[In the following excerpt, Mallett presents Richard as a Machiavellian Jester, able to fool and control others like puppets by means of his play-acting, but also subject to a jesting providence.]

It might be thought perverse to link Richard III and Henry V as plays seriously concerned with the trickery of their central figures. Why not regard Richard's trickery as simply the cunning of a villain, who is duly defeated when the heroic Richmond finally restores peace and justice to the world? But this just and heroic figure doesn't get on stage until the fifth act, so we can understand that Shakespeare returned to give a fuller account of such a character in the person of Henry V, who is to be seen as 'the mirror of all Christian kings', and therefore not a trickster at all.

But both plays are more complicated and more demanding than this. The most dutiful audience might think Richmond a little perfunctory in his patriotism, and an attentive one would see that this patriotism has already been shown at the mercy of the complex pressures of greed, power and self-deception. There is, accordingly, more to say about Richard than that he temporarily frustrates a Providential scheme which plans the good of England: we cannot make a stick to beat him out of the idea of a violated moral order, when we continually see this order to be equivocal. In fact the play does not lead unhesitatingly towards Richmond's closing speech, but fosters in a wider and more critical awareness than Richmond's platitudes admit.

We need to take this critical awareness to Henry V as well, where we find that an equivocal moral order cannot be made to serve as a prop to support Henry. The questioning throughout the history plays is so rigorous that we must feel uneasy when we meet someone who claims to have 'right' always on his side, and our suspicions about Henry are confirmed when we compare the panegyrics of the Chorus to the picture forced on us by the play as a whole. Henry is intelligible to us only if we see him as a trickster, who will always contrive to be justified by events or arguments, in order to 'show goodly', and to 'attract more eyes', like 'bright metal on a sullen ground'. The Chorus is his most conspicuous victim, but what makes Henry so alarming is his ability to take everybody in, perhaps even himself. He seems to have engaged a problematic sense in Shakespeare that he could only have become what he was popularly taken to be, by being a kind of Machiavel, a completely successful trickster in moral terms, with the result that we can no longer speculate as to what, if anything, lies in the inner man. Just at those moments when we expect a glimpse into his inner life, we encounter a blankness. And this blankness is more appalling than anything in Richard III.

To turn to Richard III Coleridge noted in the histories a concern with 'the relation of providence to the human will', and his remark should alert us to the questions in the plays about the orientation of the individual towards the moral order, and to the question where, in this world, such an order is to be found. Broadly, Shakespeare's sources imply two levels of providence: general providence, leading to the eventual accession of the Tudors, and particular providence, a kind of even-handed justice which ensures that the murderers become the murdered. This providential scheme co-exists awkwardly with a Machiavellian stress on the clashing of human wills: thus Henry VI can be seen both as a saint wretchedly sacrificed as England pays for the murder of Richard II (general providence), and as a weak king who proved incompetent to govern his country (human will). Through the confusions of this Shakespeare saw the possibility of making a central issue in Richard III out of the opposition of an idea of providence, and the human will of Richard. A succession of characters assume the providential fitness of things, as in their frequent curses:

Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen,
Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self!

(1.3.202-3)

or in the speeches at their deaths:

Come, lead me, officers, to the block of shame;
Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.

(5.1.28-9)

or in ritual recitals of past history:

Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward;

(4.4.63-4)

These comments amount to so many cries of 'Nemesis', either invoked or acknowledged. Richard defies this providential logic with the