Ever so briefly, in the back of a car, above dirty dishes, in rooms omitted by history, female agency is assumed in a collective form, through tears, outbursts, and public outcries. So, I invite you to rethink the age-old trope of the emotional woman. Delve into her “lamentations, curses, and denunciations.” Attempt not to surrender her to isolation and ineffectiveness. This is a call for you to reevaluate her reactions—to see them as effective actions. Because in a heinous society, one who cannot react is nothing but a victim of their own lunacy.
Let’s go about this matter, evoking the classics (since name-dropping is the consolation of the unfortunate), and rethink Shakespeare’s Richard III. This play, whose plot revolves around self-centered, immature male characters, the female characters, in no one’s surprise, speak in less than thirty percent of the play, and yet, in this extremely male-dominated universe, the words “mother” and “children” appear more than in any other Shakespearean play. That suggests something incredibly unfamiliar: women’s cries not only were ultimately taken seriously, but also conveyed “compelling truths” and on their own could have been perceived as an early form of activism and resistance.
More specifically, the women in the play were the only ones who publicly stood against Richard and exemplified their resistance, juxtaposing with the silent stance of the common Londoners (the “public” of the play) and the cowardice of the nobles. The women, in their supposedly melodramatic cries, in their desperate begging and in their annoying screams, were actively name-dropping, irritating, and frightening the killer/king “before his own men.” Behind their puffy eyes there was a flame that burned brighter than any “glorious summer by this son of York—” that of the demand for truth, the demand for accountability, the demand for justice.
If Shakespeare did it then, why can’t we do it? We have been reading him for centuries, and yet we still highlight the rhetorical powers of Richard, the elusive nature of Hamlet, the complex Othello, and forget the vocal Queen Elizabeth, the cunning Isabella, the eerie three witches. We falsely attribute to women the leftovers of a literary canon, the leftovers of a blood-ridden history, the leftovers of a heinous society, and our persistence is laughable, because cries cannot be muted for long and tears can alter the chemistry of the body of civilisation.
Acknowledge the undeniable force, or, your “kingdom for a horse…”
Source: King Richard III- edited by James R. Siemon
