Queen Margaret
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Margaret of Anjou, widow of Henry VI and mother of the Prince Edward whom Richard killed at Tewkesbury. The last Lancastrian voice at a Yorkist court, banished on pain of death and present anyway. She curses everyone, and the curses come true.
- Key Traits: Bitter, ferocious and utterly unafraid. She has nothing left to lose and says so. Her language is formal, incantatory and relentless: she does not argue, she pronounces.
- The Core Conflict: Margaret has lost a husband, a son, a crown and a country to the house of York, and lives only to watch them lose everything in turn. Her conflict is with time. She wants to see the ending, and she does.
- Key Actions: Enters unseen in A1S3 and comments on the Yorkist court before revealing herself. Curses King Edward, Queen Elizabeth, the Prince of Wales, Rivers, Dorset, Hastings and, at greatest length, Richard. Spares Buckingham and warns him against Richard. Returns in A4S4 to watch the waning of her enemies, outdoes the Duchess and Elizabeth in grief, and teaches Elizabeth how to curse. Leaves for France.
- Famous Quote:
"O but remember this another day,
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess!"
(Act 1, Scene 3) - The Outcome: Leaves England before the end, promising to smile at English woes from France. Every curse she has spoken is fulfilled, except that she does not live on stage to see the last one.
Hear Me, You Wrangling Pirates
Margaret is on stage for some sixty lines before anyone knows she is there. She stands apart, listening to Richard and Queen Elizabeth’s party quarrel over a crown that used to be hers, and comments to the audience on each of them. Then she steps forward.
Original
Hear me, you wrangling pirates, that fall out
In sharing that which you have pilled from me!
Which of you trembles not that looks on me?
If not, that I am queen, you bow like subjects,
Yet that, by you deposed, you quake like rebels?
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Listen to me, you quibbling pirates, bickering
About the sovereignty you stole from me!
Which one of you is not afraid to see me?
If you don’t tremble, bowing when I’m queen,
You shiver knowing you wrongly dethroned me.
The word "pirates" does exact work. The Yorkists are not, in her account, a royal house but a gang dividing stolen goods, and the goods are hers. She claims a husband and a son from Richard, a kingdom from Edward, and allegiance from all of them, and she says that the sorrow she carries is by right theirs.
Nobody answers the claim; they answer the woman. Richard reminds her of the paper crown she put on his father’s head and the cloth soaked in his brother Rutland’s blood, and for a moment the whole court, which was at each other’s throats a minute earlier, is united against her. Margaret notices, and asks whether they were not all snarling before she came. It is a fair point, and it tells us how the play’s treatment of power and ambition works: the winners of a civil war can always agree about the loser.
The Worm of Conscience Still Begnaw Thy Soul
Then the curses begin, and they are the most sustained piece of cursing in Shakespeare. Margaret takes the court in order – the King, the Queen, the Prince, the Queen’s relatives, Hastings – and reserves the worst for Richard, who tries to leave.
Original
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv’st,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And may your conscience eat you up inside!
And may you start to think your friends are traitors,
And take the cruellest traitors as your friends!
And don’t let sleep close up those eyes of yours,
Unless it’s caused by an appalling nightmare
With ugly devils scaring you from hell!
Every line of this is a prophecy of Act 5. The worm of conscience is the thousand tongues that condemn Richard on the night before Bosworth; the friends suspected as traitors are Stanley and Buckingham; the tormenting dream full of ugly devils is the procession of ghosts. Margaret is not wishing but describing, and the play will spend four acts proving her right.
The rest of the curse is abuse – hog, slave of nature, son of hell – and Richard turns it with a trick, supplying his own name at the moment she reaches for hers, so that she appears to have cursed herself. It is his best joke in the scene and it changes nothing. The theme of prophecy and curses does not depend on the curser finishing her sentence. Heaven, in this play, has heard enough.
