Vulgar History Podcast
Shakespeare’s Greatest Character, Margaret of Anjou
July 22, 2026
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster; I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudors since I was a little girl. This season on the podcast, we will be talking about the notorious Tudors, who they were, the times they lived in, and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.
In terms of this podcast and this season, the Tudor era, I’m defining as starting in 1421, which is the year of the birth of Henry Tudor, AKA Henry VII, and ending in 1603, which is the death of Elizabeth I, who was the final Tudor monarch. So, anyone who was alive at all between those two years is fair game for this season of the podcast. And this is a massive amount of time; it’s almost 200 years. And so, 1421, we’re talking about, like, back England, the Wars of the Roses, the Yorks, and the Plantagenets, and the Lancasters, this whole mess. We talked about it last week on the podcast, and all these cousins who were fighting each other. And then, the end of the Tudor era, Elizabeth I dies, this is like, Shakespeare, we’re in the Renaissance. This whole saga goes from what a lot of people would consider like the medieval period into the Renaissance period.
This episode covers both because we’re talking about Margaret of Anjou, who was Queen of England during the Wars of the Roses era, kind of on and off because her husband, Henry VI, kept being kicked off the throne, and then he’s put back on the throne, and she’s such a powerful woman. And then, almost like, 200 years later, William Shakespeare writes a bunch of plays, and she’s in those plays, Margaret of Anjou. She has the most screen time, or I guess stage time, of any female character in any Shakespearean play because she appears in several of his different plays, because she was around for so much of this time period. But I think this is such a good episode to have for this podcast for this season, because we’re talking about a character, a real-life person who was alive during the beginning of the Tudor era, and then how somebody, William Shakespeare, towards the end of the Tudor era wrote a play about her. So, it’s like, both ends all at the same time.
What we’re talking about today, it’s an interview with two authors, Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern, who are authors of the new book, Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen, which is looking at the life of Margaret of Anjou as she’s portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a really good book; I really recommend it. It’s such an interesting concept for a book. In our discussion you’re about to hear, we talk about the real Margaret of Anjou, but then also what theatre was like when Shakespeare was writing his plays, and why Shakespeare’s Margaret is maybe one of Shakespeare’s best characters, certainly his most interesting female character. So, please enjoy this chat with Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern, authors of Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen.
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Ann: Okay, so today I’m joined by Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern, authors of the new book Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen, which is a really— I’ve never read a book like this before. It’s like, a biography of a fictional character, but also the biography of the real-life person, and also talking about what it was like to do plays in a Shakespeare time. It’s a lot, all together, and I’m excited to talk to you. So, welcome. Charles and Scott, if you can each just introduce yourself and explain kind of what your background is with this topic.
Charlie: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us; we’re totally thrilled to be here talking about Margaret and her portrayals. So, my name is Charlie O’Malley. I am a dramaturge, so I’m kind of the theatre person on this project. What a dramaturge is, it’s kind of, for those of you who don’t know, it’s kind of like an editor who works with plays, new plays, old plays. So, I have a lot of history with reading Shakespeare’s work and putting it on stage in a whole bunch of different contexts. I’m also a historian and a writer. I love looking at theatre history and figuring out how these stories are relevant, and working with new plays too, and figuring out how we can really bring new voices to the stage.
So, I’ve been intrigued by the character of Margaret. She shows up in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, his history plays, where he’s writing the recent history of England, kind of memorializing, like, what the English character is. So, I think Margaret’s just a fascinating person, and I’ve been in love with her for decades. Scott, my co-conspirator, also spouse, is a writer, and he kind of had the idea that we could work on this project together. So, I’ll pass it over to Scott.
Scott: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us on this podcast. Yeah, I’m Scott Stern. I am a writer and a critic and a historian. I come to this less from a theatre background, in fact, no theatre background, and instead from a history and nonfiction background. I’ve previously written two books of narrative nonfiction, both about the history of gender and violence.
So, Margaret’s story is of a much earlier time period than what I’m really used to, but there are a lot of themes of sort of structural misogyny and violence and also resistance that really carried through. And so, to me, this was a very exciting new project where not only did I get to collaborate for the first time on a book, but also write about an earlier era and, as you say, write a somewhat unusual narrative in that we call this a biography, but it’s not a biography of the historical person, it’s a biography of the character and the way the character has changed over several centuries.
Ann: Well, and what I thought we could focus on for this conversation, because the book is so interesting and there’s so many levels to it, but just so we can sort of explain, introduce it to people who might not have a lot of background and understanding about Shakespearean theatre, or understanding about this part of English history. One of the things that I think a lot of people probably know from movies like Shakespeare in Love is that this play, these plays during Shakespeare’s life, the women’s roles were played by young men. So, can you talk about what, and this was… So, she appears in four of Shakespeare’s plays, and I thought we could kind of go in order, her appearance in each of those plays and what it’s like… How much were audiences at that point used to watching a young man play a woman’s role? How long had that been happening for?
Scott: It had been several decades that on English stages, certainly in the capital, it had been exclusively boys in dresses playing women. Earlier centuries there had been women appearing on stage, and actually, on the European continent, there were still women appearing on stage at that time. But for a variety of reasons, England started only having young men in drag playing female characters. And so, that was, like, totally normal for audiences at the time.
Now, that doesn’t mean it was uncontroversial. There were a lot of religious figures who really, really hated this and viewed it as evidence of theatre’s depravity, but audiences would have known to expect it. There’s some interesting evidence and some sort of scholarly speculation that this may even have provided a kind of thrill or, like, titillation for audiences, that they kind of got off on seeing gender play on stage. And playwrights like Shakespeare really played with those expectations, so there’s a lot of characters in Shakespeare who are women who then dress as men. So, what you’re really seeing is, like, a boy dressing as a woman, dressing as a man, and that kind of gender play was something that it appears audiences really responded to.
