians of the Renaissance from their classical predecessors,” “Introduction,” xxxi. See Clark, “Bacon’s Henry VII,” 103–­8; Weinberger, “Introduction,” 12–­14; Vickers, “Introduction,” xv–­x xiii; and Woolf, The Idea of History, 143–­44. 26. Among Bacon’s many debts to classical history evident in Henry VII, Vickers identifies an interest in dissimulation and prudence, an annalistic format, and the use of “orations” or invented dialogues, “Introduction,” xx. 27. Breen, “Early Modern Historiography,” 4–­5. 28. Janet Starner-­Wright and Susan M. Fitzmaurice make note of More’s invented speeches and negative exemplars to point out that Cary’s text is not “atypical of the genre in the period, though it is not typical of the writing that women practiced,” “Shaping a Drama out of a History,” 81. 29. Lewalski’s otherwise excellent analysis reads this account of Isabel’s journey to France and Hainault as Cary’s own creation; it is representative of approaches to The History of Edward II that overlook Cary’s indebtedness to chronicle traditions and take the author at her prefatory word by asserting she “eschews as ‘dull’ the sort of chronicle history written by Holinshed, Speed, and Stow, Writing Women, 203; see also 208–­9. 30. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 71. 31. Hall, Union, 466, and Speed, The History of Great Britaine, 739. 32. Cary here is still expanding upon Grafton, who also assigns Isabel agency and power through her oft-­reported cover as a penitent on a pilgrimage: “The Queene therefore purposed nowe to flye to the Realme and to go into Fraunce, and therefore did feyne her selfe that shee would go on pilgrimage to Saint Thomas of Caunterbury” (204). 33. Kennedy, “Reform or Rebellion?,” 214. 34. Kennedy, “Reform or Rebellion?,” 210. 35. Suzuki, “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 91.

294  Notes to Pages 180–187

36. Bacon here assigns John Speed’s own assessment of Margaret as Henry’s “implacable Iuno” to Henry’s men, The History of Great Britaine, 734. 37. Grafton devotes an extensive paragraph detailing Sir Robert of Artois’s brave assistance to the queen and he credits Robert with warning Isabel of her brother’s imminent betrayal and advising her to flee to Hainault. Robert’s action is depicted as a principled resistance to the king’s error in the service of a worthy cause: he defies his cousin Charles’s commandment and risks the confiscation of his lands and banishment from France because “he was fully perswaded that the Queene was wrongfully vexed and troubled,” A Chronicle at Large, 207. 38. Cary might also have drawn on Stow here, who briefly mentions that the queen “would not come agayne” to her husband “without Roger Mortimer and other Nobles that were fledde out of England,” Annals of England, 337. 39. On Cary’s sympathetic view of Isabel’s adultery, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 222 and Lewalski, Writing Women, 207, 211; Kennedy, Just Anger, 76–­77; and Krontiris, “Style and Gender,” 93. Some comparative readings argue that Cary downplays the couple’s adultery in comparison to Marlowe’s play, but she appears more clearly aligned with Marlowe on this point if one considers the chronicle histories, which sometimes gesture to her affair with Mortimer to critique Isabel but never privilege it over her political action. 40. See Lewalski, Writing Women, 208–­11, and Nelson, “Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II,” 164. 41. Grafton’s account of the siege reports much the same events and the difficult situation of the townspeople, who recognizing the queen’s power and their own peril, reluctantly yield the town and the queen’s enemies, but he does not incriminate the citizens nor the queen for their actions, A Chronicle at Large, 212. 42. Kennedy, Just Anger, 108. 43. See Kennedy, Just Anger, 108. 44. Kennedy, Just Anger, 109. 45. Perry, “‘Royal Fever’ and ‘The Giddy Commons,’” 86. 46. Perry, “‘Royal Fever’ and ‘The Giddy Commons,’” 87. 47. Kennedy, Just Anger, 110. 48. Suzuki, “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 92. 49. Suzuki, “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 92. 50. Suzuki, “‘Fortune Is a Stepmother,’” 93. 5. You Must Be King of Me 1. Ford, Perkin Warbeck, 3.2.162. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 2. For general critical analyses of The History of King Henry VII’s place in early modern historiography, see Woolf, The Idea of History, 145–­58; Anderson, Biographical

Notes to Pages 188–224  295

Truth, 157–­69. For an evaluation of The History of King Henry VII’s innovation and psychological analysis, see Clark, “Bacon’s Henry VII,” 97–­118. 3. For a survey of Bacon’s use of chronicle histories, see Michael Kiernan, “Introduction,” xxxii–­xli. Kiernan notes that Bacon “worked closely and creatively” with Hall’s text and “drew extensively” on Speed, while he accessed Vergil’s Anglica Historia primarily through Hall and used Stow’s chronicle more narrowly, xxxv–­ xxxvi. While Kiernan does not acknowledge Thomas Gainsford’s 1618 True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck as a source, aspects of Bacon’s representation of Margaret of Burgundy suggest his knowledge of that text. 4. Bacon, The History of King Henry VII, 3. All references are cited in-­text hereafter. 5. Woolf, The Idea of History, 156–­57. 6. In 1604, James describes the union of York and Lancaster as “reunited and confirmed in me,” and prefiguring the “Vnion of two ancient and famous Kingdomes” of Scotland and England, Political Works, 271. See Dale B. J. Randall for a synopsis of literary comparisons between Henry and James and James I’s further interest in this comparison, “Theatres of Greatness,” 22–­24. 7. Bacon’s letter to King James I, 8 October 1621, in Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon 7: 303. 8. While Bacon’s plan to write a history of Henry VII emerged decades before he composed it, the bulk of the text was drafted over the summer and fall of 1621, while at Gorhambury after being banished from court. He first produced a fragment of the history under Elizabeth I, and shared it with John Speed, and he referred on numerous occasions throughout the early reign of James I to his anticipated project. On the composition of The History of King Henry VII, see Kiernan, xxi–­x xxii. Vickers reprints the manuscript fragment, 209–­14. 9. Woolf, The Idea of History, 145. 10. Though Anderson and Clark acknowledge the importance of Henry’s treatment of Elizabeth, they both see Bacon’s attention to it as part of the historiographer’s general critique of Henry’s personal flaws rather than a commentary on queenship. See Anderson, Biographical Truth, 187 and Clark, “Bacon’s Henry VII,” 114. 11. See Kiernan’s commentary, 299 and 334. Modern studies of Henry VII often characterize the king as insecure about his claim to the throne, but do not accept Bacon’s perspective that these suspicions are focused on his wife; see Chrimes, Henry VII, 68–­94. On how Bacon’s account of the relationship between Henry and Elizabeth York differs from that of modern historians, see Vickers’s “Introduction,” xxiv and 9, as well as Anderson, Biographical Truth, 185–­87. Clark notes that Vergil and Hall never “hint that Henry behaved in any but an exemplary fashion toward his wife,” “Bacon’s Henry VII,” 113. J. L. Laynesmith, Charles T.