Poor Margaret Was a Prophetess
Margaret spares one man. Buckingham, she says, has no Lancastrian blood on his clothes and is outside her curse; she offers to kiss his hand. When he dismisses curses as breath, she warns him instead, and the warning is the plainest description of Richard anyone gives.
Original
O but remember this another day,
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, you’ll remember this another day,
When he will break your heart with grief and sorrow,
And you’ll say Margaret could predict the future!
The line is remembered. Hastings recalls her curse on the way to the block; Buckingham quotes it on All Souls’ Day; Elizabeth quotes it when her sons are dead. The word "prophetess" is repeated by her victims until it becomes the play’s word for what she is.
What makes the moment cruel is that Buckingham could have listened. Margaret offers him the one thing she offers no one else in the play, a way out, and he laughs. His refusal is the model for everyone’s: they all hear her, they all dismiss her, and they all die remembering her. The play’s treatment of fate and free will is not that the future is fixed but that it is announced, and that nobody who could act on the announcement chooses to.
I Am Hungry for Revenge
Margaret returns in A4S4, when most of her curses have already been paid, to inspect the account. She has been lurking, she says, to watch the waning of her enemies, and she finds Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York on the ground, mourning the princes. She joins them, and she counts.
Original
Bear with me; I am hungry for revenge,
And now I cloy me with beholding it.
Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward;
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Matched not the high perfection of my loss.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Bear with me; I am hungry for revenge,
And now I’ve seen so much, I’m overwhelmed.
Your dead son Edward killed my own son Edward;
Your grandson Edward’s death pays back my Edward;
Add in to that young Duke of York, and both
Of them don’t match to losing my own son.
The arithmetic is monstrous and exact. Edward IV is dead, and he killed her Edward; the young Prince Edward is dead, to pay for her Edward; the little Duke of York is thrown in as a bonus, because the two boys together do not equal her one son. It is grief as bookkeeping, and it is spoken to the boys’ mother and grandmother.
And yet the scene does not end in triumph. Elizabeth asks her to stay and teach her to curse, and Margaret, for the first time in the play, gives something away: a lesson, bleak and practical, in how to hate. Then she goes. She has been the play’s conscience in the oldest sense – the thing that remembers – and the theme of conscience and guilt passes, with her exit, from the woman who cursed to the man who is about to dream.
"That this play has scenes noble in themselves, and very well contrived to strike in the exhibition, cannot be denied. But some parts are trifling, others shocking, and some improbable."
— Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765
Key Quotes
Quote 1
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children’s death,
And see another, as I see thee now,
Decked in thy rights as thou art stalled in mine!
Long die thy happy days before thy death,
And after many length’ned hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And may you live to mourn your children’s deaths
And see another queen, as I see you now,
Wearing your robes as you are wearing mine!
May happy days cease long before your death,
And after an extended bout of grief,
You’ll die no mother, wife, nor England’s queen!
Quote Analysis: The curse on Queen Elizabeth, and the one that gives the play its shape. Every clause is a scene to come: Elizabeth will wail her children’s deaths in A4S4; she will see Lady Anne crowned in her place in A4S1; and she will name herself, in that same scene, "nor mother, wife, nor England’s counted queen", quoting Margaret almost word for word. Margaret is not so much cursing as reading the rest of the play aloud.
Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You scarred, revolting pig, digging the dirt!
You who became, the day that you were born,
A freak of nature and the son of hell!
Quote Analysis: The abuse of Richard at its height. "Elvish-marked" means marked at birth by evil spirits; "abortive" means born too soon; "rooting hog" turns his badge of the boar into a pig with its snout in the dirt. The three lines assert what Richard himself claimed in the first scene, that he was made wrong from the start – but where he made it a joke and an excuse, Margaret makes it a verdict. Nature and hell, she says, both signed him.
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
I married Henry, then a Richard killed him.
Your son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
Your son was Richard, then a Richard killed him.
