The Queens

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London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray them here in the timelessness of their quest. As Ernst Kantorowicz has said so clearly in The King’s Two Bodies, all royal personae exist in two worlds: the private world of their needs and desires; and the public world where they become the emblematic icon of the realm. It is on the ritualized ground between these two worlds where the human drama is seen most clearly in all of its comic and tragic, visceral and political, temporal and metaphysical astonishments. Yet this traditionally male ground has rarely been explored with women characters, and has even less frequently been presented in the context of the primal mystery it ultimately is—the vision of public majesty in the instant before the death of the private body.

The Queens, first published in an English translation by Coach House Press in 1992, is presented here in a new edition, containing the latest revisions by the author and the translator.

Cast of six women.

AUTHOR

Linda Gaboriau

Linda Gaboriau is a Montreal-based dramaturge and literary translator. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the CBC as well as the Montreal Gazette, and worked in Canadian and Quebecois theatre. Gaboriau has won awards for her translations of more than 100 plays and novels by Quebec writers, including many of the Quebec plays best known to English Canadian audiences. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.

AUTHOR

Normand Chaurette

Normand Chaurette was born in Montreal in 1954. His published plays include: Rêve d’une nuit d’hôpital; Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans; Fêtes d’autome; La Société de Métis; and The Queens (Talonbooks 1998). Fragments of a Farewell Letter Read by Geologists (Talonbooks 1998) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 1987 and won the Prix de l’Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre for Best Play Produced in 1988. His novel, Scènes d’enfants, was nominated for a 1989 Governor General’s Award. Chaurette’s plays have been showcased or produced in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Banff, New York, Paris, Brussels and Florence, as well as in Zaire and the Congo. His most recent play, available from Talonbooks, is All the Verdis of Venice (2000).