296  Notes to Pages 224–225

Wood, and Jacqueline Johnson all note that Elizabeth’s claims to the throne were minimized in favor of her role as mother of Henry’s heirs. See Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 216–­19; Wood, “First Two Queens Elizabeth,” 129–­30; Johnson, “Elizabeth of York,” 54–­58. 12. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 218. 13. Johnson, “Elizabeth of York,” 58. 14. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 186. 15. Wood, “First Two Queens Elizabeth,” 129. 16. Laynesmith notes that Henry “dared not allow her to marry anyone else, lest she become the focus for a challenge to his power,” The Last Medieval Queens, 45. 17. Bacon calls the contract between Henry and Elizabeth York a “precedent Pact with the Partie that brought [Henry] in,” 5; Vickers notes that many Yorkist supporters expected Henry to rule through Elizabeth’s right to the throne, “Introduction,” 7n13. 18. In contrast to Bacon, Chrimes claims that Henry emphatically desired the marriage, but practical matters postponed it, Henry VII, 65–­66. 19. Speed, The History of Great Britaine, 729. See Kiernan’s commentary, 314. 20. See Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 265. 21. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 180. 22. Gainsford, True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 178–­79. These epithets appear first in Hall’s Union, where he calls her a “viper that is ready to burst with a sperflyvyte of poison” and introduces the metaphor of a “dog returning to her olde vomite,” 461–­62. 23. See Vergil, who describes Margaret’s pursuit of Henry as driven by “insatiable hatred and with fiery wrath,” Anglica Historia, 17. Hall notes her “fury and frantyke moode” as an example that “there is no malice equiualent nor aboue the malice of a woman,” Union, 430, while Speed locates her animosity in Henry VII’s slaying of her brother Richard III, The History of Great Britaine, 737. 24. This account of Margaret’s absolute right to control her dower lands is a paraphrase of Hall’s Union, 466. See Kiernan’s commentary, 388. 25. Vergil, Anglica Historia, 71; Hall, Union, 466. 26. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 90. 27. Kiernan’s commentary observes that the “meagre details of the day” are taken from Stow, 334, xxxvi. 28. Bergeron, Practicing Renaissance Scholarship, 86. 29. Bergeron, Practicing Renaissance Scholarship, 83–­85. 30. Lewalski, Writing Women, 18–­19. While earlier historians have claimed Anna of Denmark’s influence on Scottish and English court culture and politics was

Notes to Pages 226–239  297

negligible, Lewalski, Leeds Barroll, and Louis H. Roper have convincingly argued otherwise. See Barroll, Anna of Denmark, and Roper, “Unmasquing the Connections.” 31. Lewalski, Writing Women, 18–­19. 32. Akrigg, Letters of King James VI & I, 214. 33. Akrigg, Letters of King James VI & I, 214. Susan Frye reads this statement as James’s attempt “to put his wife in her place outside the power relations he enjoyed with his male favourites,” “Anne of Denmark,” 186. 34. On Anna’s court faction and their opposition to the union of kingdoms, see Roper, “Unmasquing the Connections,” 49. On Bacon’s promotion of the union, see Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 281–­85. 35. While Roper does not see Anna as particularly pro-­Spanish, “Unmasquing the Connections,” 50, Lewalski does, Writing Women, 21; Barroll addresses the question in regard to her possible Catholicism and her interest in Spanish marriages for her children, Anna of Denmark, 168–­71. On Bacon’s support of Elizabeth and Frederick, see Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 428. 36. On Anna’s dislike of Somerset and the Howard circle, see Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 12, 133–­37, and Lewalski, Writing Women, 24. On Bacon’s prosecution of Somerset and Howard, see Marwil, The Trials of Counsel, 142. 37. Bacon, though at times aligned with Raleigh, was charged with investigating and prosecuting him. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 423. On Anna’s interventions on Raleigh’s behalf, see Lewalski, Writing Women, 23. 38. On Anna’s orchestration of George Villiers’s rise to prominence at the Stuart court, see Roper, “Unmasquing Connections,” 51; Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 145–­49; and Lewalski, Writing Women, 24–­26. 39. Lewalski, Writing Women, 26. 40. The question of who truly ran the government during James’s absence appears to be somewhat open; Roper, Barroll, and Courtney Erin Thomas argue that the queen was given substantial political power during James’s absence from England as one of six appointed to a governing council. See Roper, “Unmasquing Connections,” 51; Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 153; and Thomas, “Politics and Culture at the Jacobean Court,” 93. 41. Bacon was familiar with royal women as potential rivals to the male monarch; he played a key role in prosecuting Arbella Stuart, James’s cousin and a rival claimant to the thrones of both Elizabeth I and James I, for her 1610 secret marriage to another potential claimant, William Seymour, and her subsequent attempt to escape England. 42. See Croft, King James, 105–­9. 43. Curran, Marriage, Performance, and Politics, 91, 126.

298  Notes to Pages 239–241

44. Croft, King James, 108. 45. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 444. Parliament, which hadn’t been called since 1614, did vote through two inadequate subsidies for the cause, but it also raised long-­standing grievances about patents of monopoly and concerns about the proposed Spanish Match; Bacon became the scapegoat for Parliament’s anger, and was impeached in the spring of 1621 for accepting bribes. 46. Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 428. 47. Bacon’s letter to the Duke of Buckingham, Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon 7: 450. 48. Elizabeth’s letter to Bacon, 11 June 1622, Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon 7: 366. 49. Mathews, Francis Bacon, 295. 50. Quoted in Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, 150. Bergeron adds to the ambassador’s explanation the possibility that James was, like Bacon’s fictive Henry, also jealous of his daughter. 51. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, 151. 52. Lewalski, Writing Women, 61. 53. Bergeron describes contemporary reactions that “condemned James” for his treatment of Elizabeth, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, 154; Lewalski likewise finds that “the English were shocked that James vehemently refused” refuge to the family, Writing Women, 61. 54. Lewalski, Writing Women, 59–­65. 55. Lewalski, Writing Women, 65. 56. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, 111. 57. Critics are divided over the play’s endorsement of either Perkin or Henry. For readings that argue the play presents Henry as a rightful or ideal ruler see Winston Weathers, “A Seventeenth-­Century Psychological Play”; Howard, “‘Effeminately Dolent’”; Anderson, “Kingship in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck”; and Randall, “Theatres of Greatness.” For readings of the play as sympathetic to Perkin and critical of Henry, see Barish, “Perkin Warbeck as Anti-­History”; Barton, “He That Plays the King”; Candido, “The ‘Strange Truth’ of Perkin Warbeck”; and Edwards, Threshold of a Nation. 58. Howard, “‘Effeminately Dolent,’” 266. 59. Howard, “‘Effeminately Dolent,’” 266. In contrast to Howard, Barish argues that the play favorably revises Perkin’s status by eliminating his confession and portraying him as a fervent believer in his own identity, “Perkin Warbeck as Anti-­History,” 168. 60. Gainsford’s account of Margaret emphasizes her gendered malice and her opposition to Henry rooted in an “inveterate Hate” and “blood-­thirsty Humor of Revenge,” True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 176. He finds Henry,

