[In the following essay, McLaughlin represents Richard III as a comic-villain who is intended to evoke laughter through his wit and the slapstick excess of his aggression for the sake of domination.]

There is a sure-fire show stopper in the Punch and Judy show: Punch takes his stick to one of his victims—usually Scaramouche—swings mightily, and the puppet's head is knocked clear off its shoulders. When Buckingham asks of Richard III, "Now my lord, what shall we do if we perceive / Lord Hastings will not yield to our complots?" Richard's reply is a Punch-line: "Chop off his head." It has the finality of Punch's stick; we can almost see the head topple. Our delight at the sudden audacity and directness of Richard's answer is equal to a child's joy at watching Punch's victim lose his blockhead. Edmund Kean, we are told, delivered the line with a laugh,¹ and Laurence Olivier, in his filmed version of Richard III gave it with a sardonic grin and a malicious twinkle of the eye. The audiences in both cases could be expected to laugh appreciatively, for Richard, like Punch, is a comedian-villain.²

There is nothing new in the notion that villainy can be played for comedy. The comic rogue and the melodramatic villain are often the same character in different kinds of plays, and any villain, if played too broadly, can trip into comic bathos. Open aggression, especially when it is unmotivated as it is with Richard, is always very close to comedy. If aesthetic distance and the rhetoric of the joke are present, aggression and cruelty easily become comic.

One of the archetypal comic villains of English popular drama is the hunchbacked puppet hero Punch, a character who represents the distillation of centuries of theatrical practice. Punch rules over a microcosmic comic world not only where murder is frequent and hilarious, but where violence emerges triumphant. The character was originally a puppet version of the commedia dell'arte's Pulcinello, quite a different comic type. In the eighteenth-century puppet theater Pulcinello was a comic henpecked husband, the receiver of blows. The metamorphosis of the character from a comic victim to the assassin Punch came about when the elegant puppet theaters of London declined and the puppet show was thrown out onto the streets where it was operated by a single person using gloved hand puppets. On the streets, the only criterion for the puppet showmen was laughter, and the character of Pulcinello, the victim of abuse, was transformed into Punch, the gleeful murderer.³ Clearly, what entertained audiences was an ever-increasing display of aggression on the part of the play's hook-nosed, hump-backed protagonist. The final Punch and Judy play as we know it today has a single-minded unity of action: Punch disposes of a series of characters by beating them into insensibility with his stick.

Both Richard and Punch are assassins—premeditated scoundrels intent on clubbing their way to dominance. Both are also crowd pleasers who have proved their endurance on the popular English stage. Burbage made his reputation as Richard, and other Shakespearean actors such as Cibber, Kean, Booth and Irving won fame in the role. Although the play has been a favorite with audiences for several centuries—especially in Cibber's version which makes it a star vehicle—only in recent years has it received favorable critical attention. We are much more sympathetic to the violence, psychological pathology, and theatricality of the play than were earlier critics. Dr. Johnson summed up the objections: "That the play has scenes noble in themselves and very well contrived to strike in the exhibition, cannot be denied. But some parts are trifling, others shocking, and some improbable."⁴

Trifling, shocking, and improbable—an apt description of the Punch and Judy show. Many of the problems of Richard III and its leading character clear up if we consider Richard, not as a character from tragedy, or even from melodrama, but as a comic rogue intent on Punch-ing his way to dominance. It is true that this theatrical interpretation ignores some of Richard's other dimensions, particularly the psychological questions raised by his inability to find satisfaction through conquest and achievement, and the moral and political contexts provided by his conscience and by Margaret's curses. These have been dealt with elsewhere, but the raw theatrical power of the character, especially his comic verve, though often noted, have been less frequently analyzed.

The essential Richard is already characterized in the second and third parts of Henry VI. His only pleasure is power and therefore he sets his sights upon the ultimate goal:

Then, 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,
  And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,
  Until this mis-shaped trunk that bears this head
  Be round impaled with a glorious crown.⁵

His method will be to dominate through role; he will become a Protean shape-changer, a master of mask and costume, a superhuman actor, a veritable Punch:

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'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machievel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

(182-195)

Richard had found complete fulfillment in war where he expressed his will to power in the most direct way, through slaughter. But as Richard III opens we find Gloucester an alienated man; peace has settled upon the land and the conflicts of battle have given way to the conflicts of love, and in this contest there is no hope for victory. In the court of Edward he is merely a grotesque hunchback incapable of attracting either admiration or love. He has been reduced from a vicious fighting machine capable of striking terror into the heart of an opponent to an ugly, ineffectual cripple. But Richard is unwilling to accept inferiority; he makes an existential choice:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
  I am determined to prove a villain . . .

