The Gendering of "Dis-ease" in Shakespeare`s Richard II

Abstract

This paper attempts to read Shakespeare’s Richard II awry, by diverting our eyes from the traditional historical scene and the oppositional paradigm of the two kings, Richard and Bolingbroke, and by focusing on the affects of sorrow and grief as well as the gendered expression of the “dis-ease” presented respectively by Isabel and Richard. The play’s gendering of “dis-ease” is extremely intriguing. While Richard’s grief is always with a cause, which is an effect of his soul and is concerned with his forefather patriarchal lineage, and presented as a form of male melancholy, Isabel’s sorrow is not always with a cause, which is inevitably linked to the maternal imagery--the womb, the pregnancy, and the power of generation--and hinted as a fit of hysteria. Whereas Richard’s melancholy often poses the questions of identity, subject formation, and representation, Isabel’s womb-engendered sorrow or hysteria is a matter of intuition, feminine feelings, and things imaginary. This paper, thus, is inevitably a feminist project because it exposes the contingency of all definitions of gender. It puts emphasis on the negotiations between female “hystoricized” sorrow and male “historicized” grief.