An insightful study of Shakespeare’s first great female character.
Step aside, m’lords.
Think of Shakespeare, and you think of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Juliet, or Cleopatra. But the single figure who appears in more plays than any other is Margaret of Anjou, queen to King Henry VI and one of the most complex of late-medieval English women. So say O’Malley, a writer and dramaturg, and Stern, a scholar and critic, in their enlightening book. Shakespeare wrote four plays in which Margaret appears—among his earliest forays into historical drama. She is the first of his great female characters, a woman torn between duty and desire. While the historical Margaret lived for little more than 50 years (1430-1482), the dramatic character takes on an immortality no less compelling than Lady Macbeth or Hamlet’s mother. “She commands armies, acts as regent without her husband’s explicit permission, seeks revenge, strikes a rival, stabs a foe, and revels in the murders of the children of her enemies,” the authors write. She raised questions about gender and power not only for her own historical century but for Shakespeare’s as well. In the 1590s, to have a Queen Elizabeth was to have a woman in a man’s role. Elizabeth herself announced that she had “the stomach of a king.” So, too, Margaret would reach out from the stage to limn herself a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” She became a focal point for understanding how Elizabethan theater could interrogate the nature of female rule; how crafting a woman’s part (that would have been played by a boy, given the times) shaped the young playwright’s sense of domestic drama; and how, throughout the history of Shakespearean performance, actresses tested their own mettle on the mantle of this ferocious queen.
An insightful study of Shakespeare’s first great female character.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781324076551
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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