Charlie: This is the 1590s. So, this is, you know, as you were mentioning, you know, Shakespeare in Love, or if people know the movie or the book Hamnet, this is around the same time; early in Shakespeare’s career, late in Queen Elizabeth I’s life. She’s the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, and Shakespeare is writing these plays about how the Tudor dynasty came to be. So, you know, you might remember from old English class or something, Shakespeare wrote comedies, he wrote tragedies, and he wrote these plays that were also called the histories. So, they’re kind of chronicles of English history. They all kind of have to flatter Elizabeth and her family because there was a lot of censorship going on at the time. She loved theatre, but she also had a really strong hand and was being performed on public stages. So, these plays had to kind of, you know, show her family, people that ended up being her family, in a good light.
As Scott was mentioning, you do have these plays, you know, for example, if you remember As You Like It or Twelfth Night, those are plays in which the boy plays a girl who goes for most of the play in costume as a male as well. But when he gets to Margaret, he comes across this person in history who is a real person. She was a foreigner, a French princess who, as a teenager, she was forced by diplomatic relation to marry the King of England to kind of hopefully provide some sort of peace between England and France, who had been at war. But she also ruled the way a continental woman would, which is not a way an English woman would. There were no queens regnant in England at the time. We didn’t have a process of women ruling in their husband’s place. But when Margaret comes along, she kind of thought she could do that, and so Shakespeare is really playing with that.
He comes up with this idea of this woman who dominates these plays, and she is not just going to sit back and say, “Yes, my Lord” she is going to come forward and tell her husband what she thinks. He creates all of these, you know, kind of incredible scenarios that she finds herself in in these plays as he’s kind of experimenting with, you know, how do we address women in power? Just as we’re coming to the end of Elizabeth’s life, we know she doesn’t have an heir en route. How are we kind of working that out on our public stages, on London stages?
Ann: I think it’s an interesting sort of balancing act that Shakespeare needs to do with this character. The audience are people who are used to having a woman in charge because Elizabeth’s been on the throne for decades, and they’re used to that and they know she’s good at it and, like, she’s a pretty popular monarch. But at the same point, the character of Margaret is a foreigner, and she is on, ultimately, the losing side of this war. So, showing like, “Well, here’s a powerful woman, but she’s also kind of a villain because, you know, she’s French and those are still kind of our enemies.” So, just can you speak about the… I guess how audiences would have viewed this character. If we’re looking at her first appearance, which is in what we now call Henry VI, Part 2… We’ll explain that later, [laughs] it’s like, Star Wars: Chapter IV. So, it starts with Henry VI, Part 2. How do you think he wrote her for an audience? Like, how do you think they would have seen, how they would have accepted this character?
Charlie: So, when she’s first introduced in this play, which, as you mentioned, is kind of picking up in the middle of the timeline, he later goes back and does, you know, kind of prequel plays, she is introduced structurally as an antagonist. She is married to the king; you don’t necessarily know that she’s been married to him against her will, and Shakespeare sets her up as one of the power players in the court. He creates an extramarital affair for her, which we have no evidence that Margaret ever cheated on her husband, the King of England.
Ann: When she was 14, yeah.
Charlie: When she was 14, which would have had a wild thing to do with a man who actually was in his fifties at the time. But Shakespeare creates a love story for them. And though she is kind of she’s very harsh and she’s very cruel in the subsequent play, you know, we see her kill people on stage, we also see a lot of vulnerability for her. We see her in this play, in Henry VI, Part 2, she has this lover, her lover is then killed, and she comes on stage holding his head, holding his severed head, and she speaks to it. The king is talking to her and saying, “What are you doing?” and she can’t see anything. So, just imagine what this was like for audiences in the 1590s, seeing a 13-year-old boy in a wig, carrying a prop head with fake blood on it, talking to it, and this is the Queen of England. You know, this is radical at the time; we’d never seen the royals behave like this.
This is something that Shakespeare is kind of playing with, you know? And this is before he’s written people like Cleopatra or Juliet, or some of the other really famous women in his plays that, later, you know, we’ve had so many marvellous performances of. But she’s kind of Margaret has rough edges, you know, but she can really vacillate between someone that you just really kind of hate and also someone that you pity because she does have a real human side to her, and she has a lot of wrong. She is wronged in a lot of ways in these plays.
Scott: I think that’s a great point, Charlie, and I think the other thing is, like, that kind of ambivalence about Margaret as both villain and a really sympathetic figure is something that, I think that’s probably the sentiment audiences would have had at the time, and it reflected real anxieties they had about Queen Elizabeth I who was aging, and there were there was real anxiety about the lack of an heir. And so, you know, there was a true cult of personality surrounding her in England in the early 1590s. There were people who were, you know, very devoted to her, and at the same time, there were popular uprisings against her, and people were really stressed out about what was going to happen next. You kind of see that anxiety among some other anxieties we can talk about being metabolized on stage in this character of Margaret, who was, you know, a name people might have recognized from the past, but probably not one they knew much about. So, she’s kind of this blank slate that Shakespeare is projecting all of these anxieties onto.
Ann: Well, and also you’re mentioning, you know, coming on stage with the head and everything, like, I do think it would be good to explain to the listeners that at the time, going to see a play… Now, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go see Shakespeare at the festival, and the ticket is two hundred dollars, and it’s Sir Patrick Stewart,” and it’s all very classy. But then, it was like, you’re either going to go see a play, or you’re going to go see someone, like, fighting a bear, and they both cost very little, or they could, depending where you’re sitting. So, could you explain, like, Shakespeare at this time, he’s trying to draw in crowds by just having things that people are going to be excited about.
