Shakespeare's Margaret
Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen (forthcoming from W.W. Norton, 2026) (with Charles O’Malley)
Shakespeare's most powerful female character, her historical inspiration, and her reinventions in performance through the centuries.
She is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than King Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life—from youth to old age—appears on stage. She is a wealth of insight into Shakespeare’s understanding of, and influence on, ideas of gender and sexuality, and she speaks by far the most lines of any of his female characters. She has allowed the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, and Sophie Okonedo full range for their stunning talents. Yet today, most audiences have still never heard of Margaret of Anjou.
But who was Margaret? In the fifteenth century, she was a fourteen-year-old French princess married to an English king, soon thrust into command amid a bloody civil war. A hundred and fifty years later, she was resurrected on the Elizabethan stage in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III.
And in every era since the Bard’s, actors, directors, and producers have recast their own Margaret, slicing, dicing, and rearranging the original Shakespeare to highlight or diminish Margaret’s role depending on the sensibilities of the time. It is this evolution of Margaret’s portrayal that Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern track in Shakespeare’s Margaret, from Elizabethan boy-actors in wigs enacting misogynist fears of witchy women to feminist celebrations of Margaret’s uninhibited grasp of power and clever commentaries on global politics and world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher. Her story, as it has changed over the centuries across the page and on the stage, brings to life the evolution of theatre and shows how Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself, still unfolding.
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"This wonderfully imaginative ‘biography’ of one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating and fully realized female characters gives Queen Margaret―fiercely ambitious, ruthless, dangerous, and irrepressible―a life of her own. Margaret lives!"― Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve and Dark Renaissance
"Historical figure, playwright’s creation, scholars’ conundrum, directors’ dilemma, actors’ opportunity, audiences’ delight; from England to Germany to Honduras, this fifteenth-century French queen of England has been resurrected and reimagined across time, taste, and geopolitical circumstance. Here, finally, Shakespeare’s Margaret occupies center stage from prologue to epilogue in this terrific balancing act of exhaustive research and inexhaustible imagination."
― Catherine Sheehy, chair of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, Yale School of Drama
"Unique and compelling . . . a lively, thoroughly researched, 360° history of Margaret of Anjou, examining the real queen herself, the social circumstances in which Shakespeare transformed her into his ‘she-wolf of France,’ the four of his plays she appeared in, and the extended life her character has had in the centuries since."
― Hugh Ryan, historian and author of My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond
"What a gift this book is. For any reader, expert or new, who loves poetry, dramatic tensions, the theatre, and great writing, Shakespeare’s Margaret is for you."
― Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
"Margaret’s image has, over the centuries, been colored, shaded, and shifted by playwrights, the primary one being Shakespeare. As Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern show in this fascinating study, in unearthing who Margaret was, we also uncover an important history of who we are."
― Philippa Kelly, author of The King and I and dramaturg of Margaret of Anjou