THE PLAY of Richard III, antedating in its composition the historical dramas that we have been studying, is of special interest for two reasons: first, it shows where tragedy and history meet; and second, it reveals an author writing without a clear distinction between these genres in mind. The play can with justification be classed as either tragedy or history, and Shakespeare's first editors did not resolve the dilemma. It was first published in quarto in 1597 with the title:
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Containing, his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephews: his tyrannicall usurpation; with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death.
The five subsequent quartos which preceded the folio gathering of the plays bore the same title. The editors of the First Folio put it with the “Histories,” though in this unique instance they departed from custom by retaining the term tragedy when printing the head-title:
The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the landing of Earle Richmond, and the battell at Bosworth Field.
In order to understand this play, then, it is necessary to distinguish the elements of tragedy from those of the history play with which they are combined, and to do so we must again recall the fundamental distinctions between the two genres. An earlier chapter1 pointed out that the plays listed by Shakespeare's editors as histories are derived from the same chronicles that furnished material for Lear and Macbeth. Furthermore, Shakespearean tragedy, like most Elizabethan tragedy, deals with those of high estate and is therein not differentiated from history, for it remained true that, as Raleigh said, “the markes, set on private men, are with their bodies cast into the earth; and their fortunes, written only in the memories of those that lived with them.” In his histories and his tragedies alike Shakespeare patterned a moral universe in which the wages of sin is death; in both genres he acted as a register of God's judgments. Yet Macbeth kills his king and usurps a throne, and his tale is classified as a tragedy by Shakespeare's editors: Bolingbroke usurps a throne, his king is killed, and the story is classed as a history. We think of Macbeth as a murderer; of Henry IV as a rebel who usurped a throne. Neither the source material, the characters, nor the divine vengeance which the plays record can, therefore, be held to account for the difference between tragedy and history. For that difference, as I have earlier indicated, we must look to the old division of morals into private and public, a division most clearly explained among the poets by Spenser in his letter to Raleigh, for Spenser proposed to portray in the first twelve books of The Faerie Queene the twelve private moral virtues in Arthur before he became king and “to frame the other part of polliticke vermes in his person, after that hee came to be king.” He also proposed to present Queen Elizabeth both as the Faerie Queene and as Belphoebe, “considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady.”2 This was the distinction laid down by philosophers and observed by poets, a distinction between private and political virtue, which marked the difference between the realms of ethics and of politics. Tragedy deals with an ethical world; history with a political world. In tragedy God avenges private sins; in history the King of kings avenges public sins, those of king and subject alike.
In classifying Shakespeare's Richard III, then, we need to consider the over-all impression. The killing of the little princes in the Tower, rather than the illegal seizing of the throne, haunts the play-goer. Clarence's dream of divine vengeance, rather than the right of the House of York to rule, fills the mind and stirs the emotions. We accept Richard's labeling of himself as a villain, and when Richmond describes him as “a bloody tyrant and a homicide,”3 we think more of the shed blood than of tyranny. These are impressions left by a tragedy rather than a history play. We need to ask why and wherefore.
One answer to these questions is to be found in Richard's own words when, waking from his last night of dreams, in which the ghosts of his murdered victims have passed before him, he cries out:
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree:
Murder, stern murder, in the dir'st degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! Guilty!4
Now perjury and murder are sins which brand Richard or any man a villain, a sinner against the moral order; but they are not sins which identify him as a traitor, a regicide, an usurper, a tyrant. Perjury and murder are, moreover, not only the sins which Richard commits with each of his victims in turn; they are also the sins which doom the other sinners in the play to divine vengeance. So much do these two sins dominate the play that the moral pattern becomes repetitious and at times almost loses its cumulative horror.
Also there is in Richard III the same portrayal and analysis of passion which characterize Shakespearean tragedy elsewhere. Ambition compels Richard, as it does Macbeth,5 to murder that he may gain a throne. Fear compels him, as it does Macbeth, to murder to keep the throne. Even the murderer becomes surfeited with his own crimes. The Mirror for Magistrates had represented Richard as saying:
But what thing may suffise unto the bloudy man,
The more he bathes in bloud, the bloudier he is alway:6
and Shakespeare later wrote the same idea into words for Macbeth:
I am in bloud
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.7
He writes like words here for Richard III:
But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.8
But each step in blood brings new perturbation to Richard's soul. Like Macbeth, he has murdered sleep, and his queen complains:
For never yet one hour in his bed
Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,
But with his timorous dreams was still awak'd.9
Yet fear urges him on to new crimes. He arranges with Tyrrel to kill the little princes in the Tower:
two deep enemies,
Foes to my rest and my sweet sleep's disturbers …10
And Tyrrel, like another Exton, promises, “I'll rid you from the fear of them.” His last night is a night of dream-riding ghosts, and roused by Ratcliff to the day of battle, he protests, “O Rat-cliff, I fear, I fear!” Answering Ratcliff's plea not to be afraid of shadows, he confesses:
By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof, and led by shallow Richmond!11
In contrast, the Richmond whom he must encounter has had
The sweetest sleep and fairest-boding dreams
That ever entered in a drowsy head,
and his heart “is very jocund” in the remembrance.12 The picture of the destructive power of passion in Richard III is a cruder one than Shakespeare was later to achieve in Macbeth, but in the other characters as well as in Richard himself its corrosive effect is exhibited and analyzed.
