The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, widely regarded as Shakespeare’s first masterpiece,1 is his only play that commences with a soliloquy. Moreover, it is a soliloquy of a special kind, very different from those he has provided Hamlet, for example, or Macbeth: devices whereby we eavesdrop on a character’s own ruminations, an inner dialogue in which, often enough, he or she acknowledges being confused, perplexed, of divided mind, conflicted. Whereas, with but one exception (the last), Richard’s soliloquies reveal a mind composed and clear of purpose, albeit predominantly villainous. Moreover, they are tacitly addressed not to himself but to the audience, seemingly taking us into his confidence and thereby inviting us to share his perspective.2 To the extent his appeal is successful, he induces our passive complicity in his schemes.
This compromising relationship is initiated by his opening soliloquy, one of the most dramatically engaging, most memorable Shakespeare ever crafted:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag’d War hath smooth’d his wrinkled front:
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up—
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them—
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophesies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day shall Clarence closely be mew’d up
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be—3
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes. (I.i.1–40)4
Having shared his stratagem with us, the mock-surprise / mock-sympathy / mock-indignation with which Richard then greets Clarence—“Brother, good day; what means this armed guard / That waits upon your Grace?”—elicits a frisson of anticipation, whatever else. And as we follow Richard’s further machinations, and share in the amusement with which he plots the ruin of those he beguiles, we find that something in us is secretly cheering him on, as it were, despite recognizing him to be evil, a monster even. But ever so fascinating! Why the fascination?5 Admittedly, the political environment in which he operates makes it that much easier for us to indulge a grudging admiration for him, since there’s almost no really attractive, “good” character to root for.6 As Richard’s mother laments, the very age is “accursed” (II.iv.55). But surely our savoring of Richard’s villainy bespeaks some deeper truth about our natures, that something in us enjoys his clever scheming, his witty irreverence, his malicious toying with people, his willful displays of power, very much as he does.7 And consequently, Shakespeare, through Richard, is toying with us, albeit for the higher purpose, perhaps, of promoting self-knowledge.
But Richard’s opening soliloquy is more than simply a display of the ruthless ambition and rhetorical power with which Shakespeare has invested him. First of all, embedded in it is an ambiguity that points to what would seem an important metaphysical issue raised by the play: “Therefore, since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain.” (I.i.29–30) As spoken by Richard, he is almost surely to be understood as meaning “self-determined”—that this is the role he has chosen for himself. After all, it’s not as if Lover and Villain are the only two options in life, such that if one is foreclosed, logical necessity dictates that a person pursue the other. As crafted by Shakespeare, however, the line in question presents rather different possibilities that cannot be ignored, since they connect with what strikes me as another dramatic high point of the play, namely, old Queen Margaret’s great curse-off in the third scene. What I have in mind is the fact that the evils she wishes upon the other seven characters present, and upon Richard in particular, are for the most part fulfilled.8 Why so? That is: How so? By what agency? Likewise fulfilled is Anne’s cursing of any future wife of Richard, which so ironically reverts upon herself. We are not allowed to ignore this facet of the drama, since all of the characters affected—save only Richard—recur to these curses upon their realization (e.g., III.iii.15–20, III.iv.92–94, V.i.25–27). Lady Anne’s more ample recollection has a special pertinence (to be examined later), as in a different way does ex-Queen Elizabeth’s when she again meets old ex-Queen Margaret, and begs of her: “O thou, well-skill’d in curses, stay awhile / And teach me how to curse mine enemies” (IV.iv.116–17).9 Nor is Richard altogether exempt from the effects of fateful predictions, anxiously recalling a disturbing pair of prophecies, one by the late King Henry, the other by “a bard of Ireland” (IV.ii.94–105).
So, would Shakespeare have us regard the outcomes of human affairs as somehow pre-ordained—that perhaps “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (as he has Hamlet assure Horatio)?10 Or is it only the consequences of choosing Evil that sooner or later follows of necessity, that people in effect curse themselves by such choices?11 Shakespeare has this possibility be suggested by pious-seeming Richard, referring back to the curses his father laid on then-Queen Margaret for the killing of his “pretty Rutland,” supposedly but a boy (though, historically, seventeen at the time): “His curse then, from bitterness of soul / Denounc’d against thee, are all fall’n upon thee, / And God, not we, hath plagu’d thy bloody deed” (I.iii.177–80). Queen Elizabeth immediately adds, “So just is God, to right the innocent”—ironic words, to say the least, given what seems to be the future fate of her own two boys.12 Then Hastings, Rivers, Dorset, and Buckingham each in turn denounce the deed. To all of whom old Margaret rejoins, “Did York’s dread curse prevail so much with heaven … ? / Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven? / Why then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses” (I.iii.191–96; cf. IV.iv.150–51).13
The opening soliloquy raises other issues, however, that are more immediately germane to the themes of this volume. As Richard sees it, war, the traditional arena of honor and bloodlust, has moved from the battlefield to the bedchamber, and changed its demeanor accordingly. More to the point, this change of venue entails a radical revision in the taxonomy of qualities that favor victory. Those that best fit a man for mounting and using fearsome war-horses are not the same as those most suitable for a very different kind of mounting, satisfying a different kind of lust (or love, if you prefer). But however nimble the capering characteristic of weak, piping times of so-called peace, it is still war. Politics is simply the continuation of war by other means, whether in the boudoir or the boardroom, pulpit or council chamber. Life is war, because life is competitive. And in the final accounting, the only thing that matters is who wins, hence rules.
If Richard is to be taken at his word, this change in the locale of war has left him profoundly disadvantaged since his body is not shaped for the sportive tricks of courtship and love-making, being such an ugly cripple. Shakespeare has him provide a more expansive description of his deformity upon his full dramatic debut in Part Three of Henry VI. In an even longer soliloquy at the very center of that play, young Richard of Gloucester (The late Richard of York’s third surviving son) first admits an ambition to wield England’s sovereign power; then seems to concede its impossibility, since so many legitimate heirs stand between him and the crown; he then considers what other pleasure the world might afford him, such as to make his heaven in a lady’s lap—a possibility he immediately rejects:
Why, Love foreswore me in my mother’s womb,
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail Nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear whelp
That carries no impression like the dam.
And am I then a man to be belov’d? (3H6 III.ii.152–63)
Thus he returns to his earlier thought: “since this earth affords no joy to me / But to command, to check, to o’erbear such / As are of better person than myself, / I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown.” (III.ii.165–68) He then rehearses the many difficulties that stand in the way of his gaining supreme power, but concludes he is more than a match for them:
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions …
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.14
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it further off, I’ll pluck it down. (III.ii.183–95)
So, to summarize, Richard claims that Love for him is out of the question because he’s such a deformed, physically repulsive cripple as to be unlovable; and that, consequently, he’ll seek power over all those more handsome fellows by way of consolation (while, not incidentally, hating the sort of world that normal people prefer, that in which one is free to idle away one’s time pursuing life’s pleasures).