Notes to Pages 241–246  299

who “never gave occasion unto her of Displeasure, of Affront,” undeserving of her “Malice,” which “sprang from herself,” True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 176. 61. Bacon elsewhere briefly describes Katherine’s “excellent beautie and vertue” (107), itself a direct quote of Speed, The History of Great Britaine, 741. Gainsford’s history praises Katherine as virtuous in spite of, not because of, her loyalty to Perkin. 62. Critics are generally divided over the play’s endorsement of either Perkin or Henry as a legitimate king. Some scholarship, such as Anderson’s “Kingship in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck,” and Randall’s “Theatres of Greatness,” as well as Howard’s “‘Effeminately Dolent,’” argue that the play condemns Perkin and presents Henry as a rightful ruler. Others read Perkin Warbeck as sympathetic to the titular character and critical or ambivalent about Henry’s kingship; all of these discussions identify the play’s sympathetic portrayal of Katherine’s devotion to Perkin as crucial to his legitimacy. See Barish, “Perkin Warbeck as Anti-­History”; Barton, “He That Plays the King,” 69–­93; Candido, “The ‘Strange Truth’ of Perkin Warbeck,” 307; Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, 179–­80. 63. Monta, “Marital Discourse and Political Discord,” 391–­413. 64. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 4. 65. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 130; Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, 2. 66. Wood, “The First Two Queens Elizabeth,” 127. 67. Schwarz, What You Will, 6–­7. 68. Schwarz, What You Will, 2. 69. See Parsons, “Ritual and Symbol,” 60–­77. 70. Barton, “He That Plays the King,” 83; Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, 180. 71. Ford gleans his romantic king from Gainsford, who reports that “Some say, [Henry] fancied her person himself,” True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 205. 72. Monta sees Henry’s attempts to “reconcile all [Katherine’s] loyalties in his person” here as the king’s desire to enforce her political duty to him over her domestic duty, while I read this attempted consolidation of loyalty as particularly appealing to Henry because it seeks to transfer her domestic duty to Henry and elide the political implications of her choices, “Marital Discourse and Political Discord,” 406. 73. Gainsford emphasizes Katherine’s romantic love for Perkin throughout their courtship, True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 192. 74. Recent scholarly work by Michelle White, Sophie Tomlinson, Karen Britland, and Erin Griffey has thoroughly challenged earlier studies characterizing Henrietta Maria as a politically unimportant and frivolous queen consort and added to the excellent existing revisionist scholarship of Caroline Hibbard and Erica Veevers. These critics have traced Henrietta Maria’s myriad political interventions through her own court performances, her patronage of drama, and her self-­presentation 300  Notes to Pages 247–258

as a French Catholic. See Griffey, Henrietta; Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama; Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria; White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars. 75. Scholars interested in Perkin Warbeck’s topical relevance to Caroline politics have not thoroughly examined the play in connection to Charles I’s queen. The exception is G. F. Sensabaugh, who argues in The Tragic Muse of John Ford that Ford’s drama celebrates the queen’s platonic love cult and the individualism of the Caroline court, in part through what he sees as a denigration of marriage. 76. Traditional dating put the play’s composition just before its publication in 1634; Randall has since made a case for the 1620s, while Andrew Gurr and Lisa Hopkins have more recently proposed new arguments for the 1630s. See Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre; Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, 174; Barton, “He That Plays the King,” 80–­81; Randall, “Theatres of Greatness”; Gurr, “Singing through the Chatter,” 93; and Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre. With Randall as a notable exception, critics generally agree that when the play takes up contemporary political concerns, they center on Charles I. See Barton, “He That Plays the King,” 80–­81, 88, 92–­93; Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre; Anderson, Perkin Warbeck, 190–­93; and Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, 183–­87. In her most recent book, Hopkins identifies three events—­the birth of Henrietta Maria’s second son, Charles’s belated Scottish coronation, and the emergence of questions about the Stuart claim to the Scottish throne—­and, reading Perkin Warbeck as a “classic succession play,” shows how Ford glances at each of these 1633 concerns in his drama. Hopkins, Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 144. 77. Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, 29. 78. Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, 45. 79. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 122–­23. 80. Hibbard, “Henrietta Maria in the 1630s,” 94. 81. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 124. 82. Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, 45. 83. See Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” 14, 18n25. 84. See Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” and “The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria,” 26–­45; Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, 3–­38; Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, 98. 85. Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” 25. 86. Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, 123. See also Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” 23–­26, and “The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria,” 28–­35; White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars, 17–­18. Notes to Pages 258–260  301

87. Smuts, “The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria,” 34. See also Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, 123. 88. Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” 25. 89. Smuts, “Religion, European Politics, and Henrietta Maria’s Circle,” 25, and “The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria,” 35. 90. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 118–­36. 91. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 130–­31. 92. Nelson, “Negotiating Exile,” 64. 93. I disagree here with Hopkins, who argues for Ford’s possible Catholicism because many of the aristocrats Perkin Warbeck seems to speak for had Catholic connections. While Hopkins persuasively shows that the play encourages Charles to offer greater access to dissatisfied English nobility, the play’s commentary on queenship positions the Catholic Henrietta Maria as an obstacle to this access and promotes her loyalty to Charles above that to her Catholic family. Smuts and Britland have also convincingly shown that while some members of Ford’s coterie were frequently political allies with the Catholic Henrietta Maria, their interests were in fact strongly Protestant. 94. Martin Butler traces courtly drama’s strongest possibilities for dissent in critiques of Henrietta Maria, noting that her “political intriguing” created “a period of greater courtly receptiveness to ‘opposition’ points of view,” Theatre and Crisis, 1632–­1642, 54. 95. Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, 133–­34. Britland also examines how the masques Henrietta Maria commissioned and performed in during the early 1630s engaged in international affairs, commented on her connections to the pro-­French Protestant faction, and promoted her foreign policy (see especially chapters 4–­7). 96. According to Tomlinson, Ford’s portrayal of women performing in court entertainments in Love’s Sacrifice ideologically reinforces the “stigma of whoredom” attached to female performance and Henrietta Maria, “She That Plays the King,” 197. In her more recent book, Tomlinson emphasizes the “forward-­looking aspects” of dramatists’ “representations of tragic women,” finding that Ford and his contemporary Shirley “forged a dramatic mode which lent itself to the expression of women’s interests,” Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 154. 97. Hopkins, “Staging the Medici,” 73. Hopkins here notes that Perkin Warbeck “respond[s] more obliquely” to the influence of the Medicis and she refers readers to Britland’s reading of Richard III, to which Perkin Warbeck “offer[s] a sequel,” “Staging the Medici,” 69. 98. See Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1–­24. 99. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 127. 302  Notes to Pages 260–263

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In de x

An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England (Grafton), 153 Actes and Monuments (Foxe), 145 adultery: audience response, 87, 98; Isabel, 135, 141, 144–­45, 155, 156, 159–­60, 190, 197–­99; Mistress Shore, 83–­85, 111, 113–­14, 116–­18 advice literature, 247 affective responses, 125–­26, 131, 141, 146, 196 agency: compliance as, 253; defined, 271n34; of Elizabeth Woodville, 55–­56, 62, 65, 68–­69, 71, 92, 103–­5; historical, 55–­56, 105, 219–­20; history plays, 22–­24; of Isabel, 162–­63, 211–­12; of Katherine Gordon, 247, 251–­53; limited, 69; literary technique, 11–­13; marital subservience, 251; political agency of queenship, 4–­13, 17, 24, 47, 143, 238; rhetorical, 13, 22, 61–­62, 68, 78, 103–­5, 113–­14, 247; of Richard III’s

women, 60–­62, 65, 68–­69. See also female ability Anderson, Judith, 40, 226, 232, 278n22 anger, 152, 187, 194, 205–­9, 215 Anglica Historia (History of England) (Vergil), 30, 42–­44, 49–­52, 185–­86, 224 Annals of England (Stow), 146–­55; and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 224; and Cary’s History of Edward II, 179–­80, 200–­205, 212; and Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 146–­49, 152–­55; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 149–­52; Isabel, 146–­55, 207, 217; and Marlowe’s Edward II, 123–­24, 168, 170; narrative strategies, 148–­52, 167–­68 Anna of Denmark, queen of England, 238–­42 antimonarchical sentiments, 23–­24 apolitical femininity, 116 apolitical marriage, 252 audience sympathies, 110, 118