Emphasizing moral rather than political sins and revealing passion as both motivating sin and punishing it by the perturbation of the soul, Richard III also shares with the other Shakespearean tragedies a deep concern with the problem of revenge. The contemporary discussion of revenge, as I have shown elsewhere, was built upon the Biblical authority for a jealous God who had said “Vengeance is mine.” Three kinds of vengeance were posited on the basis of this Biblical authority: God's vengeance for sin; public vengeance executed by the ruler or his representative acting as the agent of God in administering justice and punishing sin; and private vengeance which usurps the authority of God and is, therefore, forbidden.13
In Richard III the murder of Clarence and the execution of Hastings are made the occasions for long discussions of private revenge in relation to divine vengeance and public vengeance. Clarence, it will be remembered, was condemned by his brother, King Edward IV, but “the order was revers'd,” and Clarence is actually killed by the hirelings of Richard, who sees in him an impediment in his path to the throne. The murderers at first pretend to come on an order from the king, and I quote from the impassioned debate between them and their victim Shakespeare's most detailed statement of the whole Elizabethan philosophy of vengeance. Clarence makes clear from the first the difference between private vengeance and public vengeance, delegated by God to his vice-gerent to be executed under law for the public weal:
CLARENCE. Are you drawn forth, among a world of men,
To slay the innocent? What is my offence?
Where is the evidence that doth accuse me?
What lawful quest have given their verdict up
Unto the frowning judge? or who pronounc'd
The bitter sentence of poor Clarence’ death?
Before I be convict by course of law,
To threaten me with death is most unlawful.
I charge you, as you hope to have redemption
By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins,
That you depart and lay no hands on me! The deed you undertake is damnable.
FIRST MURD. What we will do we do upon command.
SECOND MURD. And he that hath commanded is our king.
CLARENCE. Erroneous vassals! the great King of kings
Hath in the table of His law commanded
That thou shalt do no murder. Will you then
Spurn at His edict, and fulfil a man's?
Take heed; for He holds vengeance in His hand,
To hurl upon their heads that break His law.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
FIRST MURD. How canst thou urge God's dreadful law to us,
When thou hast broke it in such dear degree?
CLARENCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If God will be avenged for the deed,
O, know you yet, He doth it publicly.
Take not the quarrel from His powerful arm;
He needs no indirect or lawless course
To cut off those that have offended Him.
Even the king has no right to exact private revenge, but as the murderers reveal the fact that not Edward, but Richard, is the author of their deed, Clarence calls upon them to relent and save their souls, asking
The murderers do not relent, but no sooner is the deed committed than the Second Murderer cries, as does many another murderer in Shakespeare's tragedies:
How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands
Of this most grievous murder—14
The case of Hastings is also presented at length to show the heinousness of private revenge, here disguised as public revenge. Hastings, betrayed by Catesby, is reported unwilling to see young Edward V deprived of his throne. Without due process of law and on the obviously trumped-up charge that he has succeeded Edward IV as the protector of Jane Shore, who is accused along with Queen Elizabeth of having through witchcraft brought harm to his deformed body, Richard orders the death of Hastings. Anticipating the suspicion which his action may cause, he justifies the hugger-mugger execution to the Lord Mayor of London:
What, think you we are Turks or infidels?
Or that we would, against the form of law,
Proceed thus rashly in the villain's death,
But that the extreme peril of the case,
The peace of England, and our persons’ safety,
Enforc'd us to this execution?
The mayor is amenable to such reasoning, but Buckingham feels it wise to share the blame with lesser folk who do their master's bidding too enthusiastically:
Yet had we not determin'd he should die,
Until your lordship came to see his end;
Which now the loving haste of these our friends,
Something against our meanings, have prevented: …15
The audience is already aware of the reason why Hastings has been hurried to his death, but a scrivener is introduced to enforce the lesson by explaining that the writing out of the precedent and the indictment had anticipated the accusation and seizure of Hastings by many hours, and he queries:
The introduction of the long dialogue between Clarence and his murderers and the intrusion of the scrivener with his undramatic but pointed speech make evident Shakespeare's special interest in revenge in this play.
The matter of the divine vengeance which is inexorably meted out for sin is, moreover, associated with the unstinted use of the supernatural in divers ways throughout the play. The wounds of King Henry VI bleed in the presence of his murderer. Prophecies contribute to the imprisonment of the Duke of Clarence, and his terrible dream warns him of his doom. Stanley dreams of Hastings’ downfall. Hastings’ horse stumbles three times. The littler of the princes senses the presence of the ghost of his uncle Clarence in the Tower. Richard accuses Jane Shore and the queen of witchcraft. The ghosts of those whom he has murdered disturb Richard's dreams and give comfort to his foe the night before Bosworth Field. Most important of all, the plot of the play is woven as a web of curses and their fulfilment, and the sense of a divine vengeance exacting a measured retribution for each sin is ever present.
However, God may and often does make use of an evil instrument in the execution of his divine vengeance, and Richard, like Tamburlaine, functions as the scourge of God.17 His first murder in the play is that of his brother Clarence. The third part of Henry VI showed Clarence going over to the side of King Henry in support of Warwick against Edward IV and marrying Warwick's younger daughter. It showed him later forsworn as he rejoined his brother's forces. Now we hear Richard, pretending pity for him and commenting unctuously:
Poor Clarence did forsake his father, Warwick;
Ay, and forswore himself, which Jesu pardon!—18
Margaret tries to close his speech with a curse before Richard can finish it, and she apparently makes herself heard in heaven—or hell—with her “Which God revenge,” for Clarence dreams of a descent “Unto the kingdom of perpetual light”:
The first that there did greet my stranger-soul
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick,
Who spoke aloud, “What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?”
Then appeared the slaughtered Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI, “A shadow like an angel, with bright hair,” who “squeak'd out aloud”:
“Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,
That stabb'd me in the field by Tewksbury:
Seize on him Furies, take him into torment!”
Shattered by his dream, Clarence sorrows to his keeper:
I have done those things,
That now give evidence against my soul,
For Edward's sake; and see how he requites me!