In the very next scene, however, we are given some reason to doubt these confidences he has so enjoyed sharing with us, his conscripted accomplices. First of all, how physically handicapped is he really? Apparently not so badly as would preclude his being a very fearsome warrior. When he halts the funeral cortege of the late King Henry, commanding that the corpse be set down and threatening to make a corpse of anyone who disobeys him, he is sufficiently intimidating that even the honor guard of professional soldiers quake with fear at the prospect of challenging him—or so Lady Anne implies: “What, do you tremble? Are you all afraid? / Alas, I blame you not, for you are mortal” (I.ii.33–44).15 And though in the play’s finale Richard is slain at the battle of Bosworth Field, it is not before he has once more proven himself among the most formidable fighters there engaged. As the loyal Catesby attests in urging Norfolk to his rescue: “The King enacts more wonders than a man, / Daring an opposite to every danger. / His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights, / Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death.” Then when Richard himself comes upon the scene, shouting his famous “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” and Catesby urges him, “Withdraw, my lord; I’ll help you to a horse,” Richard responds, “Slave! I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die. / I think there be six Richmonds in the field: / Five I have slain today instead of him” (V.iv.1–12).16 How likely is it that a limping hunchback with only one good arm would be such an effective killing machine?
This leads me to question Richard’s second claim, that his bodily condition precludes his proving a successful lover of women, and therewith to the primary theme of this chapter. Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne is a dramatic tour de force—indeed, to my mind, having few rivals in the entire canon for sheer theatricality—and not least because Shakespeare has Richard emphasize its prima facie unlikelihood. However, the episode also makes manifest the key mystery of the play, and as such points to its deeper understanding. Shakespeare has this puzzle be posed with unusual explicitness by Richard in the soliloquy that concludes the play’s very rich first scene.17 He has been conversing with Lord Hasting about the state of King Edward’s health. Upon Hasting’s leaving to visit the ailing King, Richard muses, “He cannot live, I hope, and must not die / Till George be pack’d with post-horse up to Heaven.” That is, Richard, having persuaded the King to issue a writ ordering the execution of brother George, he wants it carried out before Edward dies, for thereupon the writ would be vacated. So Richard continues:
And if I fail not in my deep intent,
Clarence hath not another day to live:
Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy,
And leave the world for me to bustle in.
For then I’ll marry Warrick’s youngest daughter—
What though I kill’d her husband and her father?
The readiest way to make the wench amends
Is to become her husband, and her father:
The which will I, not all so much for love
As for another secret close intent,
By marrying her which I must reach unto. (I.i.145–59)
What is Richard’s secret intent in marrying the young widow, Lady Anne—which surely must constitute the primary, if not the exclusive, motivation behind his spectacular display of will to power: her unlikely seduction?18
One might begin by eliminating what was instrumental for the historical Richard: that she was an heiress of very considerable wealth, not only from her disgraced father, Warwick, the erstwhile “King-maker,” but from her mother as well.19 However, inasmuch as there is no mention in the play of her being wealthy, this is not a plausible candidate for Richard’s secret motive. Nor does there seem to be any clear answer in the seduction scene itself, which instead simply compounds the puzzles that the play presents. It consists (first of all) of the Lady Anne halting the procession by ordering the bearers to “Set down, set down your honorable load / (If honor may be shrouded in a hearse) / Whilst I awhile obsequiously lament / The untimely fall of virtuous Lancaster” (I.ii.1–4). And lament she surely does, both the death of her father-in-law (the hapless King Henry VI), and of his “slaughter’d son,” her short-term husband, Prince Edward, “Stabb’d by the self-same hand” as killed Henry. Her grieving, however, is generously punctuated with curses upon that hand, as well as upon any wife and child that he might come to have.
It is at this point that Richard enters—or perhaps one should say, reveals himself—commanding the cortege to halt and again set down the coffin. Given that we know he has some secret intention in marrying, hence first wooing, the fair lady, we can be pretty sure that he hasn’t simply happened upon this funeral train by chance; that he has, rather, lain in wait for it at what might be a likely, or perhaps the usual, resting place for such processions. But this suspicion no sooner occurs than it raises further questions: why in the world would he choose this time and place to begin a courtship that would seem to be doomed from the get-go! Who in his right mind would choose to woo a grieving widow and daughter in public, at a funeral, much less at one of which he was the cause? One can readily imagine fifty more congenial situations that might enhance his slim chance of success. There must be some reason that Richard has chosen this, seemingly so unpropitious circumstance.
And even if he didn’t overhear the rant of damnation she wished upon his head, he could hardly have failed to anticipate the several earfuls of anger and hate and disgust she now bestows upon him. But after allowing her time to vent her initial hostility, he draws her into a contest of clever repartee, wherein she is allowed to insult and accuse him, while he parries her accusations and flatters her person, at last leading up to Richard’s indecent rejoinder to her assertion that he is “unfit for any place but hell”: “Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it … Your bed-chamber.” He then proceeds to blame her for all the misdeeds that she has accused him of: “Your beauty was the cause … / Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep / To undertake the death of all the world, / So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom” (I.ii.125–28). She continues to insult, and he to cajole. He offers to let her kill him if her “revengeful heart cannot forgive,” then to kill himself if she so bid him, whereupon “This hand, which for thy love did kill thy love, / Shall for thy love kill a far truer love” (I.ii.176, 193–94). She weakens, then relents, accepts his ring, and allows him—crediting his ironic admission that he “hath most cause to be mourner”—to take charge of the late King’s funeral procession to Chertsey Monastery (Richard promising to “wet his grave with … repentant tears”). Whereupon, joyfully persuaded that he has “become so penitent,” she leaves for Richard’s Crosby Place, escorted by a pair of gentlemen. With her gone, Richard orders Henry’s body be taken, not to Chertsey, but to Whitefriars priory. Why does he do that?
Richard, now left alone, treats us to another of his mocking soliloquies, in which he confirms that his design on Lady Anne is indeed motivated “not all so much for love.” If we had not previously been privy to his having a secret purpose for wedding her, and had heard only this soliloquy, we might suppose he seduced her just for the fun of it, for the sheer challenge of it, an expression of his will to power.
Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What, I that kill’d her husband and her father:
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me—
And I, no friends to back my suit at all
But the plain devil and dissembling looks—
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing! …
My dukedom to a beggarly denier,
I do mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds—although I cannot—
Myself to be a marvelous proper man. (I.ii.232–59)
How are we to explain his success with Lady Anne—bearing in mind what he so graphically insists upon: that he’s hardly blessed with movie star looks. Even if he’s not as ugly as he pretends, we are not to imagine him a natural heartthrob—after all, other characters attest to his disfigurement, including Anne herself (“thou lump of foul deformity”; I.ii.57); most persistently, old Queen Margaret (“Thou elvish-marked, abortive rooting hog,” “poisonous bunch-backed toad”; I.iii.228, 246). So, what does he have going for him? And what would Shakespeare have us learn from his, and her, examples?
But to return to the question of what motivates Richard, someone might suggest that I am overlooking an obvious explanation: plain old everyday animal lust. We must imagine Lady Anne to be at least somewhat attractive. Richard would have sacrificed all credibility with Anne herself in going on so about her bewitching beauty if she actually looked like a witch. And to be sure, if we were considering King Edward here rather than Duke Richard, lust would top the list of likely explanations. There is ample testimony in the play as to his lustful disposition; it suffices to mention the notorious Mistress Shore (famously the most significant Shakespearean character never to have actually appeared on stage), whose charms the ailing King now shares with his Chamberlain, Lord Hastings, and perhaps also with her husband. In fact, Richard alludes to the effects of Edward’s voluptuous lifestyle in our first indication of his failing health: “O, he hath kept an evil diet long, / And over-much consumed his royal person; / ’Tis very grievous to be thought upon” (I.i.139–41). And later, instructing “cousin Buckingham” what to tell those assembled in the Guildhall in order to persuade them to declare for Richard:
Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children; …
Moreover, urge his hateful luxury
And bestial appetite in change of lust,
Which stretch’d unto their servants, daughters, wives,
Even where his raging eye or savage heart
Without control lusted to make prey. (III.v.74–83)
The point of making these charges against “insatiate Edward”—the credibility of which rests on what those assembled already know, or at least believe, about him—is to make Richard shine by comparison: he’s not lustful, he doesn’t prey upon good citizens’ servants, daughters, wives; you’ve never heard anyone accuse him of luxurious living. Buckingham will subsequently make this point explicitly to the assembled Mayor and Aldermen when Richard refuses to come forth to hear their plea that he become their king, being so preoccupied (supposedly) in pious exercise with a pair of priests:
Ah ha, my lord [mayor], this prince is not an Edward:
He is not lolling on a lewd love-bed
But on his knees at meditation;
Not dallying with a brace of courtesans,
But meditating with two deep divines;
Not sleeping, to engross his idle body,
But praying, to enrich his watchful soul. (III.vii.70–76)
If a lust for Anne were a factor prompting Richard’s designs upon her, surely we would expect some indication to that effect in at least one of the soliloquies that frame her public seduction. It needn’t be as blatant as that of Lord Angelo’s private confession of his lust for Isabella in Measure for Measure (II.ii.163–87; II.iv.1–17); but surely some hint of sexual feeling would be only natural in the circumstance … if it existed, that is. And as is shown in his risqué bantering with Brackenbury about Mistress Shore (I.i.98–102), Richard is adept enough at sexual innuendo if it serves his purpose.
I suspect that his Grace, the Duke of Buckingham provides a partial clue to the answer when he and Richard are discussing the charade that they will stage for the Mayor and Aldermen, with Richard seemingly determined to decline the crown offered him, and Buckingham insisting that he accept it: “And be not easily won to our requests: / Play the maid’s part: still answer nay, and take it.” Richard’s rejoinder, as if simply agreeing to ‘play the maid’s part,’ is nicely ironic in light of his subsequent dealings with cousin Buck-ingham: “I go, and if you plead as well for them / As I can say nay to thee for myself, / No doubt we bring it to a happy issue” (III.vii.49–53). When their pantomime is actually staged, Buckingham again employs ‘trans-gendering’ language in playing his manly part of leading the Londoners’ insistence that Richard assume the kingship. Richard, having declined yet again in favor of his dear nephew, Buckingham warns him in terms the irony of which he could but half appreciate:
If you refuse it, as in love and zeal
Loath to depose the child, your brother’s son—
As well we know your tenderness of heart,
And gentle, kind, effeminate remorse,
Which we have noted in you to your kindred,
And equally indeed to all estates—
Yet know, whe’er you accept our suit or no,
Your brother’s son shall never reign our king. (III.vii.207–14)
“Effeminate remorse”—why would such a term even occur to him, unless … ? I do not mean to suggest that Buckingham has accurately assessed Richard’s nature. For in believing that he (Buckingham) is actually going to be the dominant partner in their relationship—being the stronger, tougher, more resolute—he is quite mistaken (as he will learn to his eternal regret). But he may have noticed things about Richard that made him suspect that the Duke of Gloucester is not altogether what he would call ‘a man’s man.’ For example, Richard is reputedly rather easily moved to weep (e.g. I.iv.234–35; II.ii.23). His cousin knows nothing, of course, about Richard’s privately boasting of an ability to “wet his cheeks with artificial tears,” as well as frame his face however would suit a given occasion—most convincingly, according to the doomed Hasting: “I think there’s never a man in Christendom / Can lesser hide his love or hate than he, / For by his face straight shall you know his heart” (III.iv.51–53). And Richard did express what might seem an effeminate willingness to subordinate himself to Buckingham: “My other self, my counsel’s consistory, / My oracle, my prophet, my dear cousin: / I, as a child, will go by thy direction” (II.ii.151–53). Whereas we know Richard includes Buckingham as well as Hastings among the “many simple gulls” his machinations misdirect (I.iii.328–29). When the two of them put on their show for the Lord Mayor, pretending to have but narrowly escaped an extreme danger posed by the popular—but now decapitated—Lord Hastings, Buckingham readily plays “bad cop” to gentle, kind Richard’s “good cop”:
So dear I lov’d the man that I must weep.
I took him for the plainest harmless creature
That breath’d upon the earth a Christian;
Made him my book, wherein my soul recorded
The history of all her secret thoughts. (III.v.24–28)
Whereas Buckingham bluntly pronounces, “Well, well, he was the covert’st shelter’d traitor,” and then, “I never look’d for better at his hands / After he once fell in with Mistress Shore” (III.v.33, 49–50).
Let me state the matter simply: there is a pattern of evidence that suggests Richard’s true deformity is not so much that of body as it is of soul (which is not to say that the one has no bearing on the other). More precisely, he is defective sexually—but not simply in the way that Buckingham presumes would explain the radical contrast between “puritanical” Richard and his voraciously womanizing elder brother, the late King. True, women have no appeal for Richard. And quite apart from his sexual indifference, he despises them (“shallow, changing woman!”; IV.iv.431). However, beyond his not being sexually attracted to women himself, he is contemptuous of men who are—who in effect are ruled by women because they cannot rule their own passions, and so seek to please women by doing their bidding: “Why, this is it, when men are rul’d by women” (I.i.62). There’s more to be said about the deformation of Richard’s eros, but this much shows through in his opening soliloquy, does it not? How must we suppose he regards smooth-faced courtiers whose preferred pastime is capering in ladies’ chambers to lascivious flute music? And which do we suppose he holds in greater disdain: “wanton ambling nymphs”? or the men who “strut” before them, trolling for their favors, (when not preening in mirrors)? Seen in this light, one supposes he especially enjoys the irony of his musing in the wake of seducing the Lady Anne, “Upon my life, she finds—although I cannot—/Myself to be a marvelous proper man” (I.ii.258–59, emphasis added). He cannot, because he knows better.
