Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen

Join authors Scott Stern and Charles O’Malley, in conversation with Phillipa Kelly, on their latest book, Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. 

Margaret of Anjou is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than King Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life—from youth to old age—appears on stage. She is a wealth of insight into Shakespeare’s understanding of, and influence on, ideas of gender and sexuality, and she speaks by far the most lines of any of his female characters. She has allowed the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, and Sophie Okonedo full range for their stunning talents. Yet today, most audiences have still never heard of Margaret of Anjou.

But who was Margaret? In the fifteenth century, she was a fourteen-year-old French princess married to an English king, soon thrust into command amid a bloody civil war. A hundred and fifty years later, she was resurrected on the Elizabethan stage in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. Her story, as it has changed over the centuries across the page and on the stage, brings to life the evolution of theatre and shows how Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself, still unfolding.

About the Authors

is a scholar and public interest lawyer. His first nonfiction book, was a New York Times editor’s choice selection, a Boston Globe best book of the year, and has been optioned for feature film. His popular writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. 

Charles O'Malley is a writer and dramaturg. He received his doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama in 2021. He is the editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance: Historiography, Narrative, and Equity in Dramatic Practice. He is currently completing his next book, Theatre for a New Age: Queer Performance in 1970s San Francisco. As a theatre maker, he has worked at Page 73, the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, the Bay Area Playwright's Festival, Jackalope Theatre, and many other theatres. His writing has been published in TDR, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. 

About the Moderator

Philippa Kelly is Resident dramaturg at the Oakland Theater Project and lead dramaturg at Marin Shakespeare Company, and has served as production dramaturg at many others including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the San Francisco Playhouse, the Magic Theatre, and Shotgun Theatre. She held a long-term appointment as Resident Dramaturg with the California Shakespeare Theater before its demise in 2023. In 2015 Philippa received a National Bly Award for Innovation in Dramaturgy from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She served as dramaturg for the script for Margaret of Anjou for theater scholar/playwright Elizabeth Schafer of Royal Holloway, London, and which the two staged in England, Australia and America in 2016 and 2017.  

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