(Richard III, I. i. 28-30)

He chooses no second-rate goal, but the highest known to man, kingship, and sets out to get it with all the resourcefulness and vitality at his command. Like the rogues of comedy he leaps nimbly from role to role as chance or his imagination dictates. One of the roles he plays is the comedian. We see him perform in the opening scene of the play when he meets his brother Clarence as he is being conducted to the Tower. Richard makes jokes at the expense of the king's mistress, Jane Shore, one of them a punning double entendre on the word "naught":

Glou. Naught to do with Mistress Shore!
>I tell thee, fellow,
He that doth naught with her, excepting one,
Were best to do it secretly, alone.

(I. i. 98-100)

But the cruelest joke is his offhand quip upon leaving Clarence:

Go, tread the path that thou shalt ne'er return.
Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,
If heaven will take the present at our hands.

(118-120)

This is the voice of Punch chuckling over the victim he has just clubbed into insensibility. The effect of these lines is to allow us to relish Richard's villainy without moral inhibitions, to sidestep the censor that might ordinarily tell us that this is a man we must condemn. The sardonic jest of doing his enemies a favor by sending them to their reward in heaven is a favorite one with Richard and he uses it in one of the most audacious scenes ever written into a play—his wooing of Lady Anne.

Characteristically, Richard's decision to become a wooer is a daring one, for he chooses the most inappropriate time possible to declare himself—when Anne is preparing to bury the corpse of Henry VI whom Richard has killed, even as he has slaughtered Anne's husband, Edward. His timing is utterly irrational; however Richard is not led by reason, but by his daemon, and by his driving need to bend others to his will, even against insuperable odds. Indeed, the improbability of success acts as an incentive to Richard, for like many of Shakespeare's characters he is a gambler and the greater the risk the greater the reward in emotional ecstasy when he has triumphed. To win against the greatest odds—"all the world to nothing"—is the most triumphant victory.

The wooing scene has often been condemned as one of the most improbable ever written by a playwright. Coleridge refused to believe that Shakespeare wrote it. It is indeed improbable if we consider it as a serious drama, but if we look at the scene for what it really is—high comedy—then it becomes a wit combat to match that of Beatrice and Benedick, with one important exception.

In the wit battles of Beatrice and Benedick and those of the Restoration "gay couples" the underlying motivation is sexuality, but in Richard's wooing of Anne the driving force is naked aggression. The scene demonstrates Richard's ability to bend Anne to submission with nothing more than the unyielding weight of his will. Against what appears to be hopeless odds, Richard seizes each line of Anne's spitting denunciation and turns it spider-like into the web that will enmesh her. The sallies between them are no less clever than those of Beatrice and Benedick. But Anne's wit never permits her to gain equality with her adversary as does that of Beatrice or Millamant:

Anne. O'he was gentle, mild and virtuous!
Glou. The better for the king of heaven, that hath him.
Anne. He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Glou. Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither,
  For he was fitter for that place than earth.
Anne. And thou unfit for any place but hell.

Glou. Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne. Some dungeon.
Glou. Your bedchamber.

(I. ii. 104-111)

The exchange only appears to be a contest; in reality Anne is no match for Richard, because the underlying issue is really not sex. Richard's eye is not on Anne's bedchamber as he claims, but on the crown, and therefore Anne does not have sex, that great equalizer, in her arsenal.

When Richard draws his sword and offers it to Anne to run through his bared breast, an act that appears to entail the greatest danger of all, there is really little risk involved. He has already submitted her to his will and the rest is mere theatrics. In this gesture Richard is the master showman. He prevails for the same reason that the high wire aerialist prevails, because of daring, nerve, and unlimited self-confidence. Shakespeare's villains—Aaron, Richard, Don John, and Iago—all possess to some degree this talent for breathtaking showmanship.⁶

When Richard dismisses Anne after dominating her completely, he is once more the ironic comedian gloating over his victory. The soliloquy which begins, "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?/Was ever woman in this humour won?" (I. ii. 228-229) anticipates Ben Jonson's Mosca, who preens, "I fear I shall begin to grow in love/With my dear self and my most prosp'rous parts. . . . " Richard, too, is filled with a bubbling, narcissistic self-love:

I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body.
Since I am crept in favour with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.