As I acknowledged above, there may well be a connection between Richard’s bodily deformities and those of his psyche. Indeed, the latter may have its origin in his birth and childhood, which is repeatedly the subject of comment. There is not a lot of textual evidence upon which to base a diagnosis, but perhaps just enough. Meeting him in adulthood, we see he does not have a genial relationship with his mother—to say the least—and there are grounds for suspecting that this may be as much her fault as his. The first indication of her attitude is in response to Clarence’s son’s revealing that his “good uncle Gloucester” told him that the King, provoked by the Queen, is to blame for his father’s death: “And when my uncle told me so he wept, / And pitied me, and kindly kiss’d my cheek; / And bade me rely on him as on my father”20—to which the Duchess replies, “Ah, that Deceit should steal such gentle shape, / And with a virtuous vizor hide deep Vice! / He is my son, ay, and herein my shame; / Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit” (II.ii.20–30). And moments later, upon learning that King Edward has just died, she laments:
I have bewept a worthy husband’s death,
And liv’d with looking on his images:
But now two mirrors of his princely semblance
Are crack’d in pieces by malignant death;
And I, for comfort, have but one false glass,21
That grieves me when I see my shame in him. (II.ii.49–54)
To be sure, her attitude towards Richard—one of shame—may have formed only in recent years, having observed various indications of his vicious nature. Then again, maybe not.
More revealing, I suspect, is the second scene in which we see the old Duchess, this time with the late King Edward’s son (and Richard’s namesake), the young Duke of York. He is telling his grandmother why he hopes he has not outgrown his elder brother, now the King designate, since his uncle Gloucester taught him the proverb, “Small herbs have grace; great weeds do grow apace.” She replies:
Good faith, good faith, the saying did not hold
In him that did object the same to thee!
He was the wretched’st thing when he was young,
So long a growing, and so leisurely,
That if his rule were true, he should be gracious. (II.iv.16–20)
When this draws from the Archbishop of York the polite rejoinder, “And so no doubt he is, my gracious madam,” her response is guarded: “I hope he is, but yet let mothers doubt.” Do we normally associate mothers with some special privilege of doubting the goodness of their own offspring? Apparently ignoring what he has just been told about Richard’s childhood, it occurs to the young prince that he could have made a clever joke at his uncle’s expense concerning a rumor he’d heard: “Marry, they say my uncle grew so fast / That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old: / ’Twas full two years ere I could get a tooth. / Grandam, this would have been a biting jest!” To which the Duchess queries, “I prithee, pretty York, who told thee this?” Pretty York replies: “Grandam, his nurse.” Duchess: “His nurse? Why she was dead ere thou wast born.” York: “If ‘twere not she, I cannot tell who told me.” Why has Shakespeare included this exchange, which leaves really two questions hanging in the air? First, and seemingly of less importance, from whom in particular did young York hear this tale. But second, who was the original source of such a symbolically fitting claim, which it seems has circulated widely? Notice, old ex-Queen Margaret later uses this same story to berate the Duchess, that she has borne a monster: “From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept / A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death: / That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes” (IV.iv.47–9).
In any case, we are invited to wonder, are we not, whether Richard’s mother the Duchess became ashamed of him only in his later years—or, was she ashamed of him from the first time she ever set eyes on his misshapen infant body, regarding him as a reproach to the womb that had already borne three handsome boys, including “pretty Rutland,” captured and killed in the Lancastrian victory at Wakefield? Does not Shakespeare intend to suggest this possibility by having Lady Anne (to her eventual regret) curse any future wife and child of Richard: “If ever he have child, abortive be it: / Prodigious, and untimely brought to light, / Whose ugly and unnatural aspect / May fright the hopeful mother at the view” (I.ii.21–24)? And was his mother’s shame, and consequent resentment of him, evident to Richard, and everyone else, throughout his childhood and youth—the disdain in which she held him, ever comparing him with his well-shaped brothers (to his chagrin, needless to add)?
Richard, for his part, maintains a proper public posture towards his mother, but privately never expresses any particular affection for her—nor any dislike, interestingly. So, for example, when he arrives ostensibly to commiserate Edward’s death with his widowed Queen, and only belatedly notices the presence of the Duchess (or claims to), he kneels, saying, “Madam my mother, I do cry you mercy: / I did not see your Grace. Humbly on my knee / I crave your blessing.” She obliges: “God bless thee, and put meekness in thy breast; / Love, charity, obedience, and true duty.” To which Richard pronounces “Amen,” then wryly adds to himself, “and make me die a good old man—/That is the butt-end of a mother’s blessing: / I marvel that her Grace did leave it out” (II.ii.104–11). The one other time in which his mother figures substantially in his activities is when he is briefing Buckingham on what to tell the Guildhall assembly that would persuade them to prefer the crown go to Richard rather than to Edward’s heir:
Tell them, when my mother went with child
Of that insatiate Edward, noble York
My princely father then had wars in France,
And by true computation of the time
Found that the issue was not his-begot;
Which well appeared in his lineaments,
Being nothing like the noble Duke, my father— (III.v.85–91)
Then, with barely a token regard for his mother’s reputation, he blithely adds, “Yet touch this sparingly, as ‘twere far off; / Because, my lord, you know my mother lives.” Imagine: “In furtherance of my political ambitions, claim my mother was an adulteress—a whore—but do so with some delicacy out of respect for her feelings!”
Later, when the Duchess along with Elizabeth and Anne are on Richard’s orders denied access to the Princes in the Tower, and then learn he has usurped the crown, she exclaims, “O my accursed womb, the bed of death! / A cockatrice hast thou hatch’d to the world” (IV.i.53–54; cf. IV.iv.137–39). Still later, she and Elizabeth intercept Richard as he is hurrying with his army to confront the rebellious Buckingham. And though he warns he’s in no mood to indulge her railing—having, as he so intriguingly puts it, “a touch of [her] condition, / That cannot brook the accent of reproof”—she pleads that he hear her one last time: “Art thou so hasty? I have stayed for thee, / God knows, in torment and in agony.” Richard cannot resist tweaking her with “And came I not at last to comfort you?” Her Grace is not amused:
No, by the holy rood, thou know’st it well:
Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.