Quote Analysis: The most formal lines in the play, and the most terrible. Four losses in four lines, each in the same shape, each ending on the same name. Margaret’s Edward and Harry; Elizabeth’s Edward and Richard. The pattern flattens all the deaths into one repeated fact, and the repeated fact is Richard. The Duchess adds that she had a Richard and a Rutland too, and Margaret adds Clarence, and the list is complete: the play’s whole body count, delivered as a chant by three women sitting on the ground.
Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is.
Bett’ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse;
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Refrain from getting sleep, and starve by day;
Compare past happiness with current suffering;
Think of your kids as sweeter than they were,
And he that killed them worse than what he is.
By suffering more you’ll make the culprit worse;
And doing this will teach you how to curse.
Quote Analysis: Margaret’s lesson in cursing, given to Queen Elizabeth on request. It is not a spell; it is a method. Do not sleep, do not eat, remember your happiness, exaggerate your loss and your enemy’s wickedness, and the curses will come. What she is describing is how she herself has lived for four acts, and the lesson is also a confession: this is what it has cost. "Revolving this" means turning it over and over in the mind, and it is the only thing Margaret has done since Tewkesbury.
Key Takeaways
- The Voice of the Past: Margaret is the last Lancastrian, banished and present anyway. She reminds the Yorkists of every crime they committed on the way up.
- The Curses Come True: She curses Edward, Elizabeth, the Prince, Rivers, Hastings, Dorset and Richard in A1S3. By A4S4 all but the last have been paid.
- The Warning Nobody Takes: She spares Buckingham and tells him plainly what Richard is. He laughs, and dies quoting her.
- Grief as Arithmetic: In A4S4 she counts her enemies’ dead against her own, teaches Elizabeth how to curse, and leaves for France.
Study Questions and Analysis
Who is Queen Margaret and why is she in the play at all?
Margaret of Anjou was Henry VI’s French queen and the effective leader of the Lancastrian cause through the Wars of the Roses. In Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays she is a warrior, a lover and, in the scene that Richard throws back at her, the woman who crowned the captured Duke of York with paper and gave him a cloth dipped in his young son’s blood before he was killed. By the time of Richard III her husband and son are dead and she has nothing left.
Historically she should not be here. The real Margaret was ransomed to France in 1475 and died there in 1482, before any of the play’s events; Shakespeare brings her back, unhistorically, and lets Richard raise the objection himself:
I was; but I do find more pain in banishment
Than death can yield me here by my abode.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I was; but being banished is more painful
Than dying here at home would be to me.
Samuel Johnson, in his 1765 edition, thought parts of the play "improbable", and Margaret’s presence is the most obvious improbability in it. Shakespeare kept her because the play needed her. Without Margaret, Richard III is the story of one man’s crimes; with her, it is the last act of a thirty-year war in which everyone on stage has blood on their hands. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) treated her as the living link to the tetralogy’s earlier plays, the character through whom the audience is reminded that the Yorkists’ troubles are a punishment as well as a plot.
Do Margaret’s curses come true?
Every one of them, in order, and the play makes sure we notice. King Edward dies of "surfeit", not war, in Act 2. Rivers, Grey and Vaughan die at Pomfret in A3S3, and Rivers remembers her as they go. Hastings, told at the council table that he will be beheaded before dinner, has one thought:
O Margaret, Margaret, now thy heavy curse
Is lighted on poor Hastings’ wretched head!
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Margaret, Margaret, now your evil curse
Has landed on my godforsaken head!
The young Prince dies in the Tower. Queen Elizabeth outlives her glory and calls herself, in Margaret’s words, neither mother, wife nor queen. Buckingham, who was warned rather than cursed, dies on All Souls’ Day quoting her name. And Richard has his night of ugly devils and his thousand-tongued conscience before Bosworth. The only curse we do not see fulfilled on stage is Margaret’s wish to live and say "the dog is dead"; that line is given to Richmond instead.
Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) traces this pattern of curse and recognition scene by scene and treats it as the play’s main structural device: the audience is told the shape of the action in Act 1 and then watches it fill in. Whether the fulfilment proves that heaven is listening, as E. M. W. Tillyard (1944) argued, or simply that Shakespeare has built a very tidy machine, as A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) suggested, is a question the play leaves open. What is not open is the fact. Margaret says it, and it happens.
What does Margaret represent in the play?
She is the past, and the play’s memory of it. Everyone else on stage is trying to move on from the civil wars; Margaret refuses. She also, in her second appearance, becomes something like a chorus, standing outside the action and telling the audience what it means:
So now prosperity begins to mellow
And drop into the rotten mouth of death.
Here in these confines slyly have I lurked,
To watch the waning of mine enemies.
A dire induction am I witness to,
And will to France, hoping the consequence
Will prove as bitter, black, and tragical.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The Yorks’ prosperity has started fading,
Like ripened fruit that rots upon the ground.
I’ve kept my distance, lurking in the shadows,
Observing all my enemies collapse.
I’ve seen an awful prologue to this story,
And now I’ll leave for France, hoping this tale
Will have a tragic, sorrowful conclusion.
"Induction" is a theatrical word: the prologue to a play. Margaret has watched the first part and is about to leave before the second, hoping it will be as bitter. She is describing Richard III from inside it, as a tragedy she has been waiting to see performed.
Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) reads the histories as the workings of a "Grand Mechanism", a staircase of kings on which each is thrown down by the next; Margaret is the one figure who has already been thrown down and has stayed to watch the others climb. Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) hears in her the play’s Senecan inheritance, the ghost or Fury who opens a revenge tragedy by demanding blood. Both are right, and both leave out the plainest thing: she is also a woman whose son was stabbed in front of her, and the play never lets her grief become merely symbolic. The theme of prophecy and curses has a person attached, and the person is very angry.
How does Margaret’s language differ from Richard’s?
Richard is quick, colloquial and changeable; Margaret is slow, formal and fixed. He improvises; she pronounces. His speeches turn on puns and asides, hers on repetition and balance. The clearest sample is her catalogue of what Queen Elizabeth has lost:
Where is thy husband now? Where be thy brothers?
Where be thy two sons? Wherein dost thou joy?
Who sues, and kneels, and says, "God save the Queen"?
Where be the bending peers that flattered thee?
Where be the thronging troops that followed thee?
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Where is your husband now? Where are your brothers?
Where are your two sons? Where do you find pleasure?
Who waits on you and says, ‘God save the Queen’?
Where are the bowing noblemen that praised you?
Where are the squads of troops that followed you?
Five questions in five lines, each beginning the same way, each expecting the same answer. Then a second list, "for happy wife, a most distressed widow" and so on, seven lines built on a single pattern. This is rhetoric as ritual, and it is meant to sound old: the voice of a woman who learned to speak in an earlier play and has not changed since.
Wolfgang Clemen (1968) connects this style to the play’s Senecan and classical models, the formal lament of ancient tragedy. Nicholas Brooke (1968) makes the sharper point that the two styles are in competition, and that Richard’s wins for four acts and Margaret’s wins in the fifth: when Richard wakes from his dream in A5S3 he speaks in short, broken, repetitive lines, and the sound is hers. The play’s study of language and rhetoric could be summarised as the moment Richard starts talking like Margaret.
Why does Margaret exempt Buckingham from her curse and then warn him?
Because he alone has done her no harm. Buckingham was not at Tewkesbury and has no part in the deaths of her husband and son, and Margaret’s curses are precise: they are payment for injuries, not general malice. She goes further and offers him something like friendship, and when he brushes it off she gives him the truest description of Richard in the play:
O Buckingham, take heed of yonder dog!
Look when he fawns he bites; and when he bites,
His venom tooth will rankle to the death.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Buckingham, beware of that dog Richard!
When he is sucking up, he’ll bite; and his bite
Is venomous, and it’s enough to kill you.
