"To play the Amazon": Patterns of female domination in Shakespeare's history plays
Description
This dissertation considers Shakespeare's representation of the dominant female in his first tetralogy of history plays in relationship to the ideological contradictions generated in Elizabethan England by the presence of a woman on the throne of a traditionally patriarchal state. Like the dangerous queens described by opponents to female rule in the sixteenth century, the independent women of Shakespeare's first tetralogy aggressively try to usurp a man's place and so threaten to subvert the stability of the nation itself. That Shakespeare in his earliest history plays chooses to foreground the figure of the woman-on-top raises questions, then, about the relationship between the women of these plays and the culture in which they were produced. This dissertation offers a way of reading these plays within a cultural framework and suggests the importance of Shakespeare's histories for feminist critics of Shakespeare The first chapter defines the ideological contradictions of Elizabeth I's reign and the strategies available for managing them, considering representations of the ruling female produced by the debate over female rule, by the Elizabethan court and the queen herself, and by travellers' reports from the New World. The three central chapters take up the individual plays of the tetralogy, beginning with 1 Henry VI and concluding with Richard III. Shakespeare's representations of women throughout the tetralogy work to reinforce traditional anxieties about women in power. But while he follows the patriarchal model in defining the woman-on-top, Shakespeare offers no comparable model for managing her. Destabilizing the reassuring resolutions of his chronicle sources, he suggests that traditional paradigms for handling the unruly woman had become problematic in Elizabethan England. Rather than mediating the ideological contradiction of female rule, then, Shakespeare in the first tetralogy exposes the conflict, emphasizing the dangers posed by the woman who wields power and, at the same time, dramatizing the failure of the heroic male to control her unruliness. In a nation ruled by a woman, these plays suggest, patriarchal models of power have lost their efficacy