A grievous burden was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furious;
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirm’d, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody:
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred. (IV.iv.166–75)
This, their final encounter concludes with her visiting upon him her “most grievous curse,” wishing for his defeat and victory to his enemies, whereupon she turns her back upon him and leaves (IV.iv.188–96). Richard makes no reply either to her curse or her departing, but immediately addresses Elizabeth, intent on persuading her to smooth the way to his marrying her daughter. For true to his word, he had the poor Lady Anne but did not keep her long. We do not know for sure her cause of death, but having heard Richard order Catesby to spread the rumour “That Anne, my Queen, is sick and like to die,” we are justified in fearing the worst. Be that as it may, Richard’s attempt to reprise the seduction of Lady Anne, this time with ex-Queen Elizabeth, reveals that he has lost a bit of his magic.22
Before returning to the puzzles which attend that earlier episode, however, let me again register this curious fact, for it bears repeating: Shakespeare has given a certain prominence, subtle but unmistakable once noticed, to Richard’s nativity and childhood. Since the poet can craft the play however he pleases, one must suppose that this feature of his drama somehow bears importantly on its proper understanding. Of course, we beneficiaries of post-Freudian enlightenment are hardly apt to be shocked by the suggestion that a boy subjected to maternal rejection may suffer sexual irregularities in adulthood, that it may even sour him on women in general. And I do believe Shakespeare anticipates Freud with respect to this and other insights about the effective, and defective, nurture of children. But this is by no means the whole explanation of Richard. I suspect Francis Bacon may be more helpful than Freud. I have in mind especially his Essay 44, “Of Deformity”:
Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature. Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind; and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other…. But because there is in man an election touching the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured by the sun of discipline and virtue. Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is deceivable; but as a cause, that seldom faileth of the effect. Whosoever hath any thing fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold. First, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn; but in process of time by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they think they may at pleasure despise; and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep; as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement, till they see them in possession. So that upon the matter, in a great wit, deformity is an advantage to rising…. Still, the ground is, they will, if they be of spirit, seek to free themselves from scorn; which must be either by virtue or malice.23
Since he cannot prove a lover, deformed as he is in both body and soul, he has elected to prove a villain.
Shakespeare has certainly invested his Richard with great wit, and spirit, and boldness. Moreover, he has provided him a keen eye for the weaknesses of others—especially for detecting what they prefer to believe, hence are predisposed to believe, and the gullibility that results: not only young, naïve Lady Anne, but his own brothers,24 first George, who almost to his bitter end prefers to believe Richard loves him; then King Edward, who wishfully believes he can and has made peace between Richard and the Queen’s Woodville clan; also Lord Rivers, taken in by Richard’s professed piety (cf. I.iii.316); Lord Hastings, who scoffs at Stanley’s dream-induced fear, so sure that Richard loves him well (III.iv.14); manly Buckingham, whose own ambition to rule inclines him to exaggerate his own political shrewdness and underestimate Richard’s. But perhaps the most important respect in which Shakespeare’s Richard conforms to Bacon’s profile is in his being “void of natural affection”—or unnatural affection, for that matter. That is, he neither loves nor hates; thus, he is subject to neither envy nor jealousy, feels neither indignation nor admiration—and is the clearer thinker for it. This is basic to the superiority he believes he enjoys over everyone else, and is for him a source of endless amusement: the superhuman perspective whence he looks down on everyone, so susceptible to his artful manipulations.
Returning now to the puzzle with which the play practically begins: Richard’s “secret close intent” in his marrying the grieving Lady Anne, recently widowed and left fatherless—thanks at least in part to him. I do not claim to have solved it with such certainty as would put the question beyond dispute, but venture here merely what I regard as the most plausible hypotheses. It seems safe to presume that Richard’s hidden motive has something to do with how he goes about effecting the desired result, since he appears to have deliberately chosen the worst possible circumstance in which to begin his wooing of the girl.25 That said, we needn’t further presume that his hidden motive is his sole motive. For Richard is a man who specializes in killing several birds with one stone. So what can we be reasonably sure of?
First of all, that marriage to Anne in particular must somehow fit in with his confided ambition to become King, once both elder brothers have conveniently left this world for him to bustle in: “For then I’ll marry Warwick’s youngest daughter,” albeit “not all so much for love.” Second, that he wishes this not be seen as a marriage forced upon the girl, but rather willingly accepted by her. Third, that her ‘seduction’ be done in public is somehow important. Fourth, that the sheer implausibility of the attempt—which he emphasizes in both framing soliloquies, and would be obvious to all who witness it—is also somehow important. Fifth, he must be fairly confident that his attempt will be successful, and that even if it isn’t, may provide some benefit, or at least do no harm (though he is a man who is prepared to take risks).
Given only these points, even bearing in mind what is revealed in the balance of the play, any explanation of Richard’s secret intention is bound to remain speculative. But suppose that Richard believes his reputed lack of interest in women heretofore is a political liability, rendering his manliness suspect, especially among ordinary soldiers who judge manliness per se by their own.26 People naturally presume that a man who does not desire women must, then, sexually prefer men. And since that often carries a stigma amongst decidedly heterosexual men, one avoids needless complications if one is regarded as a woman-lover also. Still, we also know that Richard disdains the very idea of men being ruled by women, which is more correctly understood as men failing to master their own passions for women, thus inclined to do their bidding in order to enjoy their favor—as, supposedly, Edward first had Hastings imprisoned to please his wife, then had him released to please his mistress (I.i.71–80). Richard, not being susceptible to the blandishments of the fair sex, doesn’t have the problem, but he wants to appear as if he does, while also displaying an enviable self-mastery. Thus, having once won over the young Lady Anne—and, not incidentally, proven himself possessed of lady-killer charms despite his physical disabilities—he blatantly does not do her bidding. That is, he does not proceed with the late King’s body to Chertsey, as he implored her to allow him to do (“For diverse unknown reasons”: I.ii.221), and she assented, presuming he would abide by her intention. Instead, once she’s gone, he orders the corpse taken to Whitefriars priory. His callous disregard for her wishes is all the more effective, given the intensity with which he professed his love for her.
This, then, is presumably what is ‘secret’ about Richard’s ‘close intent’: that he means to mask his sexual deformity with an appearance of hyper-normality—to conceal the monstrous fact that his eros inclines him to neither women nor men, but is simply pure lust for power,27 whereby he receives as much gratification in dealing death, thanatos—perhaps more—as in serving life. He seems amused whenever contemplating those whose deaths he arranges, even inspired, to offer his victims ironic salutations: “Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so / That I shall shortly send thy soul to Heaven / If Heaven will take the present at our hands” (I.i.118–20). And when his namesake, the young Duke of York, requests Richard’s dagger, he replies, “My dagger, little cousin? With all my heart” (III.i.110–11). Equanimous with respect to death, he is quite at home on the battlefield, not for the sake of honor (which has no intrinsic value for him, since he despises those who would presume to bestow it), but simply as an unfettered arena in which to discharge pent-up power.
