SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD III brilliantly develops the personality features of the aspiring tyrant already sketched in the Henry VI trilogy: the limitless self-regard, the lawbreaking, the pleasure in inflicting pain, the compulsive desire to dominate. He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.
He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.
He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.
His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.
Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard III never been born.
SHAKESPEARE BASED HIS portrait of Richard on a highly tendentious, partisan account written by Thomas More and reiterated by the Tudor chroniclers. But where, the playwright wondered, did his psychopathology come from? How was it formed? The tyrant, as Shakespeare conceived him, was inwardly tormented by a sense of his own ugliness, the consequence of a misshapen body that from the moment he was born made people recoil in disgust or horror. “The midwife wondered, and the women cried/‘O Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!” (3 Henry VI 5.6.74–75). “And so I was,” he reflects, “which plainly signified/That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.”
Richard’s neonatal teeth are a symbolically charged feature that he has incorporated into his account of himself and that has evidently been elaborated by others. “They say my uncle grew so fast,” his little nephew York prattles, “That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old” (Richard III 2.4.27–28). “Who told thee so?” asks his grandmother, the Duchess of York, who is Richard’s mother. “His nurse,” the boy replies, but the duchess contradicts him: “His nurse? Why she was dead ere thou wert born” (2.4.33). “If ’twere not she,” he says, “I cannot tell who told me” (2.4.34). Richard’s infancy has become the stuff of legend.
Richard mentions the reaction of the midwife and the attending women, but it is easy to surmise that the account of his ill-omened arrival derives principally from his mother. The Duchess of York has evidently regaled her son and everyone else with stories of his difficult birth and the repellent signs on his body. Her recurrent theme is what she calls the “anguish, pain, and agony” (Richard III [Quarto] 4.4.156) she experienced in bringing him into the world, and that theme serves as a reproach leveled against him by those imprudent or desperate enough to speak their minds. “Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,” the unfortunate Henry VI reminds his captor Richard, “And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope—/To wit, an undigested and deformèd lump” (3 Henry VI 5.7.49–51). When the captive king goes on to bring up those teeth—“Teeth thou had in thy head when thou wast born/To signify thou cam’st to bite the world”—Richard has had enough. Shouting “I’ll hear no more!” he stabs his royal prisoner to death (5.7.53–57).
As those around him come to perceive, something is seriously wrong with Richard’s mind; even he acknowledges his inner turmoil, if only to himself. To account for his moral and psychological deformity, his contemporaries point to his physical deformity: the twisted spine they call a hunchback (and we would diagnose as severe kyphosis). For them, it is as if the universe marked him outwardly to signify his inner condition. And Richard concurs: “Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,” he says, “Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it” (5.6.78–79). Feeling in himself none of the ordinary human emotions—I have, he says, “neither pity, love, nor fear” (5.6.68)—he actively wills his mind to match the stigmatized crookedness of his body.
Shakespeare does not repudiate his culture’s belief that bodily deformity signified moral deformity; he allows his audience to credit the notion that a higher power, whether nature or God, has provided a visible sign of the villain’s wickedness. Richard’s physical deformity is a kind of preternatural portent or emblem of his viciousness. But, against the dominant current of his culture, Shakespeare insists that the inverse is also true: Richard’s deformity—or, rather, his society’s reaction to his deformity—is the root condition of his psychopathology. There is nothing automatic in this conditioning; certainly, no suggestion that all people with twisted spines become cunning murderers. Shakespeare does, however, suggest that a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.
Richard observes his brother Edward wooing an attractive woman. It is evidently something he has watched before—his brother is a notorious ladies’ man—and it arouses bitter reflections. “Love forswore me in my mother’s womb,” he broods, and to make sure that this abandonment would be permanent, the goddess connived with Nature
To shrink mine arm up like a withered 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. (3 Henry VI 3.2.153–60)
It would be grotesque for him, he thinks, to imagine that he could have any erotic success; no one could ever love that body of his. Whatever pleasure he could seize from life thus could not possibly come from making his “heaven in a lady’s lap” (3.2.148). But there is a way he can compensate for the painful loss: he can devote himself to bullying those who possess the natural endowments he lacks.
