“In the Breath of Bitter Words”: Curses, Femininity, and Power in Shakespeare’s Richard III

As wives, mothers, and queens, the women in Shakespeare’s Richard III are defined by their relationships to men with political power. Their influence is powerful, but indirect, and when their husbands and sons are killed, their connection to this power dies as well. Deprived of access to the earthly power of male political authority, the former Queen Margaret, Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York each turn to the supernatural power of the curse when they lack agency in their physical world. With her metaphysical question, “Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?” (1.3.192), Queen Margaret calls on heaven to infuse her words not just with prophetic foresight, but with the power to speak her revenge into existence. This paper argues that as a performative speech act, the curse combines elements of feminine lament with masculine action and supernatural authority in a way that both supports and undermines the cursing female character’s performance of femininity. At once extending the early modern belief that words are “women’s weapons,” while also moving dangerously beyond the feminine ideal of silence, the curse calls on unseen supernatural forces to imbue the cursing woman’s words with the power to enact physical harm. Using the J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and injurious speech, this paper explores the combination of masculine speech acts, supernatural soliciting, and early modern femininity to argue that rather than rejecting feminine characteristics, in Richard III, the female characters’ curses manipulate traditionally feminine modes of behavior and speech to regain a measure of political influence in the earthly world through supernatural means.