If you google Shakespeare’s plays, you will see an impressive list, but nowhere on it will you find “The Life and Death of Queen Margaret,” a “new Shakespeare play” created by Massachusetts-based Real Live Theater and to be performed at Shea Theater in Turners Falls on Saturday.
And yet it’s not at all a stretch to credit the long-dead Bard with this new play. During his illustrious career, Shakespeare frequently collaborated with other playwrights, notably John Fletcher, Thomas Kyd, George Peele and Thomas Middleton on such crowd-pleasers as “Macbeth,” “Measure for Measure” and “Titus Andronicus.” Across the centuries, Shakespeare has found two 21st-century collaborators, Dan Morbyne and Toby Vera Bercovici, to create a play illuminating “what really happens when women rise to power inside of patriarchal systems.”
Queen Margaret, considered to be one of Shakespeare’s most vivid female characters, can be found in the historical tetrology of “Henry VI, parts I-III” and “Richard III,” historical plays about the fateful Wars of the Roses in 15th-century England. As these plays are amongst the most seldom produced in the Shakespearean canon, however, Margaret is not a character well-known even to theater buffs and Bard enthusiasts.
“We lifted Margaret’s arc from the three Henry VI plays and from Richard III, although we heavily shaped and edited it,” says Bercovici, “and then we created scenes by stitching together text from many different Shakespeare plays. ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ ‘The Tempest,’ ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and the list goes on. These created scenes came both from our imaginations and from the real Margaret of Anjou’s life history. We wanted to flesh her out, give her a childhood, give her a strong motivation for behaving the way she does, so that she is more of a real human being and less of a man’s conception of Evil Powerful Woman.”
For those portions of Margaret’s story that cannot be expressed in Shakespeare’s words, New York-based choreographer Annelise Nielsen, who also performs in the play, has incorporated dance and movement to continue the story on another level of expression.
The historical Margaret was a French princess married to Henry VI of England, a king known for his weak will and bouts of insanity. She was unanimously praised by chroniclers and contemporaries, the Duke of Orléans saying, “England had never seen a queen more worthy of a throne than Margaret of Anjou. It seemed as if she had been formed by Heaven to supply to her royal husband the qualities which he required in order to become a great king.”
According to Alison Weir’s “The Wars of the Roses” (1995), “Margaret made it clear from the first that she was to be no passive consort, content to remain in her husband’s shadow. She had a fine brain and meant to use it, even though the business of government was then thought to be a male preserve” (130).
… Then thought to be a male preserve? Margaret’s story as a powerful and, therefore, reviled woman seems to have more political resonance than ever. As Bercovici and Morbyne were creating “The Life and Death of Queen Margaret,” Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president.
“(Clinton) was the recipient of misogynist horror after misogynist horror, heaped upon her by Democrats and Republicans alike,” Bercovici recalls. “If you translate some of what was said about Margaret, at least in Shakespeare’s text, into contemporary speech, it’s shockingly close to what was said about Hillary Clinton. It makes one wonder how much progress women have made.”
The fate of powerful women was on Shakespeare’s mind 420 years ago, as it is on our minds today. Margaret’s legacy received great craftsmanship in Shakespeare’s hands and no less so in this current production.
Bercovici has an impressive directing résumé, and Real Live Theater has produced daring works to critical acclaim throughout the Pioneer Valley. After staging “The Life and Death of Queen Margaret” at the Drama Studio in Springfield on Friday and the Shea Theater on Saturday, Real Live Theater will bring its play to Theater for the New City in New York for two consecutive weekends.
For tickets and more information about the show, visit: www.reallivetheatre.net
Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is a Greenfield-based writer and educator. She welcomes your feedback at jennifer.abeles@gmail.com