Richard II, like most of Shakespeare's historical plays (although, notably, unlike his comedies and tragedies), establishes a theatrical world dominated by men and masculinity. Female characters are few in number and those who appear on stage tend to say little and have less action. But, as critic Graham Holderness notes, “women may not be very present in the play, but femininity is” (173). Holderness's article "A Woman's War: A Feminist Reading of Richard II" attempts to reinsert femininity into history and historicity into feminist criticism, but her insightful argument does not sufficiently examine the most powerful way in which femininity is highlighted in Richard II: in the images, metaphors and explicit comments on motherhood, motherhood and childbirth that appear at various important moments in the play. Motherhood not only reinserts femininity into the historical play, but it constructs femininity as the site of a strange and incomprehensible experience (of emotion, of power, of pain) that haunts the male and female characters and alienates women from a silent presence in Richard II. . From John of Gaunt's burning elegy to his threatened homeland, through Queen Isabella's prophetic fantasy about the birth of sorrow, to Duchess York's passionate plea for her traitorous son Aumerle, motherhood and the mother-child relationship are represented as traumatic - painful and indelible - sources of knowledge and power that resonate not only in individual life but (through metaphor and rhetoric) in the life of the nation and, thus , in a sense, structure the way the story is created and experienced in the play. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayQueen Isabella is certainly the most tragic female character in Richard II; for most of the play (most clearly in scene 2.1), she is, as Holderness notes, "a virtually silent and self-effacing character, who is also ignored by everyone else in the play, virtually as a absence, non-existence. (170). When she speaks, her words often seem as vague and vague as the feeling of grief that haunts her; entering the garden with her servants and asking "What sport shall we devise here in this garden/To drive away the heavy cares" (3.4.1-2), then stubbornly refusing any "sport", the Queen seems foolish and childish otherwise completely mad, a pathetic creature similar to Ophelia, troubled by grief. The Queen's speech in 2.2, however, is both eloquent and thematically significant, and her engagement with the issue of motherhood is fascinating. Haunted by a sadness without an obvious cause, the queen says: “Again, I think,/A coming sorrow, ripened in the bosom of fortune/Comes to me, and my inner soul/For nothing trembles.” Of something that afflicts him/More than in parting from my lord the king” (2.1.9-13). Queen Isabella's voice is not only melancholic but prophetic; with what might roughly be called a particularly feminine type of knowledge (a view denied or ignored by men), she anticipates the impending tragedy of the play and puts into language the fall of a king - a moment of national crisis and historical. of pregnancy and motherhood, envisioning a “fortune” that could be broadly defined as the narrative form of the story or play as a pregnant woman, a mother. Refusing Bushy's assurance according towhich "it is nothing but vanity, my gracious lady" (2.2.33), Isabella, historically childless (Holderness 177), continues to imagine herself involved, in complicated ways, in the birth of the tragedy. Holderness asserts that “Isabella naturally uses imagery of pregnancy and birth, but displaces these possibilities from her own body, envisioning birth only through misfortune” (176). I am not convinced, however, that Isabella's rhetoric is so far removed from her body: "nothing" was a commonly accepted expression. Elizabethan euphemism for vagina, and the Queen's repeated use of the word ("my inner soul/without anything trembles » [2.2.12] ; “As, although thinking no thought, I think, / causes me to faint and shrink without anything heavy” " [2.2.31-32]; "'This does not is nothing less.../For nothing has engendered my sorrow,/Or something has the nothing that I mourn" [2.1.34-37]) in speeches that explicitly deal with pregnancy and childbirth suggest that this meaning is consciously referenced here the female genitalia, literally the site of reproduction and birth, become metaphorically (and through the play of the world) the site of premonitions and tragedies; that his menacing melancholy is that of a fatherless child, a pure product of only female genitalia: “Vanity still derives/From an ancestral sorrow. Mine is not so,/For nothing has begotten my sorrow anything" (2.2.34-36). His next line - "Or something has nothing that I mourn" (2.2.37) could be read as a mourning for the loss of this moment of purity or as a demand for greater freedom to act for the female body, a place of physicalized and embodied knowledge (and therefore power) derived from experience of motherhood, an experience that becomes more closely tied to Isabella's own body when she says "So, Green, you are the midwife of my woe, / Boling has broken the mournful heir of my sorrow. / Now my soul has brought /And I, a panting new-born mother, /I have woe to woe, sadness to sadness joined" (2.1.62-66). The female experience of the traumatic pain of childbirth - as a "prodigy" or monstrous omen (which is, of course, now substantiated and proven to be no "nothing" at all) is transmitted through Isabelle's soul and confused with her body or her genitals - becomes explicitly linked to the functioning of the State and history: not only are Isabella's personal "misfortune" and "grief" joined to those of England, but it is through the suffering of the woman as well as the sufferings of the king and the nation are dramatically anticipated and represented rhetorically. The most explicit representation of the power of motherhood in the play is the last: against the wishes of her husband, which turns against it. their son Aumerle for his plot of treason, the Duchess of York asks King Henry for forgiveness on behalf of her son. . Holderness argues that, unlike the Queen and the Duchess of Gloucester, "the Duchess of York offers what is in fact a contrasting success story, precisely because she accepts and embraces the submissive and marginal role of women... the prospect of losing her son would deprive her of her very existence" (178), illustrating Holderness's thesis that the identities of the women in the play are constituted solely through their relationships with men, that "their only function in this world masculine is that of giving birth to sons for their own life. powerful husbands” (177). Holderness reads the Duchess's impassioned plea for her son, first to her husband and then - against that husband's wishes - to the King as yet another example of female submission to powermasculine, finding in her the begging on her knees before the king and her self-effacing appeal to paternal pride (“He is as like you as a man can be, / Not like me, nor like any of my