Scott: Yeah, Shakespeare is, like, mass entertainment. This is a time, obviously, before television, but also before widespread literacy. Most people couldn’t read, so telling stories was a principal form of entertainment. And yeah, as you say, the other forms of entertainment that people would pay or sometimes not pay to see were, like, bear baiting or bull baiting, clowning, miming, also public executions. This was a populace that was used to pretty extreme forms of entertainment. And so, Shakespeare really had to lean into that.
So, now these plays are seen as like, you know, classics and elevated pieces of culture and something that’s not often thought of as, like, mass appeal. But at the time, these were extreme; there were battles on stage, there’s love affairs, there’s people coming back from the dead and talking as ghosts. This was a form of entertainment for the masses, and Shakespeare and basically all of the other popular playwrights from the 1580s and ‘90s, and early 1600s, meant it to be for the masses and easily comprehensible. And so, that shaped the way that these characters were portrayed. They were not meant to be on a pedestal and at a distance. They were physically very close by, and they were meant to be figures that audience members could identify with or hate righteously or love.
Ann: I’m just wondering how much you know, Charlie, about like, how gruesome the special effects would have been in a show like this? Like, when you’re bringing out the head, how gross would it have looked?
Charlie: It would have been probably pretty extreme. There’s a lot of evidence in the text of Shakespeare’s plays – and not to get too, you know, this is what scholars think – but there’s a lot of evidence if you just look at the lines where you can tell there’s meant to be some interplay with the audiences, or just kind of some joking around with them too. You know, we have this idea that you sit quietly and hold your hands and the lights go down, but these were shows done outdoors; people were kind of coming and going, people were selling goods, there was sex work happening. In one of the later plays in the early 1600s, they would use cannons; that’s actually why the first Globe Theatre burnt down, because of a spark from a cannon during a performance. So, yeah, as Scott said, they’re, you know, trying to keep up with like the bear baitings next door. They know that people want something really visceral.
In a way, we still see this a lot with the way people engage with, you know, I mean, like, dating shows or something. They want to feel like they’re seeing something real, like reality television. Elizabeth herself actually really enjoyed performance. She sponsored some troupes, and that’s something that a lot of people in her court didn’t like; they thought it was low, and they thought it was popular, but she liked it. And she had, you know, certain actors that she liked. You know, if you remember, there are some scenes in Shakespeare in Love in which they go, and they perform at the court, and it’s very different than when they’re performing for, you know, the groups of people who pay just a penny to stand, and they’d stand all afternoon. Sometimes they’d get rained on as they’re watching, you know, these crazy battle scenes. These history plays had huge casts with so many characters and battle scene after battle scene after battle scene. Today, we look at them, and we’re like, “Okay, maybe you should condense a little bit,” but at the time, that’s really what the audiences loved to watch.
Ann: Well, and the plays would have been, what? Like, two or three hours long? You need to keep people entertained in a sustained way for quite a period of time.
Charlie: Oh, yeah. And that’s also why there would have been probably these… He would have wrote a whole series of history plays. As you mentioned, Henry VI has three different parts. He was responding to popular tastes. You know, he wrote Part 2, or what we now call Part 2; he wrote a sequel play; and then later he wrote an earlier play, you know, kind of like trying to add on to the, as you mentioned, like Star Wars or something, kind of fan service. Like, there’s another Legally Blonde, there was another Devil Wears Prada. You know, people wanted to see these characters again, and sometimes in the beginning of the plays, they do the same thing that they do in, like, The Devil Wears Prada 2 where they’ll call back. They’ll be like, “Remember this character? Here’s me reminding you what she did in the previous play.”
Ann: Well, that’s where I’m curious to know… So, like, the play comes out chronologically, the first one, what we now call Henry VI, Part 2. Margaret is a fairly major character in this play, and then clearly, people respond to her because in the next one, does she have an even bigger part or similar size part?
Charlie: Oh, yeah. In the play, we now call Part 3, which is kind of the end of this trilogy, that’s kind of the climax of the Wars of the Roses, which are this, you know, dynastic battle that Margaret’s court is involved in. That’s the one where we see her really take over for her husband. She leads armies; she has this tremendous speech to her troops that is very reminiscent of a speech that Elizabeth gave to troops. So, they’re really, really kind of… Shakespeare and whoever he was working with on these plays, because they certainly were collaborative endeavours, it wasn’t just one person, one genius sitting alone at a computer, right? This is a whole group of people participating. They want to really play up that similarity to Elizabeth.
Scott: And I mean, this is also like, you know, she’s not just sort of akin to a protagonist of Henry VI, Part 3, but she’s also continually heightening mistakes and doing things that would have shocked the audience. So, the play basically opens with her calling her husband, who is the King of England, like, weak and incapable, and then she says, “I divorce thee,” and like, leaves him and goes off to raise an army herself. So, she is, like, from the get-go of Henry VI, Part 3, she is set out as the far more militant royal in charge and the one who is, like, going to be leading the army, and the one who, pretty early in the play, stabs her principal rival at the time, the Duke of York. So, she is set up as the head of one of the two warring factions in this basically a civil war that is wrecking England. And so, audiences would have understood her as basically a general, akin to any of the other male generals on the stage, in something that’s completely wrong historically is, like, leading armies in battle, in the front of the army on stage.