O God! If my deep prayers cannot appease Thee,
But thou wilt be aveng'd on my misdeeds,
Yet execute Thy wrath in me alone; …19
Clarence is murdered before an Elizabethan audience that knew his last prayer had not been answered, for the destruction of his wife and children by Henry VII and Henry VIII, who feared their possible claims to the throne, was an oft-told tale.
King Edward IV, learning of the death of Clarence, which he had commanded and then unavailingly countermanded, cries out in horror:
O God, I fear thy justice will take hold
On me, and you, and mine, and yours for this!20
Like King John and King Henry IV he bitterly chides those who have failed to advise him and check him, but he acknowledges his own sin, and Richard assents, “God will revenge it.” King Edward dies, and those who heard his words are soon themselves experiencing the justice of God administered through Richard's malice.
Anne calls down the wrath of God upon the wife of Richard III and thereby curses her future self. Buckingham calls upon God to take vengeance if he be not true to England's queen and so curses himself. Edward on his death-bed warns the rival factions gathered about him to swear peace:
Take heed you dally not before your king;
Lest He that is the supreme King of kings
Confound your hidden falsehood, and award
Either of you to be the other's end.21
Both factions perjure themselves, heedless of the warning, and upon them both the supreme King of kings takes vengeance through Richard's evil acts.
The poor, distracted Margaret, queen to Henry VI, is taunted by Richard as one who suffers the fate to which she was doomed by his father's curses:
The curse my noble father laid on thee,
When thou didst crown his warlike brows with paper,
And with thy scorns drew'st rivers from his eyes,
And then, to dry them, gav'st the duke a clout
Steep'd in the faultless blood of pretty Rutland—
His curses, then from bitterness of soul
Denounc'd against thee, are all fall'n upon thee;
And God, not we, hath plag'd thy bloody deed.22
But Margaret in her turn pronounces her dreadful anathemas upon those who have wronged her. She cries out for King Edward's death because her king was murdered to make this Yorkist king. She begs God to let Queen Elizabeth die “neither mother, wife, nor England's queen” that justice may prevail and her own loss of child, husband, and kingdom be paid for. For all those who stood by when her son was murdered:
God I pray Him,
That none of you may live his natural age,
But by some unlook'd accident cut off!
And her prayers are answered, even her prayer for the young Edward V:
Edward thy son, that now is Prince of Wales,
For Edward my son, that was Prince of Wales,
Die in his youth by like untimely violence!
Her raucous demands for justice shock us, and the execution of that justice horrifies us, but they contribute to the pattern of the play.
In his turn God's evil executioner of his justice must feel the vengeance of the King of kings, and when he does, we see the working out of yet more of Margaret's awful curses:
If heaven hath any grievous plague in store,
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee,
O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,
And then hurl down their indignation
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou livest,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!23
Richard's device of closing the curse with her name before she can close it with his is unavailing, for Margaret's curses foretell the manner of his punishment. His doom does not come upon him till his sins are ripe. Conscience gnaws his soul, and he never sleeps without horrible dreams. He distrusts his best friends and discards true advisers. He makes friends with traitors. His last night is a night of horror, and he meets his death ignominiously on foot, his horse having been killed under him in the course of the battle.
It is the God of the Old Testament that must be supposed to rule in such a moral order as Shakespeare here depicts, but it is a moral order. The justice is that of an eye for an eye, a Prince of Wales for a Prince of Wales. Prayers that are offered as curses by those with hatred in their hearts are answered by a divine justice without pity. The stage should indeed be hung with black for the presentation of this play. But it was a play that rounded out the cycle of history in which the crown was snatched from the House of Lancaster by unruly Yorkist hands, only to be lost by the third heir to the importunate Richmond. Holinshed explained:
And as it thus well appeared, that the house of Yorke shewed itselfe more bloudie in seeking to obteine the kingdome, than that of Lancaster in usurping it: so it came to passe, that the Lords vengeance appeared more heavie towards the same than towards the other, not ceassing till the whole issue male of the said Richard duke of Yorke was extinguished. For such is Gods justice, to leave no unrepentant wickednesse unpunished, as especiallie in this caitife Richard the third, not deserving so much as the name of a man, muche lesse of a king, most manifestlie appeareth.24
Thus Shakespeare pictured the dominating sins in the play as perjury and murder, sins against the moral order. He portrayed and analyzed the passion of ambition that caused Richard to sin and the passion of fear that at the same time punished him for his sins and forced him to wade still further in blood. He inserted non-historical scenes developing the Elizabethan philosophy of revenge. He used the supernatural to enhance the horror of the play and to contribute to the impression of a divine vengeance meting out punishment for sin. He showed God's revenge exacted through the agency of the evil Richard, who was nevertheless held to account for his evil-doing. He made use of pathos in the death of the royal children. These are the common methods of Shakespearean tragedy, and they justify those who hold Richard III to be a tragedy.
But on the other hand, Shakespeare's editors can also be justified for putting Richard III among the histories. Except for the epilogue spoken by Richmond there are, of course, no great speeches on political abstractions such as the later history plays contained, or such as are to be found in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third. Unlike King John and Richard II and Henry IV, the play presents the usurpation of a throne and the punishment of the usurper without expounding the political sins involved. Yet Richard is, as Richmond says, a bloody tyrant and an usurper, and his crimes constitute offenses against the common weal for which the great King of kings takes vengeance. Thus though Clarence and Hastings are the victims of Richard's private vengeance, their deaths are made to emphasize the particular sinfulness of private vengeance executed, under the cloak of public vengeance, by one who serves as God's vice-gerent. And the pattern of sin and punishment is a political as well as a moral pattern, for murder and perjury are motivated by political purposes. The God who demands vengeance is, furthermore, the same God who presides as King of kings. In this play, as I have said, we see where tragedy and history meet.