323

Bacon, Francis: and Anna of Denmark, 238–­41; and Elizabeth Stuart, 242–­44; and James I, 224–­26, 238–­40; on Margaret of Burgundy, 10, 184–­88, 232–­35; political crises, 238–­44. See also The History of King Henry VII (Bacon) Baldwin, William, 1, 77–­79 ballad traditions, 79, 110 Barton, Anne, 254–­55 Bergeron, David M., 238–­39, 243 Bezio, Kristin M. S., 96, 286n36 biographical methodologies, 176 Bohemia crisis, 241–­42 Booth, Stephen, 14–­15 Bourchier, John (Lord Berners), 18, 125–­ 27, 134, 154 Breen, Dan, 181 Britland, Karen, 180–­81, 259–­60, 262 Britton, Dennis, 14, 16–­17 Brown, Georgia E., 156, 291n46 Budra, Paul, 78–­79 Bullough, Geoffrey, 79 Butler, Martin, 262–­63 Callaghan, Dympna, 4 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 12, 271n34 Cary, Elizabeth. See The History of Edward II (Cary) Charles I, king of England, 223–­25, 258–­ 63, 301n76 Chronicle (Cooper), 153–­55 Chronicle (Fabyan), 126 A Chronicle at Large (Grafton): and Cary’s History of Edward II, 177–­80, 181–­84, 188–­204, 208, 211–­12; chronicle histories, 123–­36; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 138–­41, 145–­46; ignored intertext, 123–­24; on Isabel, 7, 20, 122, 125–­36, 138–­41, 188, 190, 217; and Marlowe’s Edward II, 123–­24, 156–­59,

161–­65, 167–­69; narrative strategies, 20, 123, 125–­27, 129–­31, 136, 138, 158, 190; queenship, 18; on the Spencers’ deaths, 149; and Stow’s Annals of England, 146–­49, 152–­55 chronicle histories: Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 224; Cary’s History of Edward II, 178–­79, 199–­200, 208; of Grafton and Froissart, 123–­36; historical narratives, 18–­20; and history plays, 22; of Holinshed and Stow, 136–­56; Isabel, 123–­24, 136–­37, 146, 152–­55, 163, 167–­68, 191; Marlowe’s Edward II, 121–­ 24, 156–­73; narrative strategies, 123–­24, 138–­39, 145–­46, 151–­52; national selfhood, 23; and political histories, 181; queenship in, 125–­36, 146, 152–­56, 211; source studies, 14–­19; treatment of royal women, 18, 141–­56; women’s perspectives in, 48–­59 Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth (Ford). See Perkin Warbeck (Ford) Chronicles (Holinshed), 136–­46; authorial attribution, 137; and Cary’s History of Edward II, 200–­205, 212; Elizabeth Woodville in, 57–­58; and Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 138–­41, 145–­46; and Hall’s Union, 48; and Heywood’s Edward IV, 79; Isabel, 7, 122, 136–­46, 149–­50, 151–­52, 164–­66, 289n21; and Marlowe’s Edward II, 123–­24, 159, 164–­66, 168, 170; and More’s History of King Richard III, 32; multiple editions of, 136–­37; narrative strategies, 138–­ 40, 144–­46, 168; and Shakespeare’s Richard III, 57; and Stow’s Annals of England, 149–­52 Chronicles (Stow), 154, 168, 212 Chroniques (Froissart), 18, 125

324  Index

Churchill, George B., 79, 91 Churchyard, Thomas, 77–­81, 85 citizen advocacy, 113–­14 citizen-­centered historical dramas, 22–­23, 101 citizen-­centered national identity, 102–­3 citizen response. See public opinion city comedy, 22 civic participation, 113–­14, 116 civil war, 164, 234 collaborative governance, 134 commercial stage plays, 15 companionate marriage, 112, 119–­20 complaint genre, 87 consorts. See queenship; royal women Continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle (Grafton), 31, 48 contrastive infracontexts, 17 Cooper, Thomas, 153–­55 coronation, 29–­31, 199, 231, 235–­36 Corrigan, Nora, 110 courtship, 105, 249–­50, 254 criticism, 14–­16 Croft, Pauline, 241 Curran, Kevin, 241 de casibus tragedy, 45 De Regimine Principum (Giles of Rome), 248 DiGangi, Mario, 60–­61 Dillon, Janette, 20 dissent, 20, 54–­55, 243 Dolan, Frances E., 119, 259 domestic conflict, 107–­8 domestic directives, 248 domestic drama, 22–­23 domesticity: loyalties, 247–­48, 252, 261; obligations, 252; politicization of, 80; queenship, 108; royal marriage, 222; valuation of, 116; virtue of, 108–­10 domestic tragedies, 37, 80

Donno, Elizabeth Story, 35 Drakakis, John, 16–­17 dramatic adaptations. See history play genre dramatic dialogues, 181 dramatic historiography, 7, 10, 14–­24 dual kinship relationship, 9, 248 duty, 129, 250–­51, 262 dynastic governance: critique of power, 35, 47, 150, 152, 157; Elizabeth Woodville’s role in, 51–­57; favoritism, 36; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 118; intercession, 34–­35; Isabel, 129–­36, 139, 150, 152, 172; national identity, 59, 102; nationalism, 23–­24; personal monarchy, 53–­55; royal women, 31, 37, 62, 64–­65, 68, 96, 98–­101; succession, 182 Earenfight, Theresa, 5–­6 early modern nationalism, 23–­25, 164, 276n86 Edward II (Marlowe), 156–­73; and Cary’s History of Edward II, 177, 212–­17; and Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 123–­24, 156–­59, 161–­65, 167–­69; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 159, 164–­66, 168, 170; Isabel, 121–­24, 156–­73, 207–­8, 210, 212; narrative sources, 121–­23, 156, 161, 163, 166–­67, 173; and Stow’s Annals of England, 123–­24, 168, 170; and Stow’s historical traditions, 156–­70 Edward IV (Heywood), 22, 78–­80, 87, 98, 101–­20, 222 Edwards, Philip, 254 Eggert, Katherine, 71, 74–­75 Elizabeth I: coronation pageant, 29–­31; early modern nationalism, 23–­24, 59; and Elizabeth Woodville, 95–­96; Queen’s Men, 95, 97; succession concerns, 71–­75; The True Tragedy, 88, 92, 94–­101

Index  325

Elizabeth of Bohemia. See Stuart, Elizabeth emergent nationalism, 24 emotion. See female behavior and emotion emotional appeals, 8, 37 emotive language, 148 Engendering a Nation (Rackin and Howard), 60 English identity, 112 English nationalism, 24, 95, 116, 118 exclusion of women: Churchyard’s “Shore’s Wife,” 78; in Hall’s Union, 55, 72–­73; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 103, 113, 116, 119–­20; in history plays, 15–­16, 30–­31; Mistress Shore, 36–­37; in narrative historiography, 49; from national identity, 23, 171–­72; new nationalism, 73; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 73–­75; in The True Tragedy, 88 Fabyan, Robert, 2, 126, 135 Fall of Princes (Lydgate), 1 favoritism, 34–­36, 50–­51, 54, 59, 63, 86, 166, 278n14 female ability: agency, 4–­13, 16, 22, 24, 30, 49, 57, 61–­62, 74, 102, 226, 232; authorship, 180–­81; inferiority, 190; male expectations about, 188. See also political power and influence female behavior and emotion: anger, 152, 187, 194, 205–­9, 215; complaint, 60; consequences of misjudging, 185; cruelty, 149–­50, 205–­6; essentialized views of, 150, 207, 210–­11; inconstancy, 49, 55, 57–­58, 93, 166–­67; irrationality, 219; lamentation, 60–­62; loyalty, 247–­58; mourning, 60–­62, 68, 71, 282n80, 282n83; pity, 204–­5; resignation, 68; weakness, 117–­19,