(256-260)

Both Mosca and Richard seethe with the power that accompanies skill in aggressive behavior. The boundless energy with which they deceive, flatter, and cajole is exceeded only by the bursting, self-satisfied rejoicing at their success. Here is Mosca, Jonson's comic servant:

. . . your fine, elegant rascal, that can rise
And stoop, almost together, like an arrow;
Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star;
Turn short as doth a swallow; and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once;
Present to any humor, all occasion;
And change a visor swifter than a thought.⁷

And Richard:

What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,
  To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
  But I no friends to back my suit withal
  But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing! Ha!

(231-239)

These are two masters of their craft glorying in their skills. Their infectious, effervescent good humor is readily transmitted to an audience which can experience vicariously the triumph of malicious superiority.

If Richard the wooer is high comedy then Richard being wooed is pure farce. I refer to the scene where Buckingham and the citizens come to offer Richard the crown and he accepts it with feigned reluctance. The scene is staged by Buckingham and Richard like a prep school theatrical. Richard, flanked by two clergymen, is following Buckingham's stage directions for accepting the crown: "Play the maid's part, still answer nay and take it" (III. vii. 51). He is the chaste virgin, innocently at prayer, being sought for seduction and coyly yielding to it. When Richard refuses the crown, Buckingham and the citizens start to leave, with Buckingham's "Zounds! we'll entreat no more." Richard, who has just had Hastings' head lopped off, replies: "O do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham." So well does he play his part that he almost overplays it; he is forced to give Catesby a panicky "Call them again," to bring the citizens back.

The entire action is an outrageous example of how the comic rogue attains mastery through role. When the role is played broadly, as it is here, it becomes farce; it is difficult to act the scene any other way. Shakespearean actors have enriched the comedy with various pieces of comic business. Olivier, in his filmed version, for example, borrowed an effective piece of stage business from the nineteenth century American actor Richard Mansfield: Richard enters between two clergymen with a prayerbook in his hand. He appears to be piously absorbed in the book, but when no one is looking he suddenly does a double take and turns the book right side up. At the end of the scene Olivier also included a piece of business originated by Colly Cibber—now that the prayer book is no longer needed, he simply throws it away, tossing it high into the air.

The rich comedy of the wooing scenes is certainly not sustained throughout the play. Once Richard has attained the ultimate prize—the crown—once his will to power has been satisfied, it is as if a source of energy has been lost. With no further victims to crush, no further risks to run, no further roles to play, Richard grows petulant and ill-humored; he loses his ironic turn of phrase and his cynical wit. Without the lust for domination he is no longer comic. Then, on the eve of battle he is stricken by conscience in the form of the ghosts of those he has slain, and this makes lightness and laughter impossible—for him and for his audience. Only when Richard enters onto the battlefield and once more faces the challenge of a competitor does he regain his old gaiety.

Richard III represents an extreme example of what happens when a playwright bedecks villainy with lightness, wit, hyperbole, and a drive for mastery. The character, with a little nudging by either actor or audience, becomes comic. In Richard's case, too much of the comedian is visible to be accidental. Punch-Richard is the portrait Shakespeare painted—a comic psychopath, a master of both gallows gag and executioner's earnest, the topsman's top banana.

Notes

¹ A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (London: Russell, 1944), p. 99.

² G. B. Shaw was one of the earliest critics to recognize the resemblance between Richard and Punch. "Richard," Shaw wrote, "is the prince of Punches: he delights Man by provoking God, and dies unrepentant and game to the last. His incongruous conventional appendages, such as the Punch hump, the conscience, the fear of ghosts, all impart a spice of outrageousness which leaves nothing lacking to the fun of the entertainment, except the solemnity of those spectators who feel bound to take the affair as a profound and subtle historic study." Quoted in Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare (New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 164.

³ A scenario of the Punch play is in Philip John Stead, Mr. Punch (London: Evans, 1950). George Speaight's The History of the English Puppet Theatre (London: Harrap, 1955) is a scholarly study of the subject.

⁴ W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., ed., Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 93.

⁵ Hardin Craig, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (New York: Scott Foresman, 1961), 3 Henry VI, III. ii. 165-171. Subsequent references to Shakespeare's plays are to this edition.

⁶ For an excellent discussion of Richard as showman see Robert B. Heilman, "Satiety and Conscience: Aspects of Richard III," Antioch Rev., 24 (Spring 1964), 57-73.

⁷ Alvin B. Kernan, ed., Ben Jonson: Volpone (New Haven: Yale, 1962), III. i. 23-29.