The Richard whom we know in Shakespeare's Richard III both as the tragic villain and the historical usurper and tyrant is the Richard whom Sir Thomas More gave to the world in a picture so convincing that none of the succeeding chroniclers could banish it from his work. More's Richard III is, indeed, still the Richard accepted by the multitude, and the apologists from Buc onward who would give the devil his due have spoken to deaf ears. More so foreshortened the events of the reigns of Edward IV and Edward V as to make them but a setting for Richard III, and Shakespeare has done likewise, but he has further distorted the perspective by crowding the events of fourteen years into eleven days, with certain intervals, according to Daniel's computation of dramatic time.25 In itself the play covers almost the complete cycle from the seizing of the crown to its loss by the House of York, but the actual seizing of the crown is not portrayed on the stage. It is only recalled from its earlier presentation in Henry VI.
G. B. Churchill has so exhaustively studied the literary sources and parallels of Richard III that it would be a work of supererogation to repeat the process.26 Churchill did not note, however, the significant fact that the Mirror for Magistrates isolated the chief events exhibited in Shakespeare's play, recording the working out of justice in each case. The relevant entries in the 1587 edition of the Mirror are as follows:
How George Plantagenet thyrd sonne of the Duke of Yorke, was by his brother King Edward wrongfully imprysoned, and by his brother Richard miserably murdered, the 11. of January. Anno 1478.
How King Edwarde the fourth, through his surfeting and untemperate life, sodaynly died in the middest of his prosperity. The 9. of Apriell, anno 1483.
How Sir Anthony Wodvill Lorde Rivers and Scales, governour of Prince Edward, was with his nephue Lord Richard Gray, and others, causles imprisoned, and cruelly murdered. Anno 1483.
How the Lord Hastings was betrayed, by trusting too much to his evill Councelour Catesby, and villanously murdered in the Towre of London, by Richard Duke of Glocester, the 13. of June. Anno 1483.
The Complaynt of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham.
How Richard Plantagenet Duke of Glocester, murdered his brothers children, usurping the Crowne: and in the 3. yeare of his raigne, was most worthely deprived of life and Kingdome, in Basworth plaine, by Henry Earle of Richmond, after called King Henry the seaventh: the 22. of August. 1485.
Later, not in chronological sequence, there is inserted another tragedy not developed by Shakespeare but, according to Churchill, the source of some of the modifications of history to be found in the play:
How Shores wife, King Edward the fourths Concubine, was by King Richard despoyled of all her goods, and forced to doe open penaunce.27
My interest in pointing out this arrangement of stories in the Mirror is, first, to note that, as in Shakespeare's play, Richard's victims, except the royal children, are represented as paying for their sins, Richard acting as the scourge of God, and that Richard himself “was most worthely deprived of life and Kingdome,” even as Shakespeare showed his “deserved death.” Second, I want to call attention to the fact that these Mirror stories were used to portray contemporary events and people, that while they were called tragedies, they were directed to political teaching.
Listing the various poetical and dramatic treatments of the story of Richard III written in Shakespeare's time, Churchill finds no evidence for Shakespeare's having used the well-known Latin play of Richard Tertius and but uncertain evidence for his use of The True Tragedie of Richard the Third.28 Both plays portrayed Richard as a pattern of usurpation and tyranny. The True Tragedie has significance, however, not as a source but as a political play on Richard III which presumably antedated Shakespeare's.29 It has many speeches dealing with the political theme of usurpation, and emphasis is given to the idea that Richmond is a lawful king who comes to free the people from a tyrant's yoke. There are such speeches as we expect in Shakespeare's play and do not find. Furthermore, Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, is conspicuous in the play. She appears in the opening scene as the peacemaker between Hastings and Marcus, who are the representatives of the contending factions at Edward's deathbed, and she is presented as a worthy grandmother-to-be of Queen Elizabeth, who is praised in the concluding speech of this play as she is in Shakespeare's. If Shakespeare was indebted to The True Tragedie for story details as critics suggest, he did not imitate its use of speeches on political themes.
Churchill's careful study of the sources and analogues of Shakespeare's Richard III is, of course, a literary study and takes no account of the treatment of Richard III in Elizabethan political polemics, where we must look if we are to understand the possible political implications of the play. Now, being against tyranny and usurpation is almost as safe as being against sin—in general. But being against a particular tyrant or would-be usurper is dangerous, as the poet Collingbourne, who suffered under Richard III, warned in the Mirror for Magistrates:
But when these pelting poetes in theyr rymes
Shall taunt, and jest, or paynt our wicked wurkes,
And cause the people knowe, and curse our crymes,
This ougly fault, no Tyrant lyves but urkes.30
For the most part the writers were, therefore, anonymous who used Richard III as the archetype by which they interpreted the designs and activities of certain contemporary figures, but the fact that they did so use him is important.
Among the earliest of the influential political libels of Elizabeth's reign was A Treatise of Treasons against Queen Elizabeth, published in 1572. Richard played a prominent role in the book, but since his treatment here bears upon the much-discussed topic of Richard's Machiavellianism, I must detour at this point to consider that subject briefly.
