War Widows

Abstract

During Shakespeare’s lifetime, England was generally peaceful, yet memories of the War of the Roses and its prologue in the rebellions against Henry IV remained alive, fanned by Tudor apologists eager to justify absolutist monarchy. Following Holinshed and Hall, two of the most unreliable but accessible sources,¹ Shakespeare’s chronicle plays rehearse fifteenth-century history with its motif of war as widow-maker. During the War of the Roses, aristocratic women were likely to be widowed a decade sooner than in peacetime and left with children correspondingly younger. Widowed mothers lived in fear for youngsters at risk because of their dynastic value. When husbands were on the losing side, the widows’ estates might be forfeit, leaving the survivors impoverished (Rosenthal 146, 139–40). In the plays as in reality, ambition often annihilated family loyalty. Joel Rosenthal sums up significant events in the life of Cecilly Neville, the Duchess of York, as Shakespeare depicts her in Richard III: “[O]ne or perhaps two of Cecilly’s sons had killed a third … the youngest labeled his oldest brother a bastard and his mother a whore, and then caused two of his nephews to disappear (if not worse) … ” (143). Whatever power widows like Cecilly may have possessed as adjuncts to their husbands was lost; they were on their own. The challenge they faced was not without theatrical appeal, as Shakespeare realized when he launched his career by writing the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. In Henry IV, Part Two, his cameo war widow, Kate Percy, has only one speech in the play, but it renders her unforgettable.