She is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life–from youth to old age–appears on stage. She has allowed the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren and Sophie Okonedo full range for their stunning talents. Yet who was Margaret of Anjou? In the fifteenth century, she was a fourteen-year-old French princess married to an English king, soon thrust into command amid a bloody civil war. A hundred and fifty years later, she is resurrected on the Elizabethan stage in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. Since then, every era has recast their own Margaret—highlighted or diminished depending on popular sensibilities around gender. Her story, as it has changed over the centuries across the page and on the stage, shows that Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics and history itself, still unfolding.