Edward Meyer's study of Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama, published in 1897,31 inaugurated an era of skepticism in regard to any popular firsthand acquaintance with Machiavelli's Prince on the part of sixteenth-century Englishmen. It is generally agreed that Shakespeare's Richard III is a Machiavellian character, but whether Shakespeare knew the Prince and was influenced by it in drawing his villain-hero has been the subject of debate, most modern scholars agreeing that the character does not show any features which could not have been derived from history or from Marlowe. It has also been pointed out that Richard could, as he boasted, have been schoolmaster to Machiavelli. Meyer contended that the denouncing of Machiavelli was the result, not of familiarity with the teachings of the Prince, but of a secondhand acquaintance with that work through a book by Innocent Gentillet, generally known as the Contre-Machiavel. It was published in French in 1576, translated into English by Simon Paterike in 1577, but not published in its translated form until 1602. Meyer explained away earlier references to Machiavelli, saying that Ascham's “assumption that Machiavelli was known can only apply to scholars,” and insisted that before the publication of Gentillet's work in 1576 he could find absolutely no references which show “the slightest tendency to misinterpret or denounce Machiavelli.” Moreover, he asserted that in 1589 “Thomas Lodge introduced Machiavelli into the popular controversial literature of the day, with his immediately-suppressed pamphlet: ‘A Reply to Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse.’ “I do not propose to enter into a discussion of the popularity of the Prince or of the influence of Machiavelli on English politics and politicians of the period, though all Meyer's pronouncements need to be reviewed. I only wish to show that most of his contentions can be challenged by referring to A Treatise of Treasons, published four years before the Contre-Machiavel. It is a political libel, definitely pro-Catholic and said by Camden to have been written in order to make Sir Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, “odious to their Prince,” the one being Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and the other Lord Treasurer of England.
The anonymous author professed two purposes: to disprove accusations against the Duke of Norfolk and Mary of Scotland, and to prove the existence of treasons against Queen Elizabeth which were still undetected. He refers throughout his work to the two worthies against whom the book is directed as Machiavels and Catilines, using the terms together or interchangeably. This fact is of itself interesting because of the printer's ink that has been used by commentators on the line in The True Tragedie which reads
And set the aspiring Catilin to schoole,
but which has been changed in the third part of Henry VI to read
And set the mur'drous Machiavel to school.32
However, it is what he says about the Machiavel-Catilines that is of special concern to us here. These “Machiavellian Libertines,” he charges, were responsible for having destroyed the old religion of the country by setting up a new one so that in effect they would leave no religion in the hearts of the people, and then he proceeds to definition:
And that is it, that I cal a Machiavellian State and Regiment: where Religion is put behind in the second and last place: where the civil Policie, I meane, is preferred before it, and not limited by any rules of Religion, but the Religion framed to serve the time and policy: … where it is free to slaunder, to belie, to forswear,... to invade, to depose, to imprison, to murther, and to commit every other outrage, never so barbarous (that promiseth to advaunce the present Policie in hand) without scruple, feare, or conscience of hel or heaven, of God, or Devil: and where no restraint, nor allurement is left in the heart of man, to bridle him from evil, nor to invite him to good: but for vaine fame only and feare of lay lawes, that reache no further than to this body and life: that cal I properly a Machiavellian State and Governance.33
The Treatise abounds in literary and historical parallels, among others a long account of the Trojan-horse methods of the current Sinon, so that Richard's comparison of himself to Sinon in Henry VI is perhaps also noteworthy.34 But the most extensive comparison is that described in a marginal note as “Comparisons betwene this Tragedie and that of K. Richard the third,”35 which begins:
It would be to long a worke, to peruse in this maner al the pointes attemted against her [Queen Elizabeth] by these Machiavellians, that do breath and spire out their fatal malice towards her. To be therefore as brief as I can, I shal put you in mind of the last Tragedie of like nature and qualitie wrought among your selves, by K. Richard the third, as the Stories make mention: compassed by like fraudulent, impudent, and monstruous meanes, and ended with that Tyranical and blouddy successe, that this also threateneth and plainly portendeth.
The author professes surprise that the present queen is not as astute, in seeing that those who seize the Duke of Norfolk and imprison Mary Stuart intend harm ultimately to the queen herself, as was the earlier Queen Elizabeth, wife to Edward IV, in understanding that those who seized her kinsmen and put the little Duke of York in the power of his uncle intended harm ultimately to the young king, Edward V. The ultimate intentions of Richard III were not apparent in the initial events, he points out; likewise the devices of these Machiavellians are today leading to a conclusion not yet obvious. Then he gives twenty pages of text to listing parallels which I must perforce summarize briefly, though brevity means omitting many interesting details.
The first step in Richard's game was to create suspicion between Edward IV's party and his queen's kinsmen; the present plotters have created suspicion between Elizabeth and Mary and their respective friends.
Richard secured the destruction of important persons, notably the Duke of Clarence, under the pretense of preventing mischief; so have these men succeeded in making way with Norfolk, Guise, Huntley, Darnley, and others.
The kinsmen of Edward IV's queen were treated with kindness when first apprehended, as were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, Lord Lumley, and the rest; but they were later executed. The rumors that the queen's kinsmen would destroy the king's kindred are comparable also to the outcropping of books and libels against these unfortunates today.
Edward's widow was defamed as an enemy to her husband's kindred and to the nobility and was accused of being a sorceress and a witch and was said by necromancy to have wasted the Protector's body; Mary, a widowed queen, is accused of being a harlot, of killing her husband, and of raising rebellions.
Edward IV was accused of being a bastard, and his sons were also announced to be bastards to debar them as heirs to the crown of England; writings, especially the book of John Hales, have pretended that because Mary was born in Scotland she could not inherit and have charged bastardy against Lady Margaret Lennox and her succession.
Richard succeeded in getting the younger son of Edward into his hands by pretending that his mother proposed to send him overseas; now it is said that Mary proposes to send her son (James) to Spain.
The Bishop of York, Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and others were unaware of the end purposed when they were instrumental in overthrowing the queen's kinsmen; these of the nobility today who have helped imprison the Bishop of Ross and the Earls of Arundel, Worcester, and Southampton should make sure that they are not serving a similar end.
The young king's faithful servants were weeded out few by few as the time of his destruction drew near; today the Queen of Scotland's faithful servants are removed few by few until now she has none about her able to resist any violence offered to her.
