This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Telltale women the dramaturgy of female characters in Shakespeare's history plays Bachrach, Hailey 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). 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Oct. 2021 Bachrach 1 TELLTALE WOMEN The Dramaturgy of Female Characters in Shakespeare’s History Plays By Hailey Bachrach Submitted to King’s College London English Department in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 30 September 2020 Bachrach 2 Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 4 Notes .......................................................................................................................................... 5 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER ONE | Facts Disfigured: Reading History Through Female Characters ......... 22 History and Accuracy: Edward III ................................................................................................ 27 History and Englishness: Henry VI ............................................................................................... 42 History and the Stage: Margaret of Anjou ................................................................................... 53 History and Tragedy: King John, Henry VIII, and Richard III ................................................. 62 CHAPTER TWO | From the Margins: Reading Female Characters Into History .............. 73 Unheeded warnings ........................................................................................................................ 77 Political marriages .......................................................................................................................... 85 The domestic realm ....................................................................................................................... 101 Historical fictions .......................................................................................................................... 114 CHAPTER THREE | History as Exclusion: Shakespeare’s Feminine Historiography .... 121 Prophesying the past .................................................................................................................... 122 Marginalised historians ................................................................................................................ 141 The genre of history ...................................................................................................................... 158 CHAPTER FOUR | Blurring the Boundaries: Effeminacy and Feminine History .......... 168 Effeminate men and women’s history ........................................................................................ 177 Feminine historians and returning to history ............................................................................ 191 Historicising boys .......................................................................................................................... 199 CHAPTER FIVE | Modern History: The Past in the Present ............................................ 207 Accuracy and Emilia .................................................................................................................... 210 Emotion and It’s True, It’s True, It’s True ................................................................................. 225 Nation and The James Plays ........................................................................................................ 233 CONCLUSION | ‘This is what you came to see’ ................................................................. 248 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................... 254 Bachrach 3 Abstract This thesis undertakes a feminist re-reading of the female characters in Shakespeare’s history plays. Drawing upon both historical and contemporary performance and the broader theatrical context of the early modern period, I use the multidisciplinary lens of dramaturgy to investigate how these characters function as specifically theatrical figures, realigning traditional understandings of the shape and purpose of the history play. The first chapter explores some of the most common assumptions about the nature of a history play—that it is tragic, that it is historically accurate, that it relates to a broader nationalistic agenda, and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre—and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these assumptions. The second chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are smaller and more marginal, a position that has led to critics consistently underrating their contributions to the plot. The chapter uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays, instances of attempted disruption of the plot that are unsuccessful. The third chapter explores how characters narrate history within the plays themselves, particularly when they appear to transgress the boundaries of historical possibility through curses, prophecy, or narrating events they have not seen—extra-historical powers enabled by their marginalisation from political power. The fourth chapter argues that these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not explicitly female, mode of storytelling by suggesting that male characters who undergo processes of disempowerment explicitly associated with femininity are endowed with the same historicising powers as female characters. Bachrach 4 The fifth chapter examines contemporary history plays written by and about women that explicitly or implicitly challenge Shakespeare’s still-influential historical dramaturgy. These new works reveal not only the negotiations that self-identified feminist writers undertake to find a space for women within Shakespearean dramaturgy, but the assumptions about Shakespeare, history, and the role of women within both that inform such artistic responses. Acknowledgements This project of course would not exist without the tireless generosity and support of my supervisors, Sonia Massai and Will Tosh. Thank you for encouraging me from the earliest stages, and always going above and beyond. I would also like to thank my parents, who did their best to actually read this draft, and my sister Hannah for keeping me in supply of pictures of our dogs (Bucky and Louise, thank you to you as well, though you are dogs and cannot read). You all feel very far away right now, but I’ve never doubted that you’re all there for me. Thank you to my PhD supervisory siblings, Robin Craig and Julian Neuhauser, and to Emily MacLeod. You were all with me every step of the way, and I hope you all know how much it means to have someone who knows exactly what you’re going through. And thank you to the entire 2019 Globe Ensemble, including (because I promised I’d put their names in this) Philip Arditti and Helen Schlesinger. Bachrach 5 Notes Spelling has been modernised except when unavoidable, as in a quotation from a scholar who has not modernised spelling. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the plays under discussion are taken from the following editions, with further citations included in-text. Titles of Shakespeare’s plays are occasionally abbreviated (R2 for Richard II, etc). In some cases, as with the use of the 2008 reprints of the Oxford Shakespeare, texts were selected over more recent editions simply because they were the version accessible to me for final edits and consultations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In some instances, page ranges in citations for journals and collections were not available for the same reason. King Edward III, ed. by Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Henry IV Part One, ed. by David Bevington, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Henry IV Part Two,