Shakespeare's Cruel Queens

Abstract

THERE is a murderous woman in the plays of Shakespeare, theatrically effective always and sometimes profoundly moving, who rants and rails at a weak husband or a lover and accuses him of too much pity, too much milk of human kindness, who curses her own femininity and cries out, Oh God, that I were a man! She is, of course, well realized in the depraved Goneril and Regan of The Tragedy of King Lear (I 6o5i 6o6); and here we know her prototype, the wicked sisters in the anonymous old play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella. But the lady appears much earlier than King Lear-as early, in fact, as Queen Margaret in 2 Henry VI (1590-1592), a work commonly named the dramatist's first play. We see something of her nature also in the charming Beatrice of Much Ado (I598-I600), one member of the tribe not a queen; and she flowers completely in Macbeth (i6o5-i6o6), where she is presented as the pathetic, yet unspeakably evil, Lady of Inverness Castle.1 Now, it is my belief that all of these creatures of darkness may in one respect at least be reduced to a common denominatorthat in their worst moments they find a source (like Goneril and Regan of King Lear) in Gonorill and Ragan of the old play; and it is my purpose in the investigation which follows to offer evidence that points toward such a conclusion.2 Opportunity for Shakespeare's using the Leir as early as 2 Henry