The “little babe” then said, “Though mine Uncle wil have my Kingdome, I would to God, he would let me have my life still;” so now the Queen of Scotland appeals but for her liberty and safety.
Compare the instruments of evil. There did not lack Shaws then among the clergy, or Sampsons now. There was a Catesby then, a Norton now, among the lawyers. There was then a Brak-enbury who refused to become a slaughterman; now there is a Shrewsbury. But there was then a Tirrel to do the deed; now there is a knight to whom Shrewsbury may have to yield his prisoner.
As the purpose was then to root out the heirs male of Edward IV, so now if the descendants of Henry VIII are finished, the right successors are to be wasted and weeded away.
At this point the author of the Treatise stops particularized parallels but continues to show how the “captaine Catiline of this Conjuration” proposes, by arranging marriages and weeding out those who stand in his path, to see to it that he rules whoever is ruler of England, and that his succession “be Coosins to the croune, and annumbered among the noblest.” The author adds ominously, “what more afterward, who wotteth yet.”
Thus Richard was, at least by 1572, accepted as the archetype of Machiavellianism, his activities being made the pattern by which to interpret the doings of political aspirants. And he continued to be so used.
Probably the most scurrilous libels of Elizabeth's reign were directed against her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, and the most famous of the infamies hurled at him were those contained in a work of which I have already written, The Copie of a Leter, wry ten by a Master of Arte of Cambridge, better known under its seventeenth-century title of Leicester's Commonwealth. The letter was published in 1584 in English and shortly afterward in a French translation bearing the more descriptive title Discours de la vie abhominable, ruses, trahisons, murtres, impostures, empoisonnements, paillardises, atheismes, et autres tres iniques conversations, due quelle id usè et usè joumellement, le my Lord de Lecestre, Machiaveliste contra l'honneur de Dieu, la Maiestie de la Royne de'Angleterre, sa Princesse etc. Since no adequate and unprejudiced biography of Leicester has ever been published, this libel has remained the basis for most of the accounts of his life up to the present day. Camden wrote that the libels against Leicester disgracefully defamed him, “not without some untruths,” and he summed up the popular judgment of the earl by-saying that “openly hee was accounted in the number of commendable men, but privily hee was ill spoken of by the most sort.”36 At any rate, the Leter but reaffirmed gossip that persisted from the early years of the reign about Leicester in spite of the most energetic measures taken by the queen and other authorities, and it spread this old gossip with additions and interpretations that drove the queen and the authorities to new but still unavailing attempts to suppress it. This all too popular libel represented Leicester, “Machiaveliste,” like his father before him, as another Richard III.
The main charge directed against Leicester in this book is that, like his father, he is seeking to divert the crown of England from the true heirs to the heirs of another house, hoping ultimately to secure it to himself or to his heirs. It will be remembered that John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had succeeded in being made protector to young Edward VI after having manipulated the execution of Protector Somerset, Edward's uncle on his mother's side. He had then married his son Guilford to Lady Jane Grey, descended from Mary, the younger daughter of Henry VII; and on the same day he had married his daughter Katherine to Henry Hastings, son and heir of the Earl of Huntington, descended on his mother's side from George, Duke of Clarence. Thinking he had secured the throne to his heirs whatever might betide, the duke, according to the ugly rumors of the time, poisoned the young king and caused Lady Jane Grey to be proclaimed queen. The attempt to deprive the daughters of Henry VIII of the crown was paid for by the series of executions which make somber pages in the history of the early days of Mary's reign. The affairs in which the Duke of Northumberland had so largely figured were mirrored in tragedies of the reigns of Henry VI and Richard III in the Mirror for Magistrates. Now the Leter proclaims that Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, is following in his father's footsteps in trying to divert the crown from the true heirs (the Scotch line) to another house, that of Huntington. But it does not use the method of the Treatise of Treasons in comparing Leicester to Richard III; instead of concentrating parallels in one section of the book, it refers to them from time to time as occasion offers.
Leicester is dominated by ambition, the author asserts, and ambition always grows and is jealous. Leicester showed his ambition to become king or to have his heirs gain the crown first by trying to marry Elizabeth; then by attempting to have Elizabeth's natural issue instead of her lawful issue declared her successor (thus giving opportunity for him to foist off any illegitimate offspring of his own as hers); then by attempting to arrange a marriage with Mary of Scotland. Now he is attempting to advance the House of Huntington (his sister being married to the Earl of Huntington), or to marry his own son to Arabella Stuart and promote her claim.
Probably the most telling comparison between Leicester and Richard III dates from the early days of the reign when Leicester still hoped to marry Queen Elizabeth. In the course of the dialogue recorded in the Leter the Lawyer is made to say:
I have hearde men of good discourse affyrme, that the Duke of Northumberland had straunge devises in his head, for deceaving of Suffolk (who was nothing so fine as himself,) and for bringing the Crown to his own familie. And among other devises it is thought, that he had most certaine intention to marrie the Ladie Marie himself …. and to have bestowed her Ma. that now is, upon some one of his children (yf it should have bene thought best to give her lyfe) ….
The Scholar suggests that the duke already had a wife. Whereupon the Gentleman derides him:
… you question like a Scholar. As though my L. of Leycester had not a wyfe alive, when he first began to pretend mariage to the Q. Ma. Doe you not remember the storie of K. Richard the third, who at such tyme as he thought best for the establishing of his title: to marry his own nepce, that afterward was married to King Henrie the seventh, how he caused secretlie to be given abroode that his own wyfe was dead, whom all the world knew to be then alive and in good health, but yet soone afterward she was sene dead indeed.37
Here was the old story of the death of Amy Robsart again. Our most authentic version has come down to us in the Spanish State Papers in a letter referred to earlier in these pages, from Bishop Quadra to the Duchess of Parma. It was dated September 11, 1560, and reported a conversation that Quadra had with Cecil, who was so much disturbed by events that he was thinking of retiring:
He ended by saying that Robert was thinking of killing his wife, who was publicly announced to be ill, although she was quite well, and would take good care they did not poison her. He said surely God would never allow such a wicked thing to be done.