But since courting and wedding any noblewoman might serve the purpose of establishing the appearance of his sexual normality, why has Richard fastened upon Anne? We must presume that her being pointedly identified as Warwick’s daughter is germane, as that name comes trailing endless political implications. Anyone at all familiar with England’s preceding history would recognize the title of the infamous “Kingmaker,” Richard Neville, and the vast, still powerful Neville clan with which it is associated. Similarly, by virtue of her previous marriage to the Lancastrian Prince Edward, albeit short-lived, she could be seen as representing all those who had previously supported the House of Lancaster in its wars with the Yorkists—that long Winter of Discontent—and for whom the outcome of those wars, the Summer of York rule, still rankled. The more emphatically Anne declares both her grief for her dead husband and father-in-law, and her seemingly implacable hatred for their killers, the stronger is her identification with the Lancastrian cause. And the stronger that identification, the more valuable to Richard is her being won over to him, being a potent symbol of reconciliation and acceptance. And to use her for this purpose, he need not keep her long; that she be wooed, won, and wed is all that matters. Nor need Shakespeare have his Richard point explicitly to this implication, since Shakespeare’s Richmond does so in his final victory speech. Himself claiming descent from the Lancaster branch of great Edward the Third’s feuding family,28 and now betrothed to the daughter of late King Edward, that glorious son of York, Richmond proclaims, “We will unite the white rose and the red. / Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction, / That long have frowned upon their enmity” (V.v.19–21).
For the wooing of Anne to serve this double purpose: that is, create a false appearance of Richard’s sexual normality, and placate Lancastrians in preparation for Richard’s usurping the Kingship—it is imperative that her unlikely seduction, his masterful display of seemingly ‘benign’ personal power, resting purely on friendly persuasion, not coercion—be publicly witnessed. For then he can be sure that it will be gossiped all over London by the morrow, and eventually filter throughout the country. Nor is it difficult to see why Richard would wish to do whatever might facilitate the unification of the Kingdom: only a united England can serve his purpose of pursuing still more power. Scotland begs to be finally conquered, granting Richard thereby mastery over the entire island, while eliminating both a potential beachhead for enemy States (especially France) and a chronic irritant to England’s northern shires. Ireland likewise. But the big prize would be France, providing a powerful base for further expansion on the continent. Richard need not remind us of this perennial English ambition, since here, too, Shakespeare has another character—in this case, young Edward, the doomed Prince of Wales—do so for him: “And if I live until I be a man, / I’ll win our ancient right in France again, / Or die a soldier, as I liv’d a king” (III.i.91–93). Had Richard only dealt more effectively with Lord Stanley, step-father of Henry Tudor, how differently might have been subsequent history.29
Be that as it might have been, the scarcely restrained exuberance with which Richard celebrates his seduction of Anne—“Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won? … To take her in her heart’s extremest hate, / With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes” and make her forget “that brave prince, … whom I, some three months since, Stabb’d in my angry mood at Tewksbury” (I.ii.227–41)—such private reveling suggests that he takes a deep personal satisfaction in his implausible success, this proof of both his extraordinary spiritual power and his superior prescience regarding the inclinations of human souls. Men who preen themselves as great conquerors whenever some woman surrenders her body are comically mistaken. Physical dominance over some woman or other is a paltry matter, within the capacity of almost any man. Meanwhile, truth is, women are the real conquerors, holding men’s souls in subjugation. Establishing a genuine ascendancy over a woman means taking possession of her soul, not her body. Ironically, it is Anne herself who unwittingly points to this, though speaking with regard to the dead King she is attending: “Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell! / Thou hadst but power over his mortal body: / His soul thou canst not have” (I.ii.46–48). One can imagine Richard’s inner reply: “O, but my dear, it’s not his soul I’m after.”
Why has Anne succumbed to this psychic assault on her? Later, sadly recalling the circumstances of her fatal seduction, she offers only this by way of explanation: “Within so small a time, my woman’s heart / Grossly grew captive to his honey words” (IV.i.78–79). But surely it is not that simple, even giving full marks to the rhetorical power Shakespeare has bestowed upon this unhandsome Prince Charming. For the power that Richard radiates is not merely that of words. It includes, first of all, the evident fear that she sees he arouses in other men, such as her attendants in the funeral procession (“What, do you tremble? Are you all afraid?”). This is a power he offers to place at her disposal. So what if she’s a physically weak woman; she may command a physically dominant man. But he is no brute—quite the contrary. As their extended repartee reveals, he is highly intelligent, every bit as quick-witted, and witty, as she. And he seems even-tempered, not easily riled despite the litany of abuse she heaps on him, but is instead patient, not hasty and impulsive as so many men are. His imperturbability bespeaks deep-seated self-confidence, psychic strength. Then, having proposed a halt to their “keen encounter of … wits,” he proceeds to eulogize her power—her ravishing beauty that did haunt him in his sleep—which he transforms into an appeal to justice: “Is not the causer of these [untimely] deaths / … As blameful as the executioner?” (I.ii.121–23). This man has killed for her. Think of it! How many women could claim as much?30 Then, as coup de grace, he offers to let her kill him, if that be her pleasure, and even to kill himself at her bidding if she prefers not to bloody her own hands. Whereupon she capitulates behind a fig leaf of equivocation (“I would I knew thy heart,” etc.; I.ii.196ff). Finally, to seal the deal, he begs as a favor to him the opportunity to relieve her of her sad funereal duty.31 Does Richard know women! He could set the envious Sigmund Freud to school. Of course, we’re not here talking about Richard, Duke of Gloucester, are we? We’re talking about Shakespeare.
1. Expressly characterized as such by, among others, Richard Courtney, in Shakespeare’s World of War: The Early Histories (Simon and Pierre, 1994, 21). It is generally recognized that the play taken as a whole represents a quantum advance over the Henry VI trilogy. Thus H. R. Richmond, in his Shakespeare’s Political Plays (Peter Smith, 1977, 75), contends that with Richard III, “we are confronted by a work that, while it is still dependent in detail on the traditional forms, involves a resynthesis of the raw material in so powerful and brilliant a way as to earn it the title of masterpiece.” John Julius Norwich, who has written a useful comparison of English history as understood by modern scholarship with that depicted by Shakespeare in his plays, judges Richard III to be “the greatest play” of the entire history canon: Shakespeare’s Kings (Viking, 1999) 10. Considered simply from the standpoint of dramatic qualities, I would readily agree; with respect to philosophical depth, its primacy is not so clear. Be that as it may, Shakespeare has endowed its eponym, who dominates the play to an extent comparable to that of Hamlet, with a level of poetic expression unsurpassed by any other character in his histories (including Prince Hal/ Henry V). However, Shakespeare’s depiction of King Richard as the royal villain nonpareil remains highly controversial, with defenders of the historical figure rejecting it as merely so much Tudor propaganda.
