The Women of Richard III
The Women of Richard III
The play Richard III takes place in the late 15th century in a patriarchal society after the War of the Roses. This period demonstrates the inferiority and marginalization of the female characters such as Anne, Elizabeth, Margaret and the Duchess of York
The women of this play function as voices of protest and morality. They often see through his intrigues and predict dire consequences from his acts. Shakespeare uses the women to point out moral truths and emphasize general principles of the Elizabethan world view of moral and political order. Anne, Elizabeth, the Duchess and Margaret each contribute in furthering Shakespeare's moral themes in three ways: through their roles as victims which is expressed in their intense lamentations, in their cries for revenge through vengeance, and in alluding to a higher moral order that transcends men's actions. The world that Shakespeare shows us in Richard III is a man's world. The women are presented as being on the sidelines to grieve, complain, or bury the dead. Richard views women as tools, as shown by his various asides to the audience when he announces his plots, where the marrying of Anne or Elizabeth are only moves in his elaborate games of intrigue and power.
Anne, the first woman we are introduced to is grief stricken by her husband's death in combat ‘To hear the lamentations of poor Anne’. Shakespeare expands this theme in scenes such as Act II, scene 2 when both Elizabeth and the Duchess also lament and enumerate similar losses of loved ones. Act IV, scene 1 contains some of the play's most poignant lines when Elizabeth looks back on the Tower, suspecting she may never see her imprisoned sons again. In this scene, the Duchess sums up the state of despair all the women find themselves in when she says, "I to my grave, where peace and rest lie with me. Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen, and each hour's joy wrack'd with a week of ten,"...