Ann: I’m just wondering, you talk in the book, and I kind of know this from Shakespeare in Love, like my main understanding of plays in this time, people, you know, they’re buying food and stuff, and if they don’t like the play, they’re throwing tomatoes or whatever at the actors. Do you think that she was a character that people were like, “Hell, yeah!” Or people are just like, “Oh, my God, this woman, she’s overstepping. This is horrifying,” and they would throw stuff at her? Like, what do you think? How do you think they would have understood a woman leading troops into battle in this play?
Scott: So, that’s a really good question. I think that part of it has to do with Elizabeth I, who had… Who didn’t personally, like, you know, she was not at the head of the army, but there’s a very famous moment in her rule where she puts on, like, male battle armour and gives a pretty famous speech where she talks about having the heart and the stomach of a king. And so, I think audience members would have understood that this was an obvious allusion to Elizabeth I, so they might have been a little reluctant to be too vocally opposed.
But I also think that, like, there is some evidence from Shakespeare’s time that suggests that Margaret was very popular, so she probably was not the person who was getting food or having, like, tomatoes thrown on her face. It appears that some of the lines about her were among the more popular ones, and probably the strongest evidence that she was popular is that Shakespeare kept bringing her back. He keeps inserting her into scenes that, in history, she wouldn’t have actually been in. And then he, you know, he writes the sequel, Henry VI, Part 3, and then later he’ll write the prequel, Henry VI, Part 1, and then after that, he’ll write Richard III. He easily could have cut her from any of those plays. You know, the sort of historical documents that he was basing these plays loosely on did not pay much attention to Margaret, but the fact that it keeps bringing her back, it’s an indication of the fact that Shakespeare was really into her, but also probably that audiences really responded to this character, quite possibly more than the other characters in the play.
Charlie: She’s also memorable. When you’re watching these plays, there are a lot of Dukes, you know? It’s the same when you’re watching, you know, Star Wars or a World War II thing and you have all these generals, and you’re like, “Who are these people?” But he knows that if there’s the one woman in the play, you’re going to remember her. And when she’s off stage, you notice that she’s gone too. At the beginning of Part 3, she ties up her enemy, kills his son in front of him, wipes her handkerchief in his son’s blood, and wipes that all over his face. That’s a tremendous thing for a person to do. Even today, people have trouble playing that scene because it’s so difficult. At the end of the play, Margaret’s son is killed in front of her – spoiler alert for history that’s, you know, many centuries old – and then she weeps over his body, and she says, “Please kill me too. I need you to kill me too,” and they won’t do it, the enemy soldiers won’t do it. And that’s just such a tremendous shift for one character to do over the course of a two- or three-hour play. And Shakespeare is trusting a 14-year-old boy…
Ann: That’s what I was thinking!
Charlie: Or an apprentice player, because they would have apprentices that would often play the female roles, and the more studied, more practiced actors would play, you know, Richard III, the big male roles. But he has some sort of young actor who he thinks can play this. So, that must show us something about what was going on at the time; there must have been actors that he trusted, or talent that he saw that he could write these characters for.
Ann: Well, and you’re saying characters, because Shakespeare, you say in your book, that he includes more interesting women characters than most of his contemporaries would. Can you speak just about the difference in how he writes women versus how other people might have?
Charlie: Absolutely. So, just to skip ahead a little bit to Part 1, which we’ve mentioned is kind of that prequel that he wrote a little bit later. One of the central characters of that is a character called Joan la Pucelle, who we all know as Joan of Arc, who I’m sure is, you know, very familiar to most listeners. And she just, you know, she was French like Margaret; she was fighting against the English, but on behalf of the French, and she was kind of a central character in that play. And then, she disappears very quickly, as we know, she’s executed, and at that point, Margaret comes on. So, he’s kind of replacing one militant woman who is really, you know, kind of exploding expectations for the way that women should behave in these stories with another one, and that’s how he chooses to introduce Margaret, you know, when she’s young, she’s a young girl in that story. But there really weren’t other characters that were kind of appearing like this at the time.
Scott: And I would just add that, I mean, you know, you are seeing in works of other, like, of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, so people that you might have heard of, like Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson, you’re seeing the emergence of what we would now call kind of an anti-hero, which is a flawed protagonist. Someone like Richard III, who’s really intriguing to watch, and you’re, like, maybe even rooting for him a bit, but you also know he’s like a bad person.
Shakespeare’s real innovation was that in Margaret, and in some of the other characters in these plays, he’s creating characters like that that are women. And so, this is Margaret, and it’s Joan, and it’s Eleanor Cobham, who is a rival of Margaret’s in Henry VI, Part 2. These are female characters who are just as complex and just as violent and dangerous as their male counterparts. And so, that was unusual and something that audiences might have recognized at the time as something of an innovation and something that would have kept them coming back, and is, you know, probably part of why Shakespeare has persisted. You know, there are the famous male characters, like Hamlet or Macbeth, but there’s also Lady Macbeth, and there’s also Margaret. So, we have these totally singular characters, and I think that was an innovation from the time.
Ann: Well, I’m wondering… I saved this quote from your book because I thought it was really interesting. It was talking about, I’ll quote from your own book:
Just as Will was writing, England was wracked by a persistent concern about young women bucking the convention of marriage and living and working independently, or masterless, to use a term from that time.
So, in terms of what you were saying, like what these plays say kind of about society and what was going on, he’s writing more female characters, and in society, women are kind of doing a different thing. Can you speak about that connection?
Scott: Yeah. So, women, there was kind of a rise in the 1580s and 1590s of women who were at the time known as masterless. These are women who are living basically on their own, or certainly independent of a spouse or a father. That was a huge source of anxiety for those in power in England at the time. This is also probably not coincidentally an era where you see a peak in witch hunting. There was a huge anxiety in England about witchcraft, and people who were most often targeted and executed as witches were women.