169, 184, 194, 199, 207–­8, 210, 212–­16; wickedness, 143–­44 female cruelty, 149–­50, 205–­7 female historical figures. See historical women female playgoers, 87, 98 female speech, 68–­69 femininity, 7 feminist criticism, 3–­4, 15–­16, 31, 271n32; and feminist historians, 6, 10, 24, 230; and feminist scholarship, 5, 16, 176 Finn, Kavita Mudan, 58, 80, 91, 95–­96, 99, 103, 107 Fleming, Abraham: moral censure, 145–­ 46; revision to Chronicles, 57–­58, 137, 142–­43, 145–­46, 151–­52, 166, 168, 212; use of classical sources, 143 Ford, John: coterie of, 258–­59; dedicatees, 259–­61; female performance, 302n96; on Margaret of Burgundy, 10, 245–­46. See also Perkin Warbeck (Ford) forgetfulness, 2–­3, 68–­69, 71, 268 Foxe, John, 145 Frederick, Elector Palatine, 240–­44, 298n35 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 95, 97 Froissart, Jean, 18, 123, 125–­36, 153–­54 Gage, Frances Dana, 12 Gainsford, Thomas, 232–­33, 244–­46, 299n60 gender: aphorisms, 195, 217; assessments, 184–­89; assumptions, 206, 216–­17; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 184–­90, 206, 216–­17; conventional categories, 261; dynastic politics, 55; essentialisms, 143, 205; expectations, 166; Fleming’s commentary, 146; gendering tragedy, 37; hierarchies, 63–­64, 78, 85–­86; Howard on Shakespeare’s use

326  Index

of, 60; intercession, 7–­8; language, 216; mourning practices, 60; national identity, 22, 172–­73; politics, 44–­45; Protestant nostalgia, 244; representation, 176, 179; stereotypes, 8, 62–­63, 105, 206–­10. See also female behavior and emotion Giles of Rome, 248 God’s vengeance, 52 good favorite, 34–­36 Goodland, Katharine, 60–­61, 68 Gordon, Katherine: agency of, 247, 251–­53; in Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII, 247, 300n61; compliance of, 247–­48, 251–­53, 255–­57; on kinship networks, 248; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 221–­23; obedience of, 248–­51, 253, 255–­57, 261; in Thomas Gainsford’s The True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, 300n61 Gouge, William, 248 Goy-­Blanquet, Dominique, 79, 100, 272n45 Gracechurch pageant, 29–­31, 75, 277n3 Grafton, Richard: abridgments, 154–­55; feud with Stow, 137, 155, 290nn34–­35. See also A Chronicle at Large (Grafton) Greenberg, Marissa, 87, 98, 113 Greene, Robert, 14 Greenfeld, Liah, 59 Griffin, Andrew, 95 guardianship, 39–­40 Hall, Edward: and Vergil, 280–­81n52. See also The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (Hall) Harper, Charles, 175 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 17–­18 Hartman, Joan E., 11 Hayward, John, 180

Heal, Felicity, 143 Helgerson, Richard, 23, 36–­37, 59, 62, 80, 101, 287n50 Henrietta Maria, queen of England, 223–­ 46, 253, 258–­63, 302n93 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 60 Herman, Peter C., 20, 54–­55 Hertel, Ralf, 171–­72, 276n84 Heywood, Thomas, 22, 78–­80, 87, 101–­20 Hiatt, Alfred, 155 hierarchies: authority, 161; familial ties, 99; of gender, 63–­64, 78, 85–­86; monarchy, 222, 253; social, 59; source studies, 14–­19, 272n45 historical drama, 13, 14–­24, 30, 59, 87, 122–­ 23, 163, 173 historical memory, 17–­18 historical narratives, 14–­21, 55, 137–­43, 199 historical women, 4–­5, 12–­13, 43, 47, 49, 54, 156–­57, 173 The History of Edward II (Cary), 175–­200; adultery emphasis, 197–­98; authorship, 175–­76, 292n2; and Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII, 184–­86; chronicle histories, 178–­79, 199–­200, 208; gender, 184–­90, 206, 216–­17; and Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 177–­80, 181–­84, 188–­204, 208, 211–­12; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 200–­205, 212; intertexts, 18; Isabel in, 177–­219; and Marlowe’s Edward II, 177, 212–­17; and More’s The History of King Richard III, 182–­84; narrative strategies, 179, 181–­87, 189–­93, 195, 198, 206–­11, 213–­15, 218–­19; political histories, 19–­20, 178–­84, 198–­99; queenship, 208–­17; and Stow’s Annals of England, 179–­80, 200–­205, 212; shift to chronicle traditions, 200–­205 The History of Great Britaine (Speed), 186, 224, 230

Index  327

The History of King Henry VII (Bacon), 224–­47; and Cary’s History of Edward II, 184–­86; and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 222–­23, 244–­47, 255–­58, 263–­64; kingly failures in, 198–­99; narrative strategies, 184–­86, 224–­26, 229–­30, 233–­34, 237–­38, 246; political histories, 19, 180–­81; rebellions of royal women, 184–­85; succession, 236–­37; Warham’s dialogue, 186, 188 The History of King Richard III (More), 31–­49; and Cary’s History of Edward II, 182–­84; Elizabeth Woodville in, 31, 37–­42; and Hall’s Union, 51; and Heywood’s Edward IV, 79–­80, 103–­5; historical narratives, 18–­20; manuscript reproductions, 280n47; narrative strategies, 35, 37–­42, 51, 182; political histories, 181; and Shakespeare’s Richard III, 65–­67; and The True Tragedy, 88–­92, 94; women in, 30–­31 history play genre, 12, 14–­18, 21–­24, 30, 59–­60, 78–­80, 136, 275n74 history writing, 1–­2, 36, 47, 59, 156, 219 Hodgdon, Barbara, 15, 53–­54 Hodgson-­Wright, Stephanie, 176 Holderness, Graham, 21 Holinshed, Raphael. See Chronicles (Holinshed) Hopkins, Lisa, 258–­60, 262 Howard, Jean: on Edward IV, 101, 103, 108, 116; on Ford’s representation of Margaret, 245–­46; on gender in Shakespeare, 60; history plays, 21; on representations of women, 15–­16 humanist political theories, 19 ideal femininity, 110 inconstancy, 49, 55, 57–­58, 93, 166–­67

infidelity. See adultery infracontexts, 17–­18 intercession, 7–­9, 34, 82–­83, 99, 109–­11, 113, 254 interdynastic marriage, 73 interior perspectives: in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 184–­86, 224–­26, 237–­38; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 179, 181–­83, 186, 190, 195, 198, 206, 211, 213–­14, 219; chronicle histories, 123; in Grafton’s Chronicle at Large, 125–­27, 136, 158, 190; in Hall’s Union, 51–­52; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 138–­40, 144–­ 45; in More’s History of King Richard III, 37, 39–­41; political histories, 19, 181; somatic form of, 51, 123; in Stow’s Annals of England, 147; in Vergil’s Anglica Historia, 42 interjected evaluations: in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 184–­86, 229–­30, 233–­34, 238, 246; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 187, 189, 192–­93, 198, 206–­11, 214, 218; chronicle histories, 123; in Grafton’s Chronicle at Large, 125, 129–­31, 190; in Hall’s Union, 49–­51; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 138–­39, 145–­46, 168; in More’s History of King Richard III, 37; political histories, 19, 181; in Stow’s Annals of England, 148–­52, 167–­68 international support, 127–­31, 147, 154–­55, 162, 182, 192, 195–­96 intertexts: Cary’s use of, 18, 177, 179–­80, 190–­91, 200, 207, 218–­19; early modern nationalism, 24; Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 123–­24; historical record, 122; intertextual borrowings, 20–­21; and narrative historiography, 14–­25; “Shore’s Wife” (Churchyard), 78–­79