But Quadra continues:
The next day the Queen told me as she returned from hunting that Robert's wire was dead or nearly so, and asked me not to say anything about it.38
The strange death of Leicester's wife that followed his inauspicious prophecy so roused public indignation that Leicester's marriage to Queen Elizabeth was made forever impossible, historians have generally agreed, and it would be strange indeed had not Leicester's contemporaries commented on the likeness of Amy Robsart's death to that of Anne, queen to Richard the Third.
The author of the Leter argues, however, that though Leicester is pretending to support Huntington, there is old enmity between the earls, and
Hastings for ought I see, when he commeth to the scambling, is like to have no better luck by the Beare, then his auncestor had once by the Boare. Who using his help first in murdering the sonne and heire of K. Henrie the sixt, and after in destroying the faithful friendes and kinsmen of K. Edward the fift, for his easier way of usurpation: made an ende of him also in the Tower, at the very same day and houre, that the other were by his counsail destroied in Pontfract Castle.39
Nor would Leicester “be so improvident, as to make him his soveraign, who now is but his dependent,” remembering what happened to the Duke of Buckingham who helped Richard III to the crown and to others who aided aspirants to their goal, since no king can satisfy these helpers or repay them sufficiently.
Nevertheless Leicester is now apparently supporting the House of Huntington and is ready to defend the title derived from the Duke of Clarence. The author adds:
they have an other fetch of K. Richard the thirde, whereby he would nedes prove, his elder brother king Edward to be a Bastard: and consequentlie his whole line aswel male as female to be void. Which devise though it be ridiculous, and was at the tyme when it was first invented: yet, as Richard found at that tyme a Doctor Shawe, that shamed not to publish and defend the same, at Paules Crosse in a Sermon: and John of Northumberland my L. of Leycesters father, founde out divers preachers in his tyme, to set up the title of Suffolk, and to debase the right of king Henries daughter …: so I dout not, but thes men would finde out also, both Shawes, Sandes, and others, to set out the title of Clarence, before the whole interest of K. Henrie the seventh and his posteritie, if occasion served.40
In order that Leicester may make clear the path for Huntington (or himself) to the crown, the Scotch line from Henry VII must be got out of the way:
You know, that Richard of Glocester had never bene able to have usurped as he did, if he had not first perswaded king Edward the fowerth to hate his own brother the Duke of Clarence, which Duke stood in the waye, betwene Richard and the thing, which he moste of al thinges coveted. That is, the possibility to the Crown, and so in this case is ther the lyke device to be observed.41
The nearness of the aspirants to the crown is dangerous to those who wear the crown. Henry IV did not mean to usurp the crown until he saw Richard II without an heir and Roger Mortimer slain in Ireland. Richard III did not mean to murder his nephews until he saw his brother dead and his nephews in his hands. Henry VIII was so well aware of the menace that he thought it best to wipe out all the heirs of Clarence:
And yet now when one of the same house and line, of more habilitie and ambition, then ever anie of his auncestors were, maketh open title and claime to the Crown, with plotes, packes, and preparations to most manifest usurpation against al order, al law, and al rightful succession: and against a special statute provided in that behalf: yet is he permitted, borne out, favored, and friended therein.42
The author attributed certain of Leicester's stratagems to his following of Machiavelli, and Sir Philip Sidney, answering the Leter in defense of his uncle, took particular note of this fact:
as though I doubted that any would build belief upon such a dirty seat, only when he, to borrow a little of his inkhorn, when he plays the statist, wringing very unluckily some of Machiavel's axioms to serve his purpose, then indeed—then he triumphs.43
Sidney defended the good will of both Leicester and Huntington, but in spite of his defense the reputation of Leicester as a “rare artist” in poison was still current when Sir Robert Naunton wrote:
I may fear he was too well seen in the Aphorismes and principles of Nicholas the Florentine, and in the reaches of Caesar Borgia.44
And in 1592 another libel, directed against Cecil, was saying that Cecil had so often given to others the execution of his plans that their real author was not known, and was citing Leicester and Walsingham as examples. Of Leicester the author wrote:
The former of the twaine, for that he had in his youth, by overmuch attending his pleasures, neglected the observation of many secretes, which M. Cecill practized out of Machiavill: yet in the end, he did in a few yeares profit so much, and so recover his negligences past, as that he soone grew old in iniquitie: and left no mischief unattempted how abhominable so ever.45
But by 1592 libels of Leicester were out of date, for Leicester's son died in 1584, and he himself in 1588. Now the libels are turned particularly against Cecil, and the same charges that were made in the Treatise of Treasons twenty years before are renewed, with two additions: he has a hunchback son whom he is advancing, and he is trying to marry his grandson to Arabella Stuart in order to make him king in her right.46 But there are no particular references to Richard III unless a remark attributed to the old Countess of Huntington may be so construed. She is reported to have warned of a prophecy that a man with two C's in his name would be the destruction of England and may have been parodying the warning which contributed to the downfall of the Duke of Clarence.47 Be that as it may, the old charges against Cecil were renewed, and the parallels would hold as well as ever.
The specific and detailed comparison between Richard III and the members of Elizabeth's council prove that Richard was accepted as a Machiavellian before Gentillet's work was published, and that he continued to be associated with Machiavellianism. The comparison also proves that Richard was used as a mirror of usurpation and tyranny in Elizabethan England. Whether Shakespeare used him with any specific intent there is no evidence to decide. But there is ample evidence to prove that an Elizabethan audience would probably have current applications of history in mind.
