It’s been a grim week in politics (at least for some). Here, our co-artistic director David Bullen shares his thoughts…
Last week we performed Margaret of Anjou, a reinvention of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. In the programme we noted the parallels in the play with the American presidential election: Margaret is effectively labelled a ‘nasty woman’. Although Margaret gains power in the narrative shared by our play and Shakespeare’s original quartet of dramas, she never completely succeeds in overcoming her male opponents. She is captured and banished, her husband is killed, and a new king takes the throne. And like Margaret, Hillary Clinton was defeated. Donald Trump won. Come January, he will be the new President of the United States.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a recitation of all the myriad reasons why Trump is a spectacularly poor choice for the US president. Rather, you may now be searching for some way to cope. If you’re a creative type, you may feel (like me) the impulse to process what has happened through the lens of art and culture. It was this impulse – combined, perhaps, with post-show withdrawal symptoms – that caused the final scene of Margaret of Anjou to return to me again and again during the night of the election. Turning it over in my mind, it became a means of coping – and I wanted to share it on the off chance is resonated with someone else.
Sian Mayhall-Purvis as Elizabeth Woodville and Ella Garland as the Duchess of York in By Jove’s Margaret of Anjou
The scene is taken from Richard III. Margaret remains in England despite her banishment – an aged, haunting spectre of past woes – and comes across Elizabeth, wife of the recently deceased Edward IV, and the Duchess of York, Edward’s mother. The latter two figures are grieving over the death of the king and his sons – all of which have lost their lives thanks to Edward’s scheming brother Richard, who has seized the throne and quickly established himself as a tyrant. Margaret, Richard’s old nemesis, convinces the woman that he is the enemy and the cause of all their problems. She muses on her hatred for the new king in a speech that resonated strongly with my thoughts as I watched the election coverage:
Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray
To have him suddenly convey’d away.
Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I prey,
That I may live to say, the dog is dead!
All three women are relatively powerless in their patriarchal Games of Thrones-esque world of treachery, murder, and power games, put at a disadvantage by their sex, age, past, or a combination of those elements. They feel as many in America (and around the world) no doubt do: tiny, insignificant, struggling against an unstoppable tide of hate and disaster. And unlike Game of Thrones, these women in Richard III don’t have wildfire or dragons to help them. During this scene, however, they discover a power that they do have.
Elizabeth asks Margaret to teach her how to curse, so that she too may challenge her enemies. Margaret duly obliges. This isn’t witchcraft in the style of Macbeth, though – there are no cauldrons or arcane rituals. Instead, Margaret tells Elizabeth and the Duchess to “forebear to sleep the nights, and fast the days” and then to think over and over their losses to the point of obsession: that is the secret to cursing, she says. It is an injunction to remain steadfastly committed to change in the face of the enemy. It is an assertion of survival and defiance. In the play, it works: after her encounter with Margaret, Elizabeth makes decisive political decisions that hasten the hateful Richard’s end at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
At present we’ve no Bosworth in sight, and no Henry Tudor to rally around against Trump’s Richard. But perhaps we can learn a lesson from Margaret, that spirit of endurance and resistance. Perhaps we can turn all the bitterness and dismay we may be feeling at present into a movement for change. It will be difficult and require fortitude – but it is possible. In America, in Britain, in all the places across the globe where radical right-wing doctrines threaten liberty: we must make use of the power to stand together in defiance and to act to overcome the systemic dangers facing us. That is how we can learn to curse – and in doing so, we too may live to say the dog is dead. Or – because I don’t want to promote violence – we may live to say the dog is impeached.