328  Index

intertextuality, 16–­18, 267, 272n48, 272n53, 273n57 intertheatricality, 18 intrusive commentary, 199 invented dialogue: in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 186; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 181–­82, 190, 195, 211, 215; chronicle traditions, 123; in Grafton’s Chronicle at Large, 20, 129, 136, 138; in Hall’s Union, 51, 53, 56; in More’s History of King Richard III, 37–­38, 103–­5; political histories, 19; in Stow’s Annals of England, 151–­52 invented monologue, 214 Isabel, queen of England: adultery, 135, 141, 144–­45, 155, 156, 159–­60, 190, 197–­99; agency, 162–­63, 211–­12; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 177–­219; chronicle histories, 7, 123–­24, 136–­37, 146, 152–­55, 163, 167–­68, 191; dynastic governance, 129–­36, 139, 150, 152, 172; in Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 7, 20, 122, 125–­36, 138–­41, 188, 190, 217; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 7, 122, 136–­46, 149–­50, 151–­52, 164–­66; house arrest of, 121–­22, 135, 140, 152, 217; kinship networks, 9; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 121–­24, 156–­73, 207–­8, 210, 212; motherhood, 7–­8; narrative historiography, 124, 134, 149, 156–­57, 161–­63, 168, 177; political participation, 127, 137, 146, 161, 178–­79, 197, 199, 215, 218; in Stow’s Annals of England, 146–­55, 207, 217 James I, king of England, 75, 223–­26, 238–­44 Jansen, Sharon, 24 joint monarchy, 30, 228 Jowett, John, 283n89

Karremann, Isabel, 68 Kennedy, Gwynne, 131–­32, 158, 163, 177–­ 78, 186–­87, 206–­7 Khanna, Lee Cullen, 45 King John (Shakespeare), 60, 73–­74 king-­making, 257 kingship, 6–­7, 198–­99, 223, 224–­25, 229–­31, 238, 256 kinship networks, 9–­10, 24, 129, 200–­220, 232, 237, 248, 261 lamentations, 60–­62, 65–­66, 68–­71, 158–­ 60, 182, 191, 193 “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth” (More), 45–­47 Lander, Jesse M., 116 Laynesmith, J. L., 6, 236, 247, 254 legitimacy: kinship networks, 9–­10; marriage, 257; political, 125–­27, 143, 146, 195, 199, 245; queenship, 161, 208, 211, 216–­17, 231, 257; succession, 30 Levine, Nina, 15, 60, 62, 71, 276n89 Levy, F. J., 181 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 138, 177–­78, 180, 239–­40, 243, 289n21 loyalties, 115–­16, 231, 234, 247–­49, 251–­52, 255–­58, 261–­62 Lucas, Scott, 48 Lydgate, John, 1 Lyons, Tara, 97 Machiavellian political thought, 211 MacLean, Sally-­Beth, 21, 95 Maguire, Laurie, 17 Marcus, Leah, 71 marginalization, 15, 101, 110, 219, 246 Marlowe, Christopher: historical revision as dramatic technique, 177; intertexts, 18; somatic responses, 182, 190–­91. See also Edward II (Marlowe)

Index  329

marriage. See royal marriage The Masque of Flowers, 240 Mathews, Nieves, 242 McMillin, Scott, 21, 95 Medici family, 262 Messer-­Davidow, Ellen, 11 Miner, Madonne, 60 The Mirror for Magistrates (Baldwin), 1–­3, 77–­80 misogyny, 216 Mistress Shore: adultery, 83–­85, 111, 113–­14, 116–­18; in Churchyard’s poem “Shore’s Wife,” 77–­80; Edward IV, 79–­80, 101–­3, 106–­20; encomium, 98; in history plays, 22; intercession, 8–­9, 33–­34; in More’s History of King Richard III, 31–­37; political participation, 34, 36; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 62; The True Tragedy, 80–­88 mob vigilantism, 201 monarch(y): antimonarchical sentiments, 23–­24; authority, 54–­57; hierarchies, 222, 253; household conflation, 102–­3; intercession, 7, 34–­35; joint, 30, 228; kingship, 256–­57; kinship networks, 9–­11; marginalization of, 101–­2; and nationalism, 23–­24, 95, 102; public opinion, 241; queenship, 5–­6, 226, 238, 253, 263; royal marriage, 222–­23, 226, 238–­39, 252–­53; women’s access to, 37, 62–­65, 74, 87, 102, 118. See also dynastic governance Monta, Susannah Brietz, 247–­48 moral censure, 145 More, Thomas. on Henry VIII, 46–­47; “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth”; “On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII.” See also The History of King Richard III (More) motherhood: familial access, 39–­40, 67–­ 68; lamentation, 60–­61; participation

in royal politics, 105; queenship, 6–­8; sanctuary debate, 40–­42; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 62, 70–­75; succession, 88; in The True Tragedy, 89–­91, 94–­96 Mott, Lewis, 286n37 narrative historiography: chronicle traditions, 137, 157, 181; classifying, 273n58; Elizabeth Woodville in, 7, 37, 41–­43, 66–­69; and editorial revisions, 146; and exclusion of women, 49; forgetfulness, 69, 71; historical recording, 2–­3; history play genre, 14–­24; interior perspectives, 162, 219; interjected evaluation, 207–­8; intertexts, 14–­25, 79; Isabel in, 124, 134, 149, 156–­57, 161–­63, 168, 177; kinship networks, 10; Marlowe’s Edward II, 121–­24; stylistic masculinity, 175–­76; tradition of hedging bets, 50; The True Tragedy, 81–­82; women’s roles in, 41–­43 narrative history, 14–­16, 177–­78; adapted for commercial stage, 246; historical figures, 12; inclusivity of, 82; narrative strategies, 190; and political history, 179; traditions of Grafton and Stow, 124, 156 narrative sources: Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 235; Cary’s History of Edward II, 176–­80, 193, 199; Fleming’s use of classical, 143; Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 222–­23, 245; Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 136; Hall’s Union, 48, 79; Heywood’s Edward IV, 102, 118; history plays, 21–­22, 30–­31; Holinshed’s Chronicles, 92; intertextuality, 18; Marlowe’s Edward II, 121–­23, 156, 161, 163, 166–­67, 173; queenly representation, 153; Shakespeare’s Richard III,

330  Index

62, 70; source studies, 14–­19; The True Tragedy, 79–­80, 92, 101 narrative strategies: in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 184–­86, 224–­26, 229–­30, 233–­34, 237–­38, 246; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 179, 181–­87, 189–­93, 195, 198, 206–­11, 213–­15, 218–­19; chronicle histories, 123–­24, 138–­39, 145–­46, 151–­52; either/or, 35; in Hall’s Union, 49–­54; historical narratives, 141; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 138–­40, 144–­46, 168; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 123–­24; in More’s History of King Richard III, 35, 37–­42, 51, 182; somatic responses, 51, 123, 130–­31; in Stow’s Annals of England, 148–­52, 167–­68; women’s perspectives, 30, 51. See also interior perspectives; interjected evaluations narrator evaluations. See interjected evaluations national identity, 14, 21–­23, 59, 80, 102–­3, 114, 120, 171–­73, 276n84, 283n107 nationalism: in Edward IV, 102, 116, 118; history play genre, 23–­24, 59, 80; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 164; political participation, 24, 73; Queen’s Men plays, 95 Nelson, Karen, 177–­78 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 14 nobility, 59, 131–­33, 258–­59 Oakley-­Brown, Liz, 24–­25 obedience, 248, 251, 253, 255–­57, 261 Of Domesticall Duties (Gouge), 248 omission, 2–­3 “On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII” (More), 47, 279n45 oppositional histories, 17 oppositional politics, 259