So, you see, all of this – again, this is probably not separate from the anxiety about Elizabeth, this queen who had been in charge for decades, but is soon going to die and doesn’t have a clear heir – there’s all of this gendered anxiety swirling through the air of England. And so, it makes a lot of sense that a popular piece of drama is going to put a lot of that on stage, where you have a female character who is violent, but also sympathetic, who is kind of ungovernable, but also ultimately brought down. And so, you see the ambivalence that Shakespeare has toward Margaret, reflecting the way that his audience would have felt about all of these young women around them who are seen as, like, behaving in inexplicable ways, or misbehaving, or acting dangerously.
Ann: I’m just thinking again about all these things are happening and the roles are being played by young men.
Charlie: Yeah!
Ann: It’s a whole other interesting level. I don’t know if that makes it… Because obviously, at the time, like that was sort of, some people were scandalized or offended by men in drag, but also if that makes it a more palatable message to watch a “woman” behaving in these masculine ways, but actually, it’s actually a man doing it. I don’t know.
Charlie: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that it’s still an incredibly sexist society, and it’s an incredibly regulated society. These plays were one of the… The playhouses were one of the very few places that people could get together and talk about these issues. There were not, you know, obviously there were not blogs, but there was also not really news media in the same way, and anything printed was very heavily censored. So, this was a place where people could— And the plays were censored as well, they had to pass scrutiny. But Shakespeare, obviously, he’s literally Shakespeare, so he can slip things, right, as are some of these other great Elizabethan dramatists. They can slip things in, and they can kind of create conversation about this. And they know, too, it’s not just the literary, it’s the performance that people are seeing, too; it’s the way people speak, it’s the sounds, the voices, the textures. The theatre-going experience is also part of that conversation.
The fact that we have no women whose voices that we’re hearing, we have not a single— You know, this is a man writing, and these are male people performing. There’s obviously gender play going on there, and that’s what a lot of people were, you know, really uncomfortable with. But also, you know, we’re not really seeing women up there on stage speaking. We will. A generation or so after Shakespeare’s death, we do start seeing professional actresses in Shakespeare, I mean, I’m sorry, in England. But not at this time. You know, it’s still a very regulated performance style.
Ann: And I just wanted, if we’re going chronologically, like he writes Part 2, Part 3, then the prequel, Part 1. And as he’s writing these plays, Shakespeare is becoming more famous, like, he’s becoming known. At first, you mentioned, and you say in your book too, the early plays, it was just kind of known, like, these are collaborations, people working together. But eventually, he starts working on his own, and then it’s like, “Oh, it’s a new Shakespeare play.” Can you talk about how that shift happened in his career where suddenly he became himself? That’s the draw. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a Christopher Nolan film. I’ll see it no matter what it’s about because it’s Christopher Nolan.” It’s like, same thing with Shakespeare, right?
Scott: So, like, the era in which Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI, or the first two parts, certainly, of the Henry VI plays and possibly the third, are in what is referred to as his “lost years.” It means that there are these, like, seven years where we know virtually nothing about what he was doing, or even where he was living. This reflected that Shakespeare was a young guy from a small town who was not yet a well-known quantity. And during the exact years he’s writing these plays, he’s also writing other plays that become equivalently popular. One example is Romeo and Juliet. He’s also writing poetry that was massively popular.
So, you know, by the early 1590s, he was probably principally thought of more as a poet than as a playwright, but what he’s really doing is just getting a ton of words out on the page and on stage, and by the early to mid-1590s, he gets together the money, probably from a wealthy benefactor, to become part of a new theatre company and he gets more control over the works that are getting put on stage. That helps him to sort of become cemented very quickly as, like, the leading, or one of the leading practitioners of theatre in the country. It really helped, I think, that Elizabeth I seemed to like him, and that her successor, James I, really, really liked Shakespeare’s work and the work of his company. And so, his rising fortunes are something that’s happening as he’s writing his plays, and can probably be seen in the fact that he gets so much license as these plays go on to really play around with the history.
So, in Richard III, which is the fourth of the plays in which Margaret appears, he brings her back completely unhistorically. She’s literally not in England at the time during the years that are depicted, but he brings her back, and I think that kind of freedom that he had to do that is reflective of the fact that he’s becoming a more powerful figure and a more known quantity in the English theatrical world.
Charlie: He’s experimenting with a lot of new things when he’s writing Richard III. So, Richard, if you think back to high school English class or something, if you’ve ever read or seen this play, he’s the main character, but he is such an anti-hero. He’s this horrible person, but he’s so smart, and he’s so charismatic. It’s why actors love to play Richard, because he is constantly punning, and he’s coming up with all of these wild, you know, kind of conceits.
And then, Margaret is this character that Shakespeare brings back kind of unhistorically to spar with him. You know, her husband has been deposed from the throne, she is sent to exile back in France, where she ends her life. But Shakespeare brings her back to be this kind of Cassandra, prophet figure who is going to say, you know, “Richard, your sins will catch up with you. Your family’s sins will catch up with you,” and she’s right. The character of Margaret is right. Of Richard’s family, the Yorks, they do lose power, and the Tudors do take over, and they become the ruling class. And so, Shakespeare is kind of using her as a figure there to kind of go back and forth with him, and to provide kind of some philosophical commentary on the way that history unfolds, and the way that that’s kind of set the stage for, well, the metaphorical stage, for where we’ve landed in the early modern era and in the Tudor era, how we got monarchs like Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, and then Elizabeth herself.
