Richard II, like most of Shakespeare's historical plays (though notably unlike his comedies and tragedies), establishes a dominated theatrical world by men and masculinity. There are few female characters and those who appear on the scene tend to say little and have less action. But, as critic Graham Holderness observes, "women may not be much in evidence 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 examine in sufficient depth the most powerful ways in which femininity is in evidence 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 drama, but rather constructs femininity as a place of a mysterious and incomprehensible experience (of emotion, of power, of pain) that haunts both male and female characters and makes women far from a silent presence in Richard II. . From John of Gaunt's searing elegy to his threatened homeland, to Queen Isabella's prophetic birth-pain fantasy, to Duchess York's passionate plea on behalf of her treacherous son Aumerle, motherhood and the mother-son relationship are depicted as traumatic , painful and indelible: sources of knowledge and power that resonate not only in individual lives but (through metaphor and rhetoric) in the life of the nation and, therefore, in a certain sense, structure the way in which history is created and experienced within the work. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Queen Isabella is certainly the most tragic female character in Richard II; for most of the play (especially in scene 2.1) he is, as Holderness observes, "a virtually silent and shy character, who is also ignored by everyone else in the room, practically like an absence, a non-existence" ( 170). When she speaks, her words often seem vague and unfocused like the sense of pain that haunts her; entering the garden with her attendants and asking "What sport shall we devise here in this garden / To drive away the heavy burden of care" (3.4.1-2), then stubbornly refusing any "sport", the Queen seems foolish and childish if not completely mad, a pathetic Ophelia-like creature confused with grief. The Queen's speech in chapter 2.2, however, is both eloquent and thematically significant, and her engagement with the question of motherhood is fascinating. Haunted by a sadness that has no obvious cause, the Queen says that "Once again, it seems to me, / Some unborn sorrow, ripe in the womb of fortune / Is coming towards me, and my inner soul / Without anything trembles. For something he grieves / Other than with the separation from my lord the king" (2.1.9-13). Queen Isabella's voice is not only melancholic but prophetic; with what might crudely be called a particularly feminine form of knowledge (intuition denied or ignored by men), anticipates the work's impending tragedy and inserts into the language the fall of a king - a moment of historical and national crisis - of pregnancy and of motherhood, imagining a “luck” that could be broadly defined as the narrative form of the story or play in the role of a pregnant woman, a mother. Rejecting Bushy's reassurance that "It's nothing butconceit, my kind lady" (2.2 .33), Isabella (Holderness 177), historically childless, continues to imagine herself involved, in complicated ways, in the birth of the tragedy. Holderness states that "Isabella naturally uses the image of pregnancy and birth, but displaces such possibilities from her own body, predicting the birth of nothing but misfortune" (176). I am not convinced, however, that Isabella's rhetoric is so removed from her body: the “nothing” was a commonly recognized word Elizabethan euphemism for the vagina and the Queen's repeated use of the word ("my soul within / without nothing trembles" [2.2.12]; "How, though thinking of no thought I think , / makes me swoon and shrink with nothing heavy" [2.2.31-32]; "It is nothing less.../For nothing has begotten my something of pain,/Or something has the nothing of which I grieve" [2.1.34-37]) in speeches that explicitly deal with pregnancy and childbirth suggest that this meaning is consciously referred to here. The female genitals, literally the site of reproduction and birth, metaphorically (and through the play of the world) become the site of premonition and tragedy; Isabella suggests, in fact, that her portentous melancholy is a daughter without a father, a pure product only of the female genitals: "The presumption is still derived/From some ancestor pain. Mine is not like that,/For nothing did it generate my something of pain" (2.2.34-36). Her next line – “Or something has the nothingness of which I grieve” (2.2.37) could be read as a mourning for the loss of that moment of purity or as a reclamation of further agency for the female body, the place of a materialized and embodied knowledge (and therefore power) derived from the experience of motherhood, which becomes more closely tied to Isabella's body when she says "So, Green, you are the midwife of my sorrow, / Bolingbroke the sad heir of my pain. / Now my soul has brought its wonder;/And I, panting, newborn,/I have joined woe to woe, woe to woe" (2.1.62-66). as the "wonder" or monstrous omen (which, of course, is now justified and proven not "nothing" at all) is transmitted through Isabella's soul and confused with her body or genitals - it becomes explicitly linked to the functioning of the state and history: not only are Isabella's personal "trouble" and "pain" united with those of England, but it is through the woman's suffering that the sufferings of the king and the nation are both dramatically anticipated and rhetorically represented . The most explicit representation of the power of motherhood in the play is the last: against the wishes of her husband, who turns against her son Aumerle for his treacherous plot, the Duchess of York begs King Henry's forgiveness on behalf of her son . . Holderness argues that, in contrast to the Queen and the Duchess of Gloucester, "the Duchess of York offers what is in effect a contrasting success story, precisely because she accepts and embraces the subservient and marginal role of women... the prospect of losing her son would deprive her of her very existence" (178), exemplifying Holderness's thesis that the identities of the women in the play are constituted exclusively through their relationships with men, that "their only function in this male world is that of give birth to children for their children." powerful husbands" (177). Holderness reads the Duchess's passionate plea for her son, first to her husband and then - against the latter's will - to the King as a further example of female submission to male power, discovering in her that he begs the King on his knees and his shy appeal to paternal pride ("He is as similar to you as anyone can beman, / Not like me, or any of my relatives" [5.2.108-109]), proves that "to save her son the Duchess is not only willing to humiliate herself... but also to sacrifice from her son the personal traces of her maternal inheritance..." (178). I would suggest that the scenes of the Duchess of