Orlin, Lena Cowen, 102–­3, 108 Ostovich, Helen, 95 Pandosto (Greene), 14 Parks, Joan, 156, 180 Parsons, John Carmi, 8 patriarchy, 24, 60, 249–­50, 253, 263 Patterson, Annabel, 19–­20, 32 penitence. See repentance performative mourning, 51–­52, 193 Perkin Warbeck (Ford), 244–­64; and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 222–­23, 244–­47, 255–­58, 263–­64; date of composition, 258, 260, 301n76; rhetorical agency, 22; royal marriage, 221–­23, 247; royal women, 13, 245–­58 Perry, Curtis, 34, 50, 166, 176, 178, 207, 278n14, 287n3, 291n48 petitionary supplication, 128 Phillippy, Patricia, 60–­61, 69 Plautus, 142–­43 political agency: in Heywood’s Edward IV, 102, 108–­9, 118; Isabel, 162–­63, 179, 211–­ 12, 226, 232; of queenship, 4–­13, 17, 24, 47, 143, 238; royal women, 4–­13, 16, 22, 24, 30, 49, 57, 61–­62, 74, 102, 226, 232; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 62, 65, 68–­69, 71, 74; in The True Tragedy, 86–­87, 92 political histories, 18–­20, 24, 176, 178–­84, 198–­99, 207, 211, 216–­17 political interventions: in Cary’s History of Edward II, 190, 195, 199; chronicle histories, 124, 129, 136, 138, 144, 154, 157; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 261–­63; in Hall’s Union, 53, 56; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 102, 104–­5, 110–­11, 114, 116; intercession, 9, 110–­11; Isabel, 124, 129, 136, 138, 144, 154; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 158, 173; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 62, 65, 72; in The True Tragedy, 91

Index  331

political legitimacy, 125–­27, 143, 146, 195, 199, 245 political participation: in Cary’s History of Edward II, 189–­90, 210, 219; Elizabeth Stuart, 243–­44; Elizabeth Woodville, 37, 64–­65; exclusion of women, 30–­31; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 22; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 103, 105, 111, 119; intertextuality, 18; Isabel, 127, 137, 146, 161, 178–­79, 197, 199, 215, 218; Margaret, 185, 246; Mistress Shore, 34, 36; nationalism, 24, 73; royal women, 23–­24, 36–­37, 73–­74, 119, 156; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 22, 68; techniques of representation, 141; in The True Tragedy, 101 political power and influence: agency, 4–­13; in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 240–­41; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 207–­9; chronicle histories, 157, 161; coronation, 30; dynastic governance, 35–­37, 47, 150, 152, 157; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 233–­34, 238, 245, 253; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 113–­14; historical narratives, 14; in Holinshed’s Chronicles, 58; interjected evaluation, 207–­9; Isabel, 123, 146, 150, 157, 161, 207–­9; Margaret, 184; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 123, 163; Mistress Shore, 78, 83, 85, 98, 113–­14; queenship, 200, 261; royal women, 59, 78, 172–­73, 213, 246; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 66–­67; soft power, 11, 78; in Stow’s Annals of England, 146, 150; in The True Tragedy, 95, 98; women’s access to, 163 power, 10–­11, 35, 60, 251–­53 private emotions, 156–­58, 190–­91, 195, 205 private marriage, 222, 263 Protestantism, 241–­44 Protestant Reformation, 59

public opinion, 20, 182, 201–­2, 228–­32, 238, 241, 243–­44 public/private spheres of influence, 5, 190–­99, 248, 263 queenship: apolitical, 223, 247, 259, 261, 263; in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 225–­44; behaviors of, 195; in Cary’s History of Edward II, 208–­17; in chronicle histories, 125–­36, 146, 152–­56, 211; critiqued in Marlowe, 191; domestic and social directives, 247–­ 48; domesticated, 108; early modern nationalism, 24–­25; in Edward IV, 80, 102–­12; familial roles, 5–­10; favoritism, 51; gender stereotypes, 206–­10; historical narrative’s depictions of, 137–­43; history play genre, 23–­24, 59–­62; ideal, 253, 257–­58; intercession, 7–­8, 109–­10; intercessory, 128–­29; intertexts, 17–­18; joint monarchy, 30; kinship networks, 9–­10; legitimacy, 161, 208, 211, 216–­17, 231, 257; loyalty, 255–­58; in Marlowe’s Edward II, 156–­73; in Perkin Warbeck, 261–­63; political agency, 4–­13, 17, 24, 47, 143, 238; political histories, 216–­17; private, 107, 112; public/private aspects of, 190–­99; representation, 141, 143, 146, 152–­53; role of, 261–­63; soft power, 11, 78; stage drama, 137; structural position, 11, 167, 196, 200, 205; in The True Tragedy, 99–­101; as wifehood, 257; women’s nature, 210–­11. See also political power and influence Queen’s Men, 21–­22, 95–­97, 275n75 Raber, Karen, 176 Rackin, Phyllis, 4, 15–­16, 21, 60 Rastell, William, 31, 48 reader recognition, 17

332  Index

Reading History in Early Modern England (Woolf), 19 Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Patterson), 19–­20, 274n68 regicide, 217–­19 repentance, 86, 87, 98, 114–­15, 218 Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Britton and Walter), 16 rhetorical agency, 13, 22, 61–­62, 68, 78, 103–­5, 113–­14, 247 rhetorical power, 71 Richard III (Shakespeare), 59–­75; agency, 13, 60–­62, 65, 68–­69; Elizabeth Woodville in, 61–­74; exclusion of women, 73–­75; forgetfulness, 2; God’s vengeance, 52; and Hall’s Union, 65, 70–­73; and Heywood’s Edward IV, 80; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 57; Mistress Shore in, 31–­37; and More’s History of King Richard III, 65–­67; performance of for Henrietta Maria’s birthday, 262; political participation, 22, 68; succession, 71–­73; and The True Tragedy, 79, 93 Richards, Judith M., 30 Roberts-­Smith, Jennifer, 96, 286n39 Rowland, Richard, 79–­80 royal claims, 256 royal marriage: alliances, 24, 72, 106, 232, 255; apolitical, 252; in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 226–­27, 229, 230–­ 31, 238–­39, 247; civil dissention, 55; companionate, 112, 119–­20; domestication of, 222; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 221–­23, 247; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 104–­5; hierarchical order of familial ties, 99; interdynastic, 73; legitimacy, 257; loyalty, 247–­58, 262; maternal negotiations, 74; political agency, 13, 47; political function of, 250–­51, 255;

