'Teach me how to curse...' Richard III Act 4, Scene 4
Crippled Queens: Hurting or Helping?
QUEEN MARGARET
If ancient sorrow be most reverend,
Give mine the benefit of seniory,
And let my woes frown on the upper hand.
[...]
QUEEN ELIZABETH
O, thou didst prophesy the time would come
That I should wish for thee to help me curse
That bottled spider, that foul bunch-back'd toad!
QUEEN MARGARET
I call'd thee then vain flourish of my fortune;
I call'd thee then poor shadow, painted queen;
The presentation of but what I was;
The flattering index of a direful pageant;
One heaved a-high, to be hurl'd down below;
A mother only mock'd with two sweet babes;
A dream of what thou wert, a breath, a bubble,
A sign of dignity, a garish flag,
To be the aim of every dangerous shot,
A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.
Where is thy husband now? where be thy brothers?
Where are thy children? wherein dost thou, joy?
Who sues to thee and cries 'God save the queen'?
Where be the bending peers that flatter'd thee?
Where be the thronging troops that follow'd thee?
Decline all this, and see what now thou art:
For happy wife, a most distressed widow;
For joyful mother, one that wails the name;
For queen, a very caitiff crown'd with care;
For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;
For one that scorn'd at me, now scorn'd of me;
For one being fear'd of all, now fearing one;
For one commanding all, obey'd of none.
Thus hath the course of justice wheel'd about,
And left thee but a very prey to time;
Having no more but thought of what thou wert,
To torture thee the more, being what thou art.
Thou didst usurp my place, and dost thou not
Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow?
Now thy proud neck bears half my burthen'd yoke;
From which even here I slip my weary neck,
And leave the burthen of it all on thee.
Farewell, York's wife, and queen of sad mischance:
These English woes will make me smile in France.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
O thou well skill'd in curses, stay awhile,
And teach me how to curse mine enemies!
QUEEN MARGARET
Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were fairer than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is:
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse:
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
My words are dull; O, quicken them with thine!
QUEEN MARGARET
Thy woes will make them sharp, and pierce like mine.
In the extract above, we see the meeting of two supplanted queens, both of whom share similar losses. At the end of Henry VI Part 3, Queen Margaret's husband (King Henry), and her son Edward, were slain, and Margaret lost her position in the royal court of England. Now, in the play Richard III, Queen Elizabeth's husband (King Edward IV), and her sons Edward and Richard, have been slain, and Elizabeth too has lost her position in court now that Richard III has crowned himself king. These queens have both been crippled by their loses, and corrupted by the conflicts of the men. In this scene, we see two women who only know how to hurt and how to hate.
Margaret, who claims her griefs hold 'the benefit of seniory' and are greater than her rival's, scorns and mocks Elizabeth as a 'queen of sad mischance'. She outlines all the things Elizabeth (and indeed, she herself) has been - a 'happy wife', a 'joyful mother', a 'queen...commanding all' - and demonstrates how each of these positions have been lost. We might expect Elizabeth to rebuke and return this verbal abuse, but instead she appears to admire Margaret, praising her as being 'well skill'd in curses' and asking to be mentored in 'how to curse [her] enemies'. Having already demonstrated how it is to be done, Margaret instructs Elizabeth to use her woes to sharpen her words - to use her hurt to hate.
Through her abusive mockery, Margaret has piqued Elizabeth's pain, giving her exactly what she needs to fashion her weapon. It is not so simple then, to interpret Margaret as merely lashing out at her 'rival', the queen who replaced her on the throne. Though she might once have been angry with this 'poor shadow', Margaret now appears to have accepted the course of fortune, seeing her position as a 'burthen'd yoke' that, now coupled with her woes, she is glad to be rid of. She has passed both onto Elizabeth, but rather than to hurt her, she does so to help her.
By hammering Elizabeth into a hurtful, hateful thing, Margaret is simply equipping her for the hard times ahead. Margaret is content to relinquish her hurt (for those she loves have been dead for some time now) and her hate (for she knows she cannot do any more to supplant Richard III). Instead, she passes these weapons onto Elizabeth, whose pain in losing her sons is more fresh, and whose loathing for the 'foul bunch-back'd toad' is more immediate. Though Elizabeth does not realise it in this scene, Margaret has actually forgiven her, and is even helping her to survive both her current grief and the corruption of the world as it stands.
An interesting comparison to this scene can be found in Richard II, a play whose events have constant repercussions through the later histories. In Act 4, Scene 1, a supplanted Richard argues with his rival Bolingbroke about the ownership of crown versus cares:
HENRY BOLINGBROKE
I thought you had been willing to resign.
KING RICHARD II
My crown I am; but still my griefs are mine:
You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
HENRY BOLINGBROKE
Part of your cares you give me with your crown.
KING RICHARD II
Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done;
Your care is gain of care, by new care won:
The cares I give I have, though given away;
They tend the crown, yet still with me they stay.
In the chosen extract from Richard III, Margaret argues that cares are to be coupled with the crown, and as Elizabeth has taken her crown, so much she take her cares - both halves of the 'burthen'd yoke'. In Richard II, however, Richard insists they are independent of one another, and that though his crown has been taken (with which Bolingbroke may 'gain' some 'new care[s]'), he is still subject to his own griefs and cares.
Why might Richard insist on owning his griefs, when it might seem much easier to let them go? A number of reasons come to mind:
- Richard has already lost so much (the siege, his kingdom, his title, his whole identity), that he might wish to appear to be holding onto at least something
- to be a man left with only his griefs makes him a pitiful figure, and being a man with his life on the line, he may be in need of pity right now
But if we take the above analysis of Margaret and Elizabeth, there might be another, more poignant reason. Margaret sees woes or hurt as being the driving force behind curses and hate, her weapon of choice. By holding onto his woes, Richard retains some power in this exchange and, as with Margaret, he couples this with his skill with words to strike at Bolingbroke with scorn and mockery. His tirades against Bolingbroke in Act 4 Scene 1 do bear some resemblances to Margaret's abusive monologue - both use repetition and anaphora, rhetorical questioning, and imagery-laden verse to strike and shame the opponent. Though it does not save his life, Richard's power of words is prevalent until his final breath, his woe to add a sting to his curses which, even after his death, shames Bolingbroke and his successors and is felt throughout all the histories that follow.
Perhaps this is what Margaret hopes for with Elizabeth - that her hate might take down Richard III, and even if it doesn't, that the power of her curses might pierce him with shame and be remembered throughout history. It lies with us to decide whether she did.
Photo credits:
Leslie Brott as Queen Elizabeth, Anne Newhall as Queen Margaret, and Elisabeth Terry as Duchess of York in Richard III (2003), copyright of Utah Shakespeare Festival, photo by Karl Hugh, found here.
Gemma Jones as Queen Margaret and Hadyn Gwynne as Queen Elizabeth in Richard III at the Old Vic Theatre (2011), photo by Geraint Lewis, found here.
Eddie Redmayne as Richard II in Richard II at Donmar Warehouse (2011), photo by Johan Persson, found here.
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