The youngest son of the Duke of York and the brother to the reigning king, Edward IV, Richard is near the top of the social hierarchy. He knows that people make cruel jokes about him when he is not in earshot, calling him the “toad” and the “boar,” but he knows, too, that his high birth confers upon him almost limitless authority over those beneath him. To this authority he conjoins arrogance, a penchant for violence, and a sense of aristocratic impunity. When he gives an order, he expects it to be instantly obeyed. Encountering the procession bearing the hearse of the king he has killed, Richard peremptorily commands the gentlemen bearers and their armed attendants to stop and set it down. When they at first refuse, he showers insults upon them—“villains,” “unmannered dog,” “beggar”—and threatens to kill them (Richard III 1.2.36–42). Such is the force of his social position and the confidence with which he wields it that they tremble before him and obey.
Dominating others serves to shore up lonely Richard’s damaged self-image, to ward off the pain of rejection, to keep him upright. It is for him as if his body were constantly mocking itself, as well as being mocked by others. Physically unbalanced, his body, he says, is “like to a chaos” (3 Henry VI 3.2.161). Exercising power, particularly the kind of power that throws people off balance, reduces his own sense of chaotic disproportionateness, or so at least he hopes. It is not simply a matter of commanding people to do what he wants them to do, though that is agreeable; it is also peculiar pleasure of making them tremble or totter or fall.
As Shakespeare’s play depicts him, Richard is chillingly clear about the links that bind together his physical deformity, his psychological disposition, and his overarching political goal:
since this earth affords no joy to me
But to command, to check, to o’erbear such
As are of better person [i.e., appearance] than myself,
I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown. (3.2.165–68)
In his own nasty way, he is a man who has achieved an unusual clarity about himself. He knows what he feels, what he lacks, and what he needs to have (or at least longs to have) in order to experience joy. Absolute power—the power to command everyone—is the extreme form of this joy; indeed, nothing less than this taste of heaven will serve to satisfy him. He will, he declares, “account this world but hell/Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head/Be round impaled with a glorious crown” (3.2.169–71).
Richard is well aware that he is trafficking in mere wish-fulfillment fantasy. His brother King Edward has two small sons who are the lineal heirs to the throne; and should neither of them chance to survive, there is also his older brother George, Duke of Clarence. There is a vast gulf between Richard and the crown he craves. “Why, then,” he says,
I do but dream on sovereignty
Like one that stands upon a promontory
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying he’ll lade it dry to have his way. (3 Henry VI 3.2.134–39)
There is something desperate and almost pathetic about this twisted man dreaming that he will one day have the power to push everyone around and, in doing so, compensate for his unloved, unbalanced body. He is, he ruefully acknowledges, like someone “lost in a thorny wood,” tearing himself on the thorns and struggling in torment to find the open air.
In these circumstances, the principal weapon Richard has is the very absurdity of his ambition. No one in his right mind would suspect that he seriously aspires to the throne. And he is confident in his possession of one particular and, in his case, essential skill. He is a gifted deceiver. “Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile,” he says, congratulating himself,
And cry “Content!” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions. (3.2.182–85)
He has the special histrionic gifts of a confidence man.
In the spectacular opening soliloquy of Richard III, Richard reminds the audience where the trilogy had left off: “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York” (Richard III 1.1.1–2). Shakespeare then reopened the window into his character. England is at last at peace, but there is no peace for the twisted Duke of Gloucester. Everyone else can turn to the pursuit of pleasure:
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped 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,
Deformed, unfinished, 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. (1.1.14–25)
“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world scarce half made up,” Richard will not attempt to be a lover but will instead pursue power by any means necessary.