2. Much as does Iago, a character with which Richard shares certain similarities, not the least being a strong sense of intellectual superiority over everyone else in their respective plays—and well deserved, one might add.
3. This is our first exposure to Richard’s taste for irony; whereas “G” is the initial of the Duke of Clarence’s Christian name (George), it is, of course, also that of Richard’s own title (Gloucester). Hence, the ‘prophecy’ that Richard has somehow engineered is valid. It is notable that in a play filled with numerous characters making pious vows only subsequently to break them, Richard never breaks any—because he never makes any, though he seems to make many. When what he says is carefully considered, however, one discovers that they are illusions created by his irony. For example, the promise he merely seems to make Buckingham:
| Rich: | And look when I am king, claim thou of me The earldom of Hereford, and all the moveables Whereof the King my brother was possess’d |
| Buck: | I’ll claim that promise at your Grade’s hand. |
| Rich: | And look to have it yielded with all kindness. (III.ii.194–98) |
So, while Buckingham is left with the clear impression that the earldom was in fact promised to him (thus IV.ii.87–90ff.), he was merely granted permission to claim it, and (further) to expect its being kindly granted.
4. The text is taken from Richard III, Second Arden edition, ed. Antony Hammond (Routledge, 1981).
5. Robert B. Pierce’s observation, in Shakespeare’s History Plays: The Family and the State (Ohio University Press, 1971, 103), is no doubt germane: “Richard is a very special kind of monster, the monster as humorist. To him the code of traditional morality and bonds of social affection are not a hated enemy but an amusing tool. He uses them to play with other people’s emotions, both to attain his secret ends and out of sheer virtuosity.”
6. Thus Henry Goodman, Players of Shakespeare 6: Essays in the Performance of Shakespeare’s History, ed. Robert Smallwood (Cambridge University Press, 2004, 203): “Unlike the men and women around him, … hypocrites one and all who ‘smooth, deceive, and cog’ (I.iii.48) but are shown to have feet of clay, Richard is at least self-conscious and consistent—honest, indeed—about his own duplicity.”
7. Richmond (1977, 79) contends: “Richard surpasses any earlier Shakespearean character in hypnotic power.” Implicitly offering insight into the play’s continuing popularity, Richmond observes that “Richard’s cheerful and efficient villainy, far from repelling the audience, delights it, [which shows] Shakespeare’s power to break through the crust of rationalizing moral prejudice and respect for decorum to the disruptive inner springs of human motivation. Richard has the fascination of the superman—intelligent, witty, superior to human limitation and virtues. More seriously, he is the focus for the vicarious release of all the repressed resentments and desires that men share in a complex, organized society.” However, as this author notes (94), we eventually become disenchanted with Richard, the turning point being “Tyrrel’s pathetic description of the murder” of the innocent Princes in the Tower, an account “carefully calculated to alienate the audience’s sympathy from Richard, and to lessen their delight in his wit, which is thereafter no longer allowed the same virtuosity.”
8. The entire role of old ex-Queen Margaret, hence the major parts of scenes I.iii and IV.iv are frequently cut from performances of the play, Richard III being second in length only to Hamlet. Suffice it to say, such amputations greatly diminish the philosophical value Shakespeare has invested in the play.
9. Including its cognates, the term “curse” occurs some forty-four times (including the five occurrences of “accursed”). Moreover, these explicit mentions are augmented by other verbal equivalents, such as praying and beseeching God to visit evil upon someone in revenge (e.g., I.ii.62–65, I.iii.111, 137, II.ii.14–15). Thus Lily B. Campbell, in Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (Methuen, 1964, 313), can plausibly contend that “the plot of the play is woven as a web of curses and their fulfillment, and the sense of a divine vengeance exacting a measured retribution for each sin is ever present.” But about that divine vengeance: it seems guided not merely by Romans 12:19: “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord” (Geneva Bible); but more disturbingly—bearing in mind the entire portion of English History treated by Shakespeare in his two tetralogies—by Numbers 14:18 as well: “visiting the wickedness of the fathers upon the children, in the third and fourth generation.”
10. Hamlet V.ii.9–11.
11. As Hobbes affirms, Leviathan XXXI.40: “seeing Punishments are consequent to the breach of Lawes; Natural Punishments must be naturally consequent to the breach of the Lawes of Nature; and therfore follow them as their naturall, not arbitrary effects”.
12. Careful consideration of the reports of their supposed murder by the “flesh’d villains, bloody dogs” hired by Tyrrell (whom Richard recruited for the task), leaves open the possibility that one or both princes actually escaped death at this time (IV.iii.1–30). Thus Shakespeare subtly allows for those embarrassing episodes of Richmond’s reign as Henry the Seventh, famously involving not one, but two im-posters claiming to be one or the other of the survivors (Perkin Warbeck posing as Prince Richard; and Lambert Simnel, supposedly Prince Edward)—but also for the rumour that, not Richard, but Richmond once he was King actually had the Princes, still captive in the Tower, murdered (as he and his heir are known to have systematically eliminated the progeny of George, Duke of Clarence, and anyone else who might be regarded as having a legitimate claim to the throne).
13. I merely mention these matters (determinism, fate, curses, divine justice) as part of a constellation of issues—including, most importantly, the nature of Evil and the status of the inner moral monitor we call ‘conscience’—that pervade the play; I do not intend a systematic treatment of them in what follows. Most of these issues figure also in Macbeth, which I have discussed at some length in my treatment of the play in Of Philosophers and Kings (University of Toronto Press, 2001) 51–76. Mary Ann McGrail, in Tyranny in Shakespeare (Lexington Books, 2001, 60–64) has an especially useful discussion of the conscience-theme in Richard III.
14. Richard is often treated as Shakespeare’s paradigmatic Machiavellian, with the corollary that his fate implies Shakespeare’s judgment on this approach to political life. Suffice it to say, this view is superficial. For a superior treatment of the issues, see Tim Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays (SUNY Press, 2001). Although Spiekerman does not separately treat Richard III, the play and its eponym are referred to extensively by way of comparison with other Shakespeare characters, notably Henry V.
15. Richard’s prowess was established with his first appearance in Shakespeare’s account of English history. The old Earl of Salisbury credits young Richard with having “three times” defended him “from eminent death” in the day’s desperate battle (Henry VI, Part 2 V.iii.18–19).