parents” [5.2.108-109]) proof that "to save her son, the duchess is not only ready to humiliate herself... but even to sacrifice her boy's personal traces of her maternal heritage..." (178) I would propose that the Duchess of York's scenes with her husband and with King Henry show much deeper engagement with issues of gender, motherhood, fatherhood and power than Holderness gives them credit for. the Duchess of York represents, as Holderness acknowledges, a “contrasted success story” in that she succeeds in bending the king's will to save her son's life; subjugation - "I will walk forever on my knees/And I will never see the day that the happy will see,/Until you give joy.../By forgiving Rutland, my transgressor boy" ( 5.3.94 -97) - but it is a subjugation so literal that it seems very self-conscious: this is a woman who, in perhaps inappropriate post-feminist terms, knows what she wants and what she should do to obtain it, even – especially – if it means a performative reconstitution of the rhetoric and structures of patriarchy. Brilliantly manipulating these structures, the Duchess implores the King to “Say “forgive” first, and then “get up.”/And if I were your nurse, your teaching tongue,/“Forgiveness should be first word of their speech/.../Say 'sorry' king; let pity teach you how./The word is short, but not as short as sweet;/No word like 'forgiveness' for the mouths of kings, so answer" (5.3.112-118). On her knees, she reverses subtly the power structures, not by forcing the king to say "sorry" through his insistent, rhythmic and alliterative speech, but by suggesting that the figure of the "nurse" (which, for the sake of this argument, I would confuse with that of the "mother" as a woman charged with the responsibility of raising children, although it should be noted that historically the nurse is even more marginalized than the mother) is invested with power, by teaching, to control what men say, to control the inheritance of the language, to decide which words should be "fit for the mouths of kings." This strange feminine authority over the language is also suggested in the laments of. Mowbray on his banishment: "The language I learned during these forty years,/My native English, now I must give it up.../I am too old to submit to a nurse,/Too far gone in years to be student now” (1.3.159-171). Leaving his homeland and without access to a new source of maternal teaching, Mowbray sees himself as deprived of the power of speech, radically dissociated from language itself. The Duchess's inversion remains ambivalent and the triumph incomplete, because the oppressive functioning of patriarchy cannot be denied both in society and in the language itself (the discourse taught by the nurse is intrinsically masculinist), but the moment is nevertheless profound. : the scene, I would say, suggests that even when fully anchored in patriarchal domination (in what Holderness calls an "embrace" and which I would call a performative and therefore destabilizing enactment), the woman, in as a figure charged with the responsibility of transmitting the language to (male) children, exercises a sort of control over this same language and therefore over its uses. In the scene preceding her appeal to the king, the duchess refuses to charge her son for his participation in the treason plot. her husband orders her to do so, disavowing paternal affection and accusing his wife of overly emotional feminine weakness:“You love the madwoman, / Do you want to hide this dark conspiracy... / Go away, dear woman! If he were twenty times/My son, I would approach him” (5.2.95-102). The Duchess eloquently argues for the place of family ties over political loyalty (a controversial issue throughout the play, as evidenced by the blood connection shared by Richard and Bolingbroke that torments both men) and for supremacy of maternal experience: “If you had moaned for him / as I did, but it would be more pitiful” (5.2.103) recognizes that here “the duchess does it”. suggest at least that femininity can have its own particular experiences and values, in some ways quite distinct from the world of masculine ideology" (178) but, again, I would say that the Duchess's words suggest something more significant than that: the traumatic painful ordeal of childbirth (the duchess's term "wail", which in Shakespearean usage often refers directly or indirectly to the pains of childbirth, resonates throughout the play , as in Richard's potentially transgender injunction to the queen: "Go, count your way with sighs; I mine with groans/.../Twice for a halt I will groan, the way being short..." [5.1.88-91]), an ordeal which both breaks and strengthens the original bond between mother and child, gives the woman access to a realm of physical well-being and the psychic experience not only "is separated from the world of masculine ideology”, not only in contradiction with it, but exerts a strange power over it while remaining incomprehensible to it. Although linked to Linda Bamber's psychoanalytic concept of feminine otherness, "feminine principle outside of history" (quoted in Holderness 167), this evocation of maternal experience claims authority and power not only against history but inside it - or even on it: the profound original The bond between mother and child, the traumatic (because painful and indelible) ordeal of childbirth, modifies the shape of the story ( or history as it is written in the history play). "Her words proceed from her mouth, ours from our bosom" (5.2.102) the duchess says of her husband to the king, once again claiming the primordial authority and strange knowledge of motherhood and situating her, as Isabelle's prophecy does, in the body (in particular the breast, the son's first source of nourishment), in a place beyond and deeper than language but also (remember the image of the nurse) exercising control over language and action. The scene of the Oedipal struggle is played out between father and son but, as the King himself (symbolically the ultimate Father) gives in to the demands of the Duchess, it is the Mother who triumphs. Mothers are, of course, intimately linked to nations in the (largely masculinist) rhetoric of patriotic sentiment, as the term “homeland” and the traditional gendering of countries as feminine make clear. The rhetoric of mother England is found throughout Richard II: “Then the land of England, farewell; the sweet earth, farewell, / My mother and my nurse, who still carry me! (1.4.306-309) says Bolingbroke banished, and King Richard speaks of "our peace, which in the cradle of our country/Sucks the sweet infant breath of sweet sleep" (1.3.132-133), conceiving the political situation ("our peace") and therefore, in a sense, of history like the sleeping child in the cradle of the motherland. Most significant, of course, is the famous speech in which John of Gaunt laments the state of his beloved nation, his homeland: "This blessed plot, this land, this kingdom, this England,/This nurse, this breast teeming with royal kings. ,/Feared by their race and famous by their birth,/Renowned for their, 2000.