Whether Shakespeare's Richard III, then, was rightly classed as one of the histories by the editors of the First Folio depends to a great extent upon Shakespeare's intention, for he did not make his play the vehicle for political moralizing, except rather casually in the last act. And even in this last act there arises the problem of the general moral versus the special political significance of the procession of ghosts which passed before Richard during his last terrifying night. The ghosts have been attributed to Senecan influence; they have been regarded as Shakespeare's interpretation of the workings of conscience, which the chronicles recorded; they have been attributed to the influence of the Mirror for Magistrates with its ghostly speakers. There were certainly many tales of the murdered returning to haunt their murderers in Shakespeare's day. But among such tales the most horrible were those relating to the death of Charles IX of France. The son of Catherine de Medici, he was at least technically responsible for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's eve which had so shocked the Protestant world, and which was constantly recalled to Englishmen when Elizabeth proposed to marry first one and then another of Catherine's sons. Charles was said to have died horribly. His pores exuded blood. He dreamed of the massacred corpses which filled the streets of Paris. He had a hot fever, and the images of his victims passed before him. Such were the tales of the divine vengeance exacted from the sinner, who, according to the Protestant writers of Shakespeare's day, had sinned in accordance with the teachings of Machiavelli as Catherine de Medici had introduced them to France. If Shakespeare did have a Machiavellian Richard in mind, it would have been fitting to accord him a death copied from the death of the arch-representative of Machiavellian evil.
To anyone who has read the chapter on Henry V, it will be apparent, I think, that Shakespeare used in brief the accepted pattern of battle in the last act of Richard III that he used in Henry V. Richmond accounts himself the captain of the Lord and his army God's “ministers of chastisement.” His troops advance to the cry of “God and Saint George,” certain that the Lord is with them. Richard resembles the French leaders in Henry V with his scorn of the enemy, “A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways.” Each of the leaders makes a formal oration to his army before the battle.
But it is not until Richmond's epilogue that we have a clear-cut political speech. It must be remembered that a renewal of the Wars of the Roses did not seem to the Elizabethans impossible. After the death of the Duke d'Alençon in 1584, it had been generally accepted that Elizabeth would not marry, and that the direct Tudor line would cease with her death. The author of the famous Leter expressed his fears
if once the chalenge of Huntington take place in our Realm. Which challenge being derived from the title of Clarence onlie, in the house of Yorke, before the union of the two great houses: rayseth up againe the olde contention, betwen the families of Yorke and Lancaster, wherein so much English blood was spilt in tymes past, and much more like to be poured out now, if the same contention should be set on foot againe. Seing that to the controversie of titles, would be added also the controversie of religion, which of all other differences is most dangerous.48
The same writer was still muddying the waters, however, when he published in 1594 his Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of lngland. Surely Shakespeare was voicing the prayer of the men of good will in all England when he was writing the words with which Richmond closed the play:
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land's increase,
That would with treason wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!
And in that day it could not be without significance that he wrote also:
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac'd peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days.
At least the partisans of the House of Lancaster could cry “Amen.”
1Chapter II.
2A11 quotations from Spenser are from the Oxford edition (1916).
3V, iii, 247.
4V, iii, 197-200.
5For a discussion of passion in Macbeth, see my Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (Cambridge, 1930), chap. xv.
6Op. cit., p. 364,11. 120-21.
7Macbeth, III, iv, 136-38.
8IV, ii, 63-64.
9IV, i, 82-84.
10IV, ii, 72-73.
11V, iii, 215-20.
12V, iii, 228-35.
13See my “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology, XXVIII (1931), 281-96.
14I, iv, 180-273.
15III, v, 41-46 and 52-55.
16V, vi, 10-12.
17See R. W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Nashville, 1941), where the Elizabethan conception of God's use of a wicked man as a scourge is discussed at length.
18I, iii, 135-36.
19I, iv, 46 et seq.
20II, i, 131-32.
21II, i, 12-15.
22I, iii, 174-81.
23I, iii, 196-227.
24Chronicles, III, 761.
25P. A. Daniel, “Time Analysis of the Plots of Shakespere's Plays: Part III. The Histories,” in The New Shakespere Society's Transactions, 1877-79, pp. 257-346.
26G. B. Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Palaestra, X: Berlin, 1900).
27Op. cit., pp. 530-31.
28An account of this play by Thomas Legge is given in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, III, 407, and by Churchill, op. cit.
29Published in 1594.
30Op. cit., p. 348, 11. 36-39.
31(Literarhistorische forschungen: Weimar, 1897). See also L. Arnold Weissberger, “Machiavelli and Tudor England,” Political Science Quarterly, XLII (1927), 589-607.
323 Henry VI, III, ii, 193.
33Op. cit., fol. a5.
343 Henry VI, III, ii, 190: “And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.”
35Op. cit., fols. 119-30.
36Camden, Historie of …. the Princesse Elizabeth, Bk. III, p. 146. See also Annates, Bk. III, p. 288.
37Op. cit., pp. 104-5.
38Cal. S. P., Span., 1558-1567, p. 175. See above, pp. 171-73.
39Op. cit., p. 106.
40Ibid., p. 124.
41Ibid., p. 160.
42Ibid., pp. 174-75.
43Sidney, Miscellaneous Works, ed. William Gray (Boston, 1860), p. 311.
44Fragmenta Regalia (1641), p. 15.
45A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles, presupposed to be intended against the realme of England (1592), pp. 52-53. All these libels are usually attributed to Robert Parsons.
46Ibid., pp. 70-71.
47John Philopatris, An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of My L. Treasurers of Ingland (1592), p. 39.
48Op. cit., pp. 120-21.