Shakespeare did not suggest that a compensatory model—power as a substitute for sexual pleasure—could fully explain the psychology of a tyrant. But he held on to the core conviction that there is a significant relationship between the lust for tyrannical power and a thwarted or damaged psychosexual life. And he held on as well to the conviction that traumatic and lasting damage to a person’s self-image could be traced back to early experiences—to an adolescent’s fear that he is ugly, or to the cruel mockery of other children, or, even earlier in life, to the responses of nurses and midwives. Above all, he thought, irreparable harm could come from a mother’s failure or inability to love her child. Richard’s bitter anger at the goddess Love, who forswore him, and at nature, who shrank his arm like a withered shrub, is a thin screen for his rage against his mother.
Richard III is among the few plays in Shakespeare to depict a mother-child relationship. Far more often the plots focus upon children and their fathers—Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV in the two plays that bear his name, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Brabantio in Othello, both Lear and Gloucester in King Lear, Prospero in The Tempest, to name only a few—with scarcely so much as a memory trace of the women who brought those children into the world. The Henry VI trilogy manages to feature York’s four sons—Edward, George, Rutland, and Richard—without bothering to introduce their mother. The plays’ emphasis is not on the individual or the family but on the whole realm’s slide into civil war. When, however, Shakespeare focused on the character of the tyrant himself—the inward bitterness, disorder, and violence that drive him forward, to the ruin of his country—then he needed to explore something amiss in the relation between mother and child.
Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, makes it clear from her first appearance in Richard III that she regards her son as a monster. She has ample reason to do so. She does not know the details, but she suspects that Richard, and not her ailing elder son Edward, was behind the murder of their brother George. Richard has expressed great sympathy and love for his niece and nephew, George’s orphaned children, but the duchess warns them—“shallow innocents,” as she calls them—not to believe a word he says. “Think you my uncle did dissemble, grandam?” asks one of the children. “Ay, boy,” she curtly replies. She expresses some combination of two contradictory sentiments, disgrace and disavowal. “He is my son, ay, and therein my shame,” she acknowledges, and then immediately abjures any responsibility: “Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit” (Richard III 2.2.18, 29–30). When the word is brought that Edward has died, leaving Richard as the sole survivor of her four sons, the duchess’s feeling of disgrace is only intensified. “I for comfort have but one false glass [i.e. mirror],” she says with bitterness, “That grieves me when I see my shame in him” (2.2.53–54).
Richard arrives and puts on a show of filial piety, kneeling down for his mother’s blessing. She complies stiffly, but it is clear that she is sickened by what she has brought into the world. Later in the play, she urges the other women whose lives her child has blighted—old Margaret, the widow of Henry VI; Elizabeth, the widow of Edward; and Richard’s miserably unhappy wife, Anne—to give vent to their grief and anger. “In the breath of bitter words,” she tells them, “let’s smother/My damnèd son” (4.4.133–34). When he appears before them, she first thinks to call him the word that encapsulates the revulsion his appearance has always aroused: “Thou toad, thou toad.” If she had only strangled him in her womb, she tells him, she could have prevented all of the misery he has brought to the world and into her life:
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, desperate, wild, and furious;
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirmed proud, subtle, sly, and bloody. (4.4.167–72)
Declaring that she will never speak to him again, she finishes by cursing him and praying for his death: “Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end.”
The mother’s shame and loathing are not merely a consequence of her son’s wicked deeds; they reach all the way to the beginning, to her first glimpse of her newborn and to his tetchy and wayward infancy. Toward Edward and toward George she expresses maternal tenderness and solicitude; toward deformed Richard, she has always felt only disgust and aversion.
Richard’s response, not surprisingly, is to order the sounding of trumpets and drums in order to drown out her curses. But the play manages to imply that his mother’s rejection has reached him and implanted in him something more than impatience and rage. It implies, as well, that in response to this rejection, he has somehow developed lifelong strategies to make himself heard, attended to, and taken in. One of Richard’s uncanny skills—and, in Shakespeare’s view, one of the tyrant’s most characteristic qualities—is the ability to force his way into the minds of those around him, whether they wish him there or not. It is as if, in compensation for the pain he has suffered, he has found a way to be present—by force or fraud, violence or insinuation—everywhere and in everyone. No one can keep him out.