York with her husband and King Henry show a much deeper engagement with issues of gender, motherhood, fatherhood, and power than Holderness gives them credit for. To begin with, the Duchess of York, as Holderness acknowledges, represents a “mixed success story” in that she manages to bend the king's will to save her son's life she does so through a kind of submission: “Forever I will walk on my knees / And I will never see the day for the happy to see, / Till you give joy... / Pardoning Rutland, my wrongdoing boy" (5.3.94 -97) - but it is a submission so literal that it seems highly aware of self: this is a woman who, in perhaps inappropriate post-feminist terms, knows what she wants and what she must do to get it, even – especially – if that means a performative re-enactment of the rhetoric and structures of patriarchy. Brilliantly manipulating those structures, the Duchess implores the king to “Say first 'forgiveness,' and then 'rise.' / And if I were your nurse, your tongue to teach, / 'Forgiveness should be the first word they say / . ../Say 'pardon,' king; let pity teach you how./The word is short, but not so short as sweet;/No word as 'pardon' is so fit for the mouths of kings" (5.3 .112-118) . On his knees, he subtly inverts power structures not by almost forcing the king to say "forgiveness" 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 women charged with the responsibility of raising children, although it is worth noting that historically the wet nurse is even more marginalized than the mother) is invested with the power, through teaching, to control what men say, to control the heritage of the language, to decide which words are "for the mouth of kings, then meet." This strange female authority over language is also suggested in Mowbray's lament about his exile: "The language I have learned these forty years,/My native English, I must give up now.../I am too old to flatter a nurse ,/ Too old to be a pupil now" (1.3.159-171). Leaving his homeland and without access to a new source of maternal teaching, Mowbray conceives of himself as robbed of the power of speech, radically dissociated from language itself. The duchess's reversal remains ambivalent and the triumph incomplete, as the oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy cannot be denied in both society and language itself (the speech given by the nurse is inherently masculinist), but the moment is profound nonetheless. : the scene, I would say, suggests that even when it is fully rooted in patriarchal domination (in what Holderness calls an "embrace" and I would define a performative and therefore destabilizing enactment), the woman, as a figure charged with the responsibility of transmitting the language to his (male) children, he exercises a sort of control over that same language and therefore over its uses. In the scene preceding her appeal to the king, the duchess refuses to incriminate her son for his participation in the conspiracy; her husband orders her to do so, denying paternal affection and accusing his wife of excessively emotional feminine weakness: "You affectionate fool, / You want to hide this dark conspiracy… / Away, affectionate woman! If it were twenty times / My son, I would turn to him” (5.2.95-102). The Duchess eloquently argues for favoring family ties over loyaltypolitics (a controversial issue throughout the play, as evidenced by Richard and Bolingbroke's shared blood bond that torments both men) and for the supremacy of maternal experience: "If you had groaned for/him/as I did , though you would be more merciful" (5.2.103). at least suggest that femininity may have distinctive experiences and values, somehow entirely separate from the world of male ideology" (178) but, once again, I would argue that the Duchess's words suggest something more significant than that: the traumatically painful ordeal of childbirth (the Duchess's term "groan", which in Shakespearean usage often refers directly or indirectly to the pains of labor, resonates throughout the play, as in Richard's potentially transgender injunction to the Queen: "Go, count your way with sighs ; I moan with moans/.../Twice for a stop I will moan, the road is short..." [5.1.88-91]), a test that breaks and at the same time strengthens the primordial bond between mother and child gives the woman access to a realm of the physical and the psychic experience is not only "separated from the world of male ideology", not only is it in contrast with it, but it exerts on it a mysterious power while remaining incomprehensible to him. Although linked to Linda Bamber's psychoanalytic concept of female Otherness, "feminine principle separated from history" (quoted in Holderness 167), this evocation of maternal experience claims authority and power not only against history but within it - or even over it: the profound original The bond between mother and child, the traumatic (because painful and indelible) ordeal of childbirth, alters the form of history (or history as written within the historical drama). "His words come from his mouth, ours from our breasts" (5.2.102) says the Duchess of her husband to the King, once again claiming the primordial authority and uncanny knowledge of motherhood and situating it, as does the prophecy of Isabella, in the body (in particular the breast, the child's first source of food), in a place beyond and deeper than language but also (remember the image of the nurse) which exercises control over language and action. The scene of the Oedipal struggle takes place between father and son but, when the King himself (symbolically the supreme Father) gives in to the Duchess' requests, it is the Mother who triumphs. Mothers are, of course, intimately linked to the nations in which they live. the (largely masculinist) rhetoric of patriotic sentiment, as clarified by the term "homeland" and the traditional feminine gender of the countries. The rhetoric of England as mother recurs throughout Richard II: "Then the land of England, farewell; the sweet land, adieu, / My mother and my nurse, who bear me still!" (1.4.306-309) says the bandit Bolingbroke, and King Richard speaks of "our peace, which in our country's cradle / Draws the sweet infant breath of sweet sleep" (1.3.132-133), conceiving the political situation ( "our peace") and therefore, in a certain sense, of history as of the child sleeping 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 motherland: "This blessed ground, this land, this kingdom, this England,/This nurse, this womb teeming with kings royal,/Feared by race and famous by birth,/Famous for their deeds far from home,/For Christian service and true chivalry,/As is the sepulcher in obstinate Judaism/Of the world's ransom, the son of the blessed Mary..." (2.1.50-56). Holderness argues: "In Gaunt's feudal and aristocratic perspective, women appear as the passive vehicles through which the patriarchal seed is procreated... Even the femininity of his metaphorical 'England' is ultimately spurious, since, 2000.