political power, 30; private, 222, 263; self-­censure, 108; submission, 247–­53; in The True Tragedy, 222 royal maternity, 72, 105 royal mistress, 111–­13 royal women: in Cary’s History of Edward II, 194–­99, 216; chronicle histories, 18, 141–­56; dynastic governance, 31, 37, 62, 64–­65, 68, 96, 98–­101; exclusion of, 88, 172; favoritism, 34–­36, 50–­51, 54, 59, 63, 86, 166, 278n14; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 13, 245–­58; forgetting, 68–­69; in Hall’s Union, 49–­59; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 79, 102–­20; historical narratives, 17, 37; independent relationship with monarch’s subjects, 241–­44; influence of, 172–­73, 213, 246; intercession, 7–­9, 34; interior perspectives, 51, 219; intertextual historiography, 14–­25; and kingship, 222–­23; kinship networks, 9–­10; in More’s History of King Richard III, 31–­48; narrative strategies, 30, 184–­85; national identity, 171–­73; political agency, 4–­13, 16, 22, 24, 30, 49, 57, 61–­62, 74, 102, 226, 232; political participation, 23–­24, 36–­37, 73–­74, 119, 156; political rebellions, 184–­85; private emotions, 156–­57, 195; roles of, 59–­61, 124; self-­condemnation, 161; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 59–­75; in The True Tragedy, 82–­101; unofficial influence, 59, 78 sanctuary debate, 38–­43, 57, 67 scaffold speeches, 119 Schaar, Claes, 17–­18 Schwarz, Kathryn, 4, 251–­53 Schwyzer, Philip, 79 self-­censure, 108

Index  333

Shakespeare, William: gender in, 60; history plays, 14–­15, 21; nationalism in, 22–­23. See also Richard III (Shakespeare) shared female grief, 60–­61 Shepard, Alan Clark, 39 “Shore’s Wife” (Churchyard), 77–­80, 81, 85 A Short View to be taken of Great Britain and Spain (Bacon), 242 Sidney, Philip, 122–­23 siege at Bristol, 202–­3, 295n41 Skura, Meredith, 177–­78, 180 Smith, Emma, 17 Smuts, Malcolm, 259–­60 social directives, 248 social hierarchy, 59 soft power, 11, 78 Sojourner Truth, 12–­13 somatic responses: in Cary’s History of Edward II, 190–­93; in Grafton’s A Chronicle at Large, 125, 130–­31, 158; in Hall’s Union, 53, 65; interior perspective, 51, 123; as narrative strategy, 51, 123, 130–­31 source intertexts, 157, 177, 190, 219 source material. See narrative sources source narratives, 15–­16, 173, 181, 204, 246 source studies, 14–­19 sovereignty, 5, 251–­54, 257 Speed, John, 186, 224, 230 Sponsler, Claire, 125 Stafford, Pauline, 11 stage drama, 13, 122, 137 statecraft, 16, 147, 182, 210, 228 Stauffer, Donald, 176 Stow, John: abridgments, 153–­55; chronicle histories, 178–­80, 184, 186, 190, 195, 199, 200–­205; feud with Grafton, 137, 155, 290nn34–­35; and Marlowe’s Edward II, 156–­70; narrative history

traditions, 124, 156. See also Annals of England (Stow) Strohm, Paul, 7, 12, 128 Stuart, Elizabeth, 241–­44 Stuart governance, 240 Stuart Tacitean historiography, 180 stylistic masculinity, 175–­76 submission, 248–­49, 253, 261 succession: in Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII, 236–­37; guardianship, 39–­40; legitimacy, 30; in More’s The History of King Richard III, 182; motherhood, 88; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 71–­73; in The True Tragedy, 97–­98, 101; Tudor, 44, 49, 53, 73–­74 A summarie of Englyshe chronicles (Stow), 153–­54 Summerson, Henry, 143 surface contexts, 17–­18 Survey of London (Stow), 79 Suzuki, Mihoko, 177–­78, 187, 211 Syme, Holger Schott, 95 telltale women, 2–­3, 69 Thomas, Vivien, 122–­23, 169–­70 Thorne, Alison, 60–­61 Traub, Valerie, 4, 11–­12 Tromly, Frederic B., 45 The Troublesome Raigne of King John, 97 True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck (Gainsford), 232–­33, 244–­46 The True Tragedy of Richard III, 78–­101; condemning politics in, 81–­101; domestication of royal marriage, 222; Elizabeth I, 88, 92, 94–­101; Elizabeth Woodville in, 88–­101; encomium, 98–­100; and Hall’s Union, 79; and Heywood’s Edward IV, 110–­16; history play, 21–­22; Mistress Shore, 80–­88; and More’s History of King Richard III,

334  Index

88–­92, 94; narrative historiography, 81–­82; and Shakespeare’s Richard III, 79, 93; “Shore’s Wife” (Churchyard), 78–­79 Tudor, Elizabeth. See Elizabeth I, queen of England Tudor dynasty, 29–­31, 43–­48, 70–­75, 92–­ 95, 119. See also dynastic governance Tudor myth, 42–­44, 229 Tudor propaganda, 20, 31; restorative union narrative, 45–­46; divine union concept, 229 Tudor succession, 44, 49, 53, 72–­74 Tudor women, 47–­48, 55 Tydeman, William, 122, 169–­70 The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (Hall), 48–­59; and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 224; Elizabeth Woodville in, 20, 49–­58; historical narratives, 18–­20; narrative strategies, 49–­54; and Shakespeare’s Richard III, 65, 70–­73; and The True Tragedy, 79; women in, 30 Utopia (More), 44–­45 Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, 74 Vergil, Polydore, 30, 42–­44, 49–­52, 185–­ 86, 224 verse epitaph, 45 verse historiography, 79 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 240, 242, 259 virtuous masochism, 110 Wall, Wendy, 36, 80, 101–­3 Walsh, Brian, 79, 97, 275n74 Walter, Melissa, 14, 16–­17

Wars of the Roses, 2, 8–­9, 18, 22, 31, 42, 44, 48 Watkins, John, 73 Weinberger, Jerry, 181 wickedness, 143–­44, 146, 151 Wilkinson, Louise J., 24 willful acquiescence, 251 Wilson, J. Dover, 79 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 14 witchcraft, 63–­64, 232, 246 The Woman’s Part (Miner), 60 women. See exclusion of women; female ability; female behavior and emotion; royal women Women’s Matters (Levine), 60 Wood, Charles T., 228, 248 Woodville, Elizabeth: agency of, 55–­56, 62, 65, 68–­69, 71, 92, 103–­5; and Elizabeth I, 95–­96; in Hall’s Union, 20, 49–­58; in Heywood’s Edward IV, 102–­10, 117–­18; kinship networks, 9; in More’s The History of King Richard III, 31, 37–­42, 65–­67; motherhood, 7; political participation, 37, 64–­65; in Shakespeare’s Richard III, 61–­74; in The True Tragedy, 88–­101; in Vergil’s Anglica Historia, 42–­44, 49–­52 Woolf, D. R., 19, 181, 224–­25 York, Elizabeth: in Bacon’s History of King Henry VII, 198, 222–­44; and Elizabeth I’s coronation, 29–­31; in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, 247, 253, 255, 257–­58; kinship networks, 9–­10; in More’s “The Lamytacyon Off Quene Elyzabeth,” 45–­48; Shakespeare’s Richard III, 31, 70, 73–­75; The True Tragedy, 93–­96, 99–­101

Index  335

In the Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series:

Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia Edited and with an introduction by Michelle Armstrong-­ Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland Edited by Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey Pathologies of Love: Medicine and the Woman Question in Early Modern France By Judy Kem The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England Edited by Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O’Leary Telltale Women: Chronicling Gender in Early Modern Historiography Allison Machlis Meyer Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-­Century French Fairy Tales Bronwyn Reddan

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