Ann: I have to say, Margaret’s appearance in Richard III is personally my favourite because she’s just like… [laughs] She’s unfiltered. She’s just, like, no fucks to give. She’s just kind of like, everything has happened to her.
Charlie: She has nothing left to lose when she comes in that play. She’s a good ghost, kind of.
Ann: You mentioned in your book, The Hollow Crown, which is kind of this TV version of the history plays, and I didn’t know the Henry VI plays at all, so I was experiencing them for the first time. And then, when Sophie Okonedo shows up in Richard III, I’m just like, “What?! My fave is back?” [Charlie laughs] It was exciting. And I feel like an audience in Shakespeare’s time might have felt the same. Just like, “Oh, my God, her? I remember her from the other plays!”
Charlie: It’s absolute— That’s actually a leading scholarly theory on why Margaret’s in the plays, because she’s not necessarily… In Richard III, she’s not necessarily important to the plot, but she provides tremendous context, and she’s fun to watch, and she was probably a fan favourite that he brings back…
Ann: Exactly, fan favourite.
Charlie: … to spar with this new character that he’s created.
Ann: You know, like on an old sitcom when, I don’t know, like Steve Urkel walks in and the audience is like, [simulates cheering] like, I feel like that’s like Margaret coming out.
Scott: My first introduction to Margaret was when I was in high school, in English class, we read Richard III, and even then, I was like, who is this character who just comes in and is just, you know, saying the most devastating insults to the King of England, with seemingly no fear at all, whereas every other character is really cowed by Richard, and he is predicting his death and downfall? I think that is probably the way that audiences at the time would have reacted to her too, not just like, “Oh, my God, it’s my favourite from the old plays,” but also like, “You go, girl! You tell him!” Because you, the audience, are seeing things the other characters aren’t. You’re seeing Richard is talking about, like, all of his evil plots, and how he’s going to have all of these people killed, and Margaret is the one who’s continuously calling him out, and rallying the other female characters to oppose him. And so, she’s just delightful to watch.
Ann: In the latter part of your book, you talk about various performances of these plays and how, for quite a bit of time, she was removed from Richard III. She’s often excluded from those, and it’s kind of brought back… Like, she’s been sort of reinserted, in some ways. But I liked, I forget if it was Helen Mirren, one of the other actors who said, like, there’s no other character in Shakespeare who you can play from a young woman all the way through her life to an old woman. The fact that she’s in so many plays… Are there any equivalent characters for men who have that same sort of ubiquity?
Scott: There are no other characters in Shakespeare of any gender who you see their entire life depicted on stage the way you see Margaret. Margaret first appears in Henry VI, Part 1 as a very young woman, basically a young teenager who’s newly wedded to the King of England. She last appears in the chronology of her life in Richard III as a very old woman, like very near death. There is no other character who you get the entire sweep of their life like that. So, in that respect, she really is singular.
Charlie: Yeah, there are a couple other characters in these history plays, like Richard III himself, he shows up as a young man, and then you kind of see him age across the plays. So, sometimes theatres will do this thing where they’ll take all these history plays and perform them in, like, a marathon. Or The Hollow Crown that you mentioned, on television, where they’ll have… That’s a series from about two years ago; they had Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III, Tom Hiddleston was in it. And so, the way they did it was they had, you know, one actor play those characters all the way through, you know, make it like a series, essentially. Whether or not Shakespeare actually saw these as a series, you know, scholars debate. So, there are a few that you see like that, but none that you really see the way that you do with Margaret. You know, I don’t want to take anything away from the other wonderful characters that Shakespeare wrote in, you know, non-serial plays, people like, I mentioned, Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth or Othello, you know, these wonderful characters, but you see them in portions of their lives, you don’t see them really age over the course of many, many decades.
And one thing Shakespeare is also talking about is the toll of war on people over many years. You know, we see decades and decades of civil war; war within England, and war between England and other territories. And he uses characters like Margaret, and there are some other mourning widow characters that show up in Richard III, other queens whose kings or whose husbands have been killed in the wars, and he’s, you know, trying to figure out what effect does this have on the population when countries have been at war for so long? And Margaret is, I think, one of the strongest voices of that.
Ann: I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind when looking at Shakespeare’s plays. It’s just the audience, you know, and often it’s illiterate people or people who have very hard lives who are going there, and it’s like, “Let’s just have a nice time. Let’s get our mind off of things.” But one of the things we’re getting their mind off of is the fact that the country is still getting… Like, their parents, their grandparents would have experienced war, and famine, and, like, plague. I mean, how many times in your book did they say “The theatres are shut down because of the plague, and Shakespeare has to pivot.” Like, the people are living these rough lives, so being able to sort of see a play where they feel themselves maybe represented in this grieving, in this mourning, of people who have also been through stuff like that. That’s interesting, even though it’s, like, what are the events…? Margaret’s life was 100 or 150 years before the plays? Something like that.
Scott: Yeah, it’s like, 1430s to about the 1480s, and Shakespeare’s writing almost exactly a century later in the 1580s and 1590s.
Ann: Yeah. And to them, that wouldn’t be that long ago, really.
Charlie: Yeah, it’d be like if you’re watching a miniseries or something about World War I. You know, maybe your great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, depending on your age, would remember it. But, you know, also, these are a lot of stories to have been passed down; they’d recognize some of the names, but not all of them.