16. And are we not meant to note the contrast Richard makes to Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII), who is provided no comparable report of his battlefield behavior, and who has sent out at least five decoys to engage Richard in his stead? True, Shakespeare departs from the historical record in order to make Henry the slayer of Richard, and Norwich (1999, 366) defends his doing so on grounds of “dramatic license”: “We shall never know at whose hands [Richard] met his death; we can be confident they were not those of Richmond, since if he had personally struck the fatal blow the fact would almost certainly been recorded.” Suffice it to say, those who regard the play as but a piece of propaganda that eulogizes the ascension of the House of Tudor must ignore some of its finer subtleties.
17. For explicitness, its only rival is the mysterious identity of the third murderer in Macbeth.
18. It is remarkable that most scholarship on this play does not so much as mention this question, much less attempt to answer it. Alexander Leggett, in Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (Routledge, 1988, 35), does note it, but only to dismiss it as unanswerable: “The warning signs come early. In the middle of one of his breezy, information-packed soliloquies, there is a small touch of darkness…. What is that ‘secret close intent’? Is it some political advantage, otherwise unrevealed? A need to degrade in Anne’s bed the sexual love he professes to despise? We may speculate but we never know.” True, like most interpretive puzzles Shakespeare poses, certitude is not to be had. However I do believe that he always has definite answers in mind, and that he supplies sufficient textual evidence for inducing them.
19. In the England of those days, primogeniture operated solely with respect to sons; if there were only daughters to inherit, estates were to be divided equally between them. Clarence had married Warwick’s eldest daughter, Isobel, for her half of the money and properties, but he wanted it all. And according to the Croyland Chronicle (which modern historians regard as generally reliable, and which Shakespeare may or may not have read), Clarence managed to get physical possession of the other daughter, Anne, and in order to prevent Richard from marrying her (and thus claiming her share of the wealth), hid her away as a scullery maid in the kitchen of one of his retainers. Richard, however, tracked her down, rescued her from her captivity, and placed her in sanctuary until arranging to marry her. Now, there’s a story with possibilities.
20. One must regard this as further evidence of Richard’s charm and plausibility, as children tend to be sensitive discerners of who does and doesn’t like them.
21. This is an ironical lament—though the irony is surely unintentional on her part, and just possibly also on Shakespeare’s, but not likely so (cf. III.v.90–91; III. vii.11–14)—in that of the elder Duke of York’s four sons, the historical Richard most closely resembled his father.
22. I mean by this, the quality of his rhetoric and repartee is not quite up to the standard he set in seducing Lady Anne. But even if he had surpassed it, the likelihood of success would be infinitely less, given the radical difference in what he is attempting: to persuade a young woman that he is so in love with her that he has killed for the opportunity to make her his wife versus persuading a middle-aged woman, whose sons and brother he has killed, to become his mother-in-law by facilitating his marrying her daughter. If he really believes that he’s convinced her—“Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!” (IV.iv.431)—rather than just elliptically expressing a wan hope, his power of judgment has declined more than his verbal dexterity.
23. The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (Longmans, 1870), Vol. VI: 480–81. If only the dates permitted, one might reasonably suspect that Shakespeare had consciously modeled his Richard on this Essay. A quarto version of King Richard the Third was first published in 1597, though it may have been written as early as 1591. Bacon’s essay ‘Of Deformity’ was first published as number 25 in the second collection of his Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1612), and became number 44 in the third (1625).
24. Of course, they never heard his final soliloquy in the preceding play:
I that have neither pity, love nor fear …
I have no brother; I am like no brother.
And this word ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone. (3H6 V.vi.68–83)
25. It is actually Shakespeare, however, who has chosen this bizarre situation as ideal for a display of Richard’s black magic—for there is nary a hint in the historical sources of anything remotely like this happening. That the scene is not merely believable, but dramatically unforgettable, attests to its creator’s superior talent.
26. The dismal fate of King Edward the Second might be interpreted as a caution-ary tale to this effect. Moreover, homosexual kings (as, reputedly, was “lion-hearted” Richard the First) invite political conflict upon their death should they have fathered no legitimate heirs. And while Richard may not care what happens in or to England once he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, he knows that this is a vital consideration for everyone else, especially for those who risk much whenever obliged to take sides in a disputed succession: the magnates.
27. In this, I agree with the actor Henry Goodman, in Smallwood 2004, 202: “Freud’s … suggestion that Richard’s will to power derives from his frustrated will to sexual power, seemed to me too simplistic. Murray Kreiger’s notion … that Richard’s will to power is a perversion of his sexual need for power I found more convincing.”
28. Albeit via the Beaufort line that John of Gaunt fathered on his mistress, Catherine Swynford, and which Richard II belatedly legitimized, but which Henry IV attempted to have declared ineligible for the succession, though this was never ratified by Parliament.
29. In both Shakespeare’s play and England’s history, Stanley’s betrayal of Richard at Bosworth Field determined the outcome of that pivotal battle, bringing to an end over three centuries of Plantagenet rule. The puzzle is: why did Richard rely on Stanley’s support despite ample evidence that he was not reliable? Richard obviously did not trust him, but neither did he take the same “prophylactic” action against him as he did Hastings—despite Catesby’s warning that Hastings will oppose Richard’s usurpation, and that Stanley “will do all in all as Hastings doth” (III.i.168). Presumably, Richard believed that Stanley (unlike Hastings) was nonetheless manipulable, that he would side with whoever wields superior power, and that the Earl of Derby thus remained useful for the forces he could muster from his estates in the North. Hence, Richard grants him permission to muster his men, but only upon his leaving his son George Stanley as surety for his loyalty: “Look your heart be firm, / Or else his head’s assurance is but frail.” Stanley’s reply is coldly ironic: “So deal with him as I prove true to you” (IV.iv.56–97). Holding the Earl’s son hostage is the only guarantee Richard provides himself for the father’s dependability; and perhaps he had no other options. He needs the forces—the “tenants and followers”—that only the Earl in person can raise. But Richard is in effect relying upon the strength of the father’s attachment to the son. In Stanley’s case, this was problematic. According to historical sources, the Earl was heard to remark that George was not his only son, that he had others. As Shakespeare often does, he leaves a character’s rationale unspoken, challenging the reader to see it for himself.
30. Richmond (1977, 88–89) likewise observes: “Flattered by the thought that their beauty could drive men to crime, both Isabella (in Measure for Measure) and Anne can pardon that crime.” He goes on to note, however, “The coup de theater by which Richard wins Anne establishes us also as his victims, for if intellectually we see a little deeper into him than she does, we are still prone to view his victims from his own merciless perspective, at least unconsciously.” Thus, “Whatever its roots in history, this second scene … establishes the rhetorical seductiveness by which evil insinuates itself.”
31. Somewhere, Nietzsche says something like: “You want to incline someone to you? Request a favor of him.”