A dog that fawns and bites, with venom in the bite. Buckingham answers with contempt, and Margaret’s reply is the prophecy he will quote on the way to his execution. The exemption and the warning together tell us something about her that the curses alone would not: Margaret is capable of justice. She distinguishes the guilty from the innocent, and she tries to save the one man in the room who might have listened.
It also sharpens the play’s treatment of fate and free will. If everything were fixed, the warning would be pointless; Margaret gives it because Buckingham could still choose. He chooses Richard, and thereafter his fate is fixed indeed. Harold C. Goddard, in The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), read the play as a study of how evil recruits its agents by their own consent, and Buckingham’s refusal of Margaret is the moment of consent.
What is Margaret’s relationship with the other women in the play?
It changes from enmity to a kind of terrible fellowship. In A1S3 Margaret and Queen Elizabeth are rivals: one queen calling the other a "poor painted queen", a mere flourish of her own lost fortune. By A4S4 the rivalry has become a competition in loss, and Margaret, who has lost most, claims seniority in grief. Then she offers to share the burden, in her own way:
Thou didst usurp my place, and dost thou not
Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow?
Now thy proud neck bears half my burdened yoke,
From which even here I slip my weary head,
And leave the burden of it all on thee.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You took my place, and can’t you see that now
You also have inherited my sorrow?
Now, like an ox, you carry half my pain,
But I’ll now lift my head out from this brace
And hand over the burden onto you.
The yoke is passed from one neck to the other. Margaret is leaving, and Elizabeth is to carry the sorrow now; it is an inheritance rather than a comfort. Yet Elizabeth asks her to stay, and Margaret gives the lesson in cursing before she goes. Two women who hated each other in Act 1 end Act 4 as teacher and pupil in the only art the play allows them.
Madonne M. Miner’s essay "Neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen" (in The Woman’s Part, 1980) takes its title from Margaret’s curse and reads the women’s scenes as the play’s record of what its politics cost. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation (1997) see the women of the histories as a chorus excluded from the action, and A4S4 is the scene where the chorus finally speaks together. The Duchess of York is the third voice, and it is she, not Margaret, who curses Richard to his face; but it is Margaret who taught them all how.
Is Margaret a sympathetic character?
Not in the ordinary sense, and the play does not want her to be. She is vindictive, she rejoices in the deaths of children, and she has her own crimes: the paper crown and the bloody handkerchief were hers. Richard’s reply to her in A1S3 is unanswerable on its own terms:
The curse my noble father laid on thee
When thou didst crown his warlike brows with paper,
And with thy scorns drew’st rivers from his eyes,
And then, to dry them, gav’st the Duke a clout
Steeped in the faultless blood of pretty Rutland –
His curses then, from bitterness of soul
Denounced against thee, are all fall’n upon thee;
And God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The curse my noble father set on you
When, mocking him, you crowned his head with paper,
Derided him, and drew his floods of tears,
And then, to dry them, offered him a cloth
Soaked in the faultless blood of his son, Rutland.
Those curses, from the bottom of his heart,
Condemned you, and now all have come to pass;
And God, not us, has penalised your cruelty.
"God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed": the Yorkists claim that Margaret’s sufferings are a curse fulfilled, exactly as she will claim theirs are. The play does not adjudicate. Both sides have killed children; both sides have cursed; both curses have worked. Margaret is the loser of the previous war, and the audience is asked to notice that the winners are no better.
Harold C. Goddard (1951) found in this symmetry the play’s real moral: that revenge breeds revenge until someone declines to continue, and that nobody in Richard III declines. What the play does grant Margaret is truth. She is right about Richard, right about Buckingham, right about Elizabeth, and right about the ending; no one else on stage can say as much. Sympathy is the wrong word for what we feel about a character like that. Attention is closer. She is the person in the room who knows what is going to happen, and the play makes us listen to her whether we like her or not.