Another really fabulous thing, and why so many people are interested in Elizabethan theatre, is because these playhouses were a place where you can really see social classes come together, and you can see people exploring things, you know, kind of moving. You can really understand, in looking at this era in theatre history, how theatre would interact with society, how people would respond to it. People would make a day of it, they would go to the bear baitings as well. You can see where it was, and you know, we have a lot of evidence as to where it was in the city of London, where these theatres are. So, you know, they were really, really a part of people’s lives. And that’s something kind of new in Shakespeare’s day. Theatre hadn’t been around for a hundred years; this type of, you know, narrative dramas, they were only a couple of decades old. So, they were really a place that people came together to experience stories together, whether they be, you know, historical stories, or stories that Shakespeare or any of the other playwrights at the time had adapted from classic myth or something like that.
Ann: You talk about this in the book as well – I’m just like, everyone read the book! But like, if you could also just explain, to sort of wrap things up a bit… These plays, like, Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, like, people study it in school, it’s performed all the time. Henry VI, I didn’t know, and I’m like, a medium Shakespeare fan. I just had never heard of it until it was included in part of The Hollow Crown. Like, why did those plays…? Why aren’t they as popular, do you think, other than Richard III?
Scott: So, I think there are a number of reasons, and you know, part of this is just speculation. But Richard III is a true masterpiece, and Richard III also, this is a point you made earlier, was written by Shakespeare alone. The Henry VI plays were the product of collaboration. Possibly because of that, they’re somewhat uneven. There are these, like, amazing scenes, often many of them Margaret scenes, but there are also a lot… There’s so much complexity, like, this Duke is taking on this cardinal. Some of it is kind of dull. And so, you have this amazing character persisting through these plays, but the plays themselves are very uneven.
The other thing that some scholars have thought about is, like, the Richard III play has a very clear male protagonist. The Henry VI plays do not have a clear male protagonist; they have a really weak king, and then they have this really powerful female character, which for, like, you know, directors or starring actors who wanted a vehicle for themselves, it’s not necessarily like… Who are you going to play? Are you going to play the antagonist who gets stabbed to death? Or are you going to play the, like, really weak king? Or are you going to play any of the other assorted Dukes? You probably can’t play Margaret, who’s definitely the most interesting figure. And so, the Henry VI plays, in that respect, are just not attractive to a lot of theatrical managers or leading actors in the 18th and the 19th centuries and even in the early 20th century.
It takes really, like, you know, a number of things, but in part, the sexual revolution to really get more interest in the leading female characters of Shakespeare, and in particular in Margaret. So, you start seeing famous actresses like Peggy Ashcroft and Helen Mirren and later Sophie Okonedo playing Margaret only in the late 20th century, once there’s much more, you know, we’ve had the second wave of feminism, and the women’s liberation movement, and much more interest in female characters than, you know, there would have been in, say, the 18th to the 19th centuries, when it really was about like, “Which king am I, leading male actor, going to play?”
Ann: It’s funny that it’s called Henry VI, when he is such a… he’s not the main character.
Scott: Yeah. And that wasn’t necessarily the title that it would have had in Shakespeare’s time. Those are titles that were applied, like, after Shakespeare’s death, when his collaborators are creating the First Folio. And so, that’s where you get these titles, Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2. That’s not even the way that Shakespeare necessarily even thought of them. But it just kind of becomes this convenient shorthand for like, “Oh, yeah, this is the play about this king. This is the play about the next king.” It becomes easy to track them historically. But yeah, Henry VI is an interesting character, but he’s not heroic, he’s not, like, someone… He’s thoughtful, but he’s not decisive. He’s no Richard III.
Charlie: And something that we track toward the end of the book is in recent decades, there’s been a lot more interest in paying attention to female characters from drama. And so, there have been a number of productions that are about Margaret, where an actress, or an actress and a director, want to take on the character, so they will cut and paste. They’ll take all the Margaret scenes, and they’ll make their own drama, and they’ll give it a new name. Sometimes called Queen Margaret or The Margriad or something, and they’ll create a play that’s just about her by cutting and pasting scenes from, you know, four different plays together. And they’ll, you know, use a couple of scenes that she’s not in to fill it out and make it a whole narrative. You know, it’s actually not a new tradition; people have been chopping and cutting and pasting Shakespeare’s plays since right after his death. You know, people are always cutting characters or, you know, putting in musical interludes or something. Adaptation is part of the game. I mean, all of Shakespeare’s plays were adaptations; he didn’t have any original ideas, he was adapting all these other stories.
So, that’s something that’s really kind of exciting about Margaret in recent years is people are saying, all right, when I’m in drama class, you know, in drama school, the boys are going to go off and play Hamlet and Richard III, and maybe the girls want to play Margaret. She’s one of these great roles. So, there’s been an effort to reclaim her really in recent years, which has been really cool and exciting. Some of these plays have, you know, really gone on. Some of them, you know, were experiments that were not as successful. But, you know, we’re really seeing her kind of, especially in the 21st century, when people are kind of comparing her to different figures in the real world, in real-life politics, because you know, she is a leader. Some people are comparing her to, like, you know, Margaret Thatcher or something, pre-21st century, and she’s kind of taking on a new life that way.
Ann: It’s interesting. I’m just thinking because, you know, when the plays came out, Elizabeth is the queen, and everyone’s used to this kind of powerful figure. And then, when the plays start being sort of reassessed, it’s like, you’ve got Margaret Thatcher, and then you’ve got Hillary Clinton, so it’s like, you need to have women in power for people to accept a play about women in power. I don’t know, something like that. I’m just percolating with it.
Charlie: Yeah. And as we know from Elizabeth’s reign, as we know from, you know, Thatcher and Clinton as well, just because a woman is temporarily in the seat of power doesn’t mean that we’ve gotten rid of every sexist trope in society, right? You know, it’s still really present. And Elizabeth leaves, you know, she dies in the early 1600s, and England becomes, you know, it continues to be a very, very sexist society where women have much harder lives than the men in their communities.
Ann: So, at the time that this episode comes out, your book is in the world; people are able to buy it. Do you have readings and events and things that people can keep up with you? Do you have a website? What do you recommend?
Scott: Yes, we will be touring with the book. We’re going to be talking at a bunch of bookstores and theatres about the book. A couple of those events will have actresses reading some of Margaret’s lines.
Ann: Nice!
Scott: So, you can see those events on our personal websites. Mine is ScottWStern.com. Charlie, yours is…
Charlie: Mine is CWBOMalley.com. In June of 2026, we’re going to be in Alameda, California and Los Angeles, California. And then, in August of 2026, we’re really going on tour; we’re going to be in Washington, D.C., New York, Pittsburgh, and Boston.
Ann: Wow! No, that’s wonderful. I’m glad that there will be… I love the idea of having women reading Margaret’s lines. I think that would be… Not just talking about Margaret, but so people can kind of experience what it’s like.
Scott: Yeah, you really can’t fully appreciate Margaret unless you hear the, like, the speeches. Because you know, I think she lives a really interesting life, and you can describe her, and I hope make her compelling, but then you hear these really intense speeches that she gives, and it’s just, like, hair-raising. I mean, it’s amazing. I’m glad that folks will be able to experience that firsthand.
Charlie: And if people are curious, you know, a lot of this lives on YouTube, too. So, you can find even some old performances, you know, old, as far back as YouTube goes, from the 1970s, 1960s, where you can see all sorts of different actors playing this role. You know, just hear those words embodied. You know, Shakespeare wrote for people to speak; he didn’t necessarily write for people to read his words. He didn’t know that people were going to… his plays were necessarily going to be published, or people were going to read them. So, when you hear them, it just really takes on a different, you know, takes on a different meaning. You can really feel it in your body. That’s the theatre person in me coming through. [laughs]
Ann: No, no, that’s what I found as well. You know, like studying Shakespeare in school, it’s one thing. But then, when I was a teenager, I volunteered for the Shakespeare in the Park Festival and seeing those plays done, you’re like, “Oh! This is fun.” It’s so much better than just reading it. So, yeah.
Charlie: Yeah. And people think it’s just the comedies that are fun, but these history plays, they have so much… They have drama, they have comedy, they have pathos. There’s so much action and excitement in these plays as well. Because, you know, Shakespeare, he had to pay the rent too. You know, he wanted his place to be successful so he’d get more commissions.
Ann: Exactly. And if you want people to go see your play instead of go to watch the public execution, then you got to… [everyone chuckles]
Charlie: Then you’ve got to have a disembodied head; you’ve got to have someone carrying out a head.
Ann: “We have a disembodied head, too! Come to the play!” Thank you, guys, both so much for talking with me today. Your book was so fascinating, I really enjoyed reading it. And best of luck with your tour and everything.
Scott: Thank you so much.
Charlie: Thank you so much. Yeah, we’re thrilled to talk to you today.
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So, I super recommend this book, Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. It’s really, really, really interesting, especially if you’re like me, if you had a theatre kid phase, like, just getting and reading all about what it was like to perform during Shakespeare’s time, and then how the play developed, and how the character developed through the years. So interesting. It’s a combination of, like, theatre history, and British history, and Tudor history. So good, so interesting. Everybody should read it, for sure.
I wanted to mention also, speaking of Shakespeare, we were talking about various Shakespearean plays in this episode. My favourite Shakespeare play is one that’s also not much discussed. It’s not Henry VI, it is, in fact, Titus Andronicus, which is Shakespeare’s, one of his messiest plays. It was written during the era when he was kind of co-writing with other playwrights. It’s such a messy story. I love it so much. And I recorded an episode, a bonus episode of this podcast with my friends, Lana Wood Johnson and Allison Epstein, it’s going to be available next week on our Patreon. If you want to listen to that, I mean, now is the time to join my Patreon.
So, anyone who joins my Patreon, it’s a place where you pay a little monthly amount of money, and you get bonus stuff for that. So, if you pay one dollar a month, you get ad-free episodes of this podcast, Vulgar History. If you pay six dollars or more a month, you also get bonus episodes, like the upcoming Titus Andronicus discussion, as well as we have movie discussions… Various different bonus episodes are going on there. Sometimes I post videos there. And this month, the month of July, when we’re just kicking off this Tudor series, you can get 30% off your Patreon membership by using code TUDOR. So, 30% off an annual membership, or 30% off your first month of a monthly membership. Either way, I really appreciate the support, and I hope that I’m providing lots of fun stuff for you to enjoy on that Patreon. One of the other things as well is at the six dollars a month level, you also get access to our Discord, where we’re just, like, talking shit about Henry VIII and having a really good time. So anyway, if you want to join my Patreon, go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter for all the details. There’s a link in the show notes as well. But just use code TUDOR to get that sweet, sweet 30% off discount to join my Patreon, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
And if you love my writing, which maybe you’ve read my writing, maybe you haven’t, but if you’re interested in what my writing is like, I have written a book. It took place in the Regency era, it’s called Rebel of the Regency, and it’s a nonfiction biography of another queen from British history who has a bad reputation. It’s about Caroline of Brunswick. That book is available now to buy wherever you get your books. Get more info on that at RebelOfTheRegency.com.
And next week, I mean, we’re barely just starting the Tudor era, but when I was asking on Instagram, where I am @VulgarHistoryPod, “Who do you hope we talk about on the podcast?” There were a lot of responses, and several of them were like, are you going to talk about Henry VIII and how he sucks? Next week, that’s exactly what the topic is going to be. So, stay tuned for that. Until next time, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
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