This book addresses the characterisation and representation of female authority in Shakespeare’s political plays by collecting the linguistic behavioural patterns of the queens of the first tetralogy (King Henry VI Part 1, 2, 3 and King Richard III) – Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Neville – and so by detecting the nature and evolution of their agency. The study is collocated in the field of literary and historical linguistics and draws on an interdisciplinary analytical model informed by pragmatics, (Austin 1962, Leech 1983, Brown and Levinson 1987, Culpeper 1996), stylistics (Simpson 1993, 2004, Burke 2014) and rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1973, Kienpointner 1987). The resulting analysis gathers and lists the sequence of linguistic recurrences of definite characters through a rigorous methodology, aiming to prove whether and how these queens retain the power to influence the course of the story as well as the other characters through the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of their chosen speech acts, the number and length of their turns, the (im)polite verbal behaviour they perform in face-to-face situations. The conclusion of the study points out its replicability for other sources with the purpose of finding new insights in historical/literary texts and of understanding characterisation through linguistics.
