Hair standing on end Why Should I Care

Why Should I Care?

We know it's Hastings who says this quote, but we want to focus on Margaret for a minute. After all, it's Margaret who has the last laugh. All her predictions come true, which is exactly why Hastings is so afraid of her.

But it's a bitter laugh. She has let herself be caught up in the machinations of the men, and since she, as a woman in the 1400s (when the play takes place), is ultimately less important than them, she suffers less grand ends than their martyrdom and mourned memories.

Her curses are a small gesture from Shakespeare. They give her power in a society where she is powerless. She even ends up teaching the other women in the play how to curse. She's just that scary. In many ways, Margaret represents the emotional crippling that's the natural result of all the horrible stuff that happens in the play—to everyone, but to women in particular.

For the men, this is a battle of good and evil. But for the women of the play, the result of all this power politicking is dead husbands and sons, meaninglessly lost at the hand of treachery. The women are reduced to powerlessness, left to mourn the dead and hate the living, while depending on the charity of others to survive.

The only thing they have to nourish them is their rage. The women have power to bring others misery, but they cannot alleviate their own misery by bestowing it on others. Margaret becomes the icon of powerless feminine suffering.

We think a scary, angry, ninja-like woman with the eerie ability for her wacky curses to come true is something that interests us, don't you? It's just all the more important because she's a butt-kicking chick in a time when women didn't really have much power. Now that probably would have made some of Shakespeare's audiences' hair stand on end.