The figure of the feminine in Shakespeare’s 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI and in Richard III continually transgresses the boundaries of femininity, rendering her a continual threat to King, Country, and Religion; in Henry VI and Richard III, the women are figured as both masculine and demonic, using witchcraft and war to achieve their ends. The fundamental problem of these plays lies with the continual violation of political, social, religious, and gendered boundaries; the women – Joan de Pucelle and the Countess from 1 Henry VI, Eleanor (Duchess of Gloucester) of 2 Henry VI, Elizabeth and the Duchess of York of Richard III, and – most importantly – Queen Margaret of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III – continually refuse to be categorized within “appropriate” bounds, defying the enclosure of their gender and attempting to seize political power for themselves. This rejection of conventional roles and mores leads to their ultimate failure, both as women and as politicians. Because they become defined as transgressors – specifically as witches and prophetesses – they lose the capability to participate in acceptable politics; the turn from angels to demons embodied in the turn to witchcraft and prophecy ultimately defiles and nullifies the female body and mind, rendering women’s successful participation in the political game entirely impossible even as they metaphorically birth corruption into the national landscape.
Despite initial appearances, the impossibility of feminine political power – outside the sphere of appropriate female participation – does not cause complete impotence; the women are, in fact, quite politically successful for a time, followed, of course, by their exile, death, and/or downfall. Of these women, Margaret – transgressive against nation, husband, king, and religion – ultimately gains the longest-lasting power through her rejection of appropriate boundaries, although, ironically, it is Margaret’s transgressiveness (along with that of the other women) in the Henry VI trilogy that causes the need for her role in Richard III. Aligned with witchcraft and the amphibology of political prophecy, the language she speaks in Richard III is a language that holds sway over the entire play, politically, socially, and religiously. It at first seems contradictory that Margaret’s voice – the voice of treason and marital/martial betrayal in 2 and 3 Henry VI – returns to haunt those traitors who, in Henry VI, have escaped their punishment; her prophecies of death and devastation, precisely because they are drawn from a space of political transgression, enforce a higher (and older) order of political righteousness, speaking out in a rebellious voice against treason rather than for it.
However, despite Margaret’s seeming alliance with right in Richard III, her crimes from the Henry VI plays cannot be forgotten; the other women repeatedly remind her of her own villainous deeds even as she attempts to claim their sympathy. As a prophetess – though more truly, as a witch, because her prophecies manifest only as curses – she also fails, since she is unable to see the positives that result from the restoration of the throne to a “proper” figure of masculine authority in Richmond. The reason for this failure lies in the progression from 1 Henry IV through Richard III; taken alone, each play divulges the danger of transgressive femininity, but taken as a series, the tetralogy enables a more complex reading of the female threat. The women of 1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III invade the Habermassian public space of the political forum, endangering masculine authority and engendering their own type of demonic offspring in the form of feminine political power, ultimately resulting in the creation of the most demonic monarch of all – Richard III – whose power is the bastardization of feminine political machinations and Machiavellian abuse of his supposedly legitimate masculine authority.