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Download Thesis This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Negotiating Queenship from Malory to Shakespeare Glyn, Elizabeth L Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 1 Negotiating Queenship from Malory to Shakespeare Elizabeth L. Glyn PhD (Kings College London), 2015 2 Abstract Queenship is a highly contested issue across the medieval and early modern periods, yet too often the subject is addressed as if those periods were discrete and distinct. In this thesis I assess certain selected literary and documentary representations of controversial queenship in the context of the history of such representations, to argue that artificial periodisation has hindered our understanding of discourses of queenship. Over time representations of idealised queenship remain consistently aware of the overarching problem of female rule. Recurring allegations of misconduct and subversion by queens suggest ongoing anxieties about female power, which are visible too in the proliferation of medieval and early modern literary defences of queens. I focus in particular on the idea of intercessory queenship, considering how this alternates with active, and in some cases even military, queenship. In so doing, I will uncover the discursive limits of autonomy for royal women. I consider a range of interconnected texts all of which use nostalgia for the past both to recreate and to question ideals of female influence. I begin by showing how Guenevere in Malory’s Morte Darthur permits a defence of Margaret of Anjou which is not couched in terms of the norms of queenly subordination. I then show how Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays manifest disquiet at Margaret’s militancy even while they create a portrait of an effective queen whose agency is entirely focussed on upholding her husband’s sovereignty. I then turn to the unexpected interchangeability of Queens Katherine and Anne in Henry VIII through which Shakespeare and Fletcher dramatise counterintuitively parallel versions of female defiance; here, queenship appears to be set free from the dominant model of intercessory influence and yet remains benign. Finally, I shall argue that disquiet at the idea of female autonomy is apparent in the return to Amazonian themes in Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen as well as in various court masques written for Queen Anna, wife to James I. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 4-29 1 Malory’s Guenevere: Questioning Intercessory Ideals of Queenship 30-84 2 Shakespeare’s Romance History: In Defence of Margaret 85-133 3 Katherine versus Anne in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII and its sources 134-185 4 Jacobean Queenship: Revival and Renewal in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen and Anna of Denmark’s masques 186-240 Conclusion 241-246 Bibliography 247-272 4 Introduction In February 2013, to accompany the recent publication of her acclaimed fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell and the fall of Anne Boleyn, Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel wrote an essay in the London Review of Books in which she described the Duchess of Cambridge as a ‘jointed doll on which certain rags are hung …. a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own’.1 Mantel generated a storm of protest, most of which mistook her words for criticism of the duchess’ personality rather than of ongoing social and political expectations that women play a silent, passive and mediative role. Mantel, it seems to me, simply pointed out that the assumption of silence does not sit comfortably in an age which, in theory at least, allows women political autonomy of their own. Although few commentators relayed any of the rest of her essay, in fact she went on to say that ‘in looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature …. Royal persons are both gods and beasts’.2 Mantel sees the depiction of royal women as both admirable and monstrous. In this thesis, I shall explore the ways in which discourses of queenship have conjured up such ‘gods and beasts’ and I shall identify unexpected patterns in literary, dramatic and historiographical treatments of royal women. This thesis will take the form of a series of case studies in which I seek to uncover the discursive limits of autonomy for royal women. My primary focus is the plays of Shakespeare, but I begin with an inescapably medieval text, Malory’s Morte Darthur, to emphasise the continuities of representation of royal women across the periods we call “medieval” and “early modern”, and I will also address a series of works by playwrights and poets other than Shakespeare. In chapter 1, I will consider Malory’s new treatment of Guenevere in Morte Darthur. Malory, writing during the Wars of the Roses in the latter half of the fifteenth century, takes on an earlier romance tradition which portrayed the queen, Guenevere, as vindictive and destructive; he chooses the more benign version 1 Hilary Mantel, ‘Royal Bodies’, London Review of Books, Vol 35, No. 4, 21 February 2013, 3-7 (p. 3). 2 ‘Royal Bodies’, p. 5. 5 of her from the available sources ─ although he doesn’t invent it. The Guenevere of Morte Darthur, as I shall show, is benevolent and astute; she defends herself and the honour of the king and she has a godly end. In chapter 1 I shall argue that changes to his presentation of Guenevere enable Malory to say more about queenship than he could by describing the contemporary, and highly controversial, queen Margaret of Anjou directly. No less than Morte Darthur, Shakespeare’s early plays show a clear sense of their own place on a historical spectrum; I will move on in chapter 2 to consider Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. Here I will argue that whilst Shakespeare’s Margaret is vicious and bloodthirsty (the epitome of Mantel’s ‘beast’), she is also always clearly motivated by the need to protect her rights and the rights of her son and her husband. Even whilst Shakespeare’s presentation of Margaret owes a great deal to medieval chronicle sources, it also makes deliberate use of romance archetypes in its depiction of her as heroic yet transgressive. In chapter 3 I turn my attention to Jacobean representations of late medieval queenship by identifying an unexpected interchangeability between Queens Katherine and Anne in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. This play does not simply balance an idealised queen against a malignant ‘other’, a virtuous queen against a subversive one: on the contrary, it subverts its sources so as to conflate these two women, Katherine and Anne. In the process, it presents a parallel version of female defiance which subverts historiographical ‘truths’. In chapter 4 I will demonstrate that the presentation of female autonomy in the other extant Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, should be considered in the light of Queen Anna’s court masques. By the time Kinsmen and the masques were composed, intercession had become explicitly oppositional and the valorisation of chastity rather than marriage had become subversive; I shall show how these texts articulate a newly circumscribed post-Elizabethan female power. It is clear that I will not be providing a strictly chronological view of female sovereignty through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I will argue, instead, that the discourse of queenship refuses to abide by the artificial periodisation that separates the medieval from the early modern 6 and that commentators have failed to take enough account of the senses of history that dominate most texts about the subject of queenship. We shall see that representations of queenship don't steadily become more modern ─ in fact, they revert to earlier modes in certain political circumstances. Over the course of this thesis, too, I will demonstrate that the discourse of queenship over a long period, expressed in a variety of different texts from chronicle to dramatic, takes the form of an ongoing and often fractious negotiation between intercessory and autonomous, sometimes even militant, female power. I shall show how Malory’s new treatment of queenship in Morte Darthur ─ printed in 1485 by Caxton and circulated widely ─ feeds directly into the revival of a debate about Margaret’s queenship in Shakespeare’s earliest histories, written in the early 1590s. Shakespeare does not return to de casibus history until Henry VIII, written in 1613 in collaboration with John Fletcher. We shall see that the overarching link between his earliest work and his last is its medievalism; Shakespeare was at his least medievalist between 1593 and around 1612.
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