"Richard II"

Paper Summary:

This paper argues that, although few female characters appear in Shakespeare's "Richard II," and though the world of the play appears extremely masculine, the idea of motherhood, in fact, exerts considerable power throughout the play. It analyzes how the feminine experience of motherhood and maternity informs the rhetoric of patriotism and power in the play, thereby structuring the way that history is created and represented within it.

From the Paper:

"Queen Isabella is certainly the most tragic female character in Richard II; for most of the play (most saliently in scene 2.1) she is, as Holderness notes, "a virtually silent, self-effacing character, who is also ignored by everyone else in the room, virtually as an absence, a non-existence" (170). When she speaks, her words often seem as vague and unfocused as the sense of sorrow that haunts her; entering the garden with her attendants and asking "What sport shall we devise here in this garden/To drive away the heavy tough of care" (3.4.1-2), then stubbornly refusing every "sport," the Queen seems silly and childlike if not altogether mad, a pathetic Ophelia-like creature addled by grief. The Queen's speech in 2.2, though, is both eloquent and thematically significant, and its engagement with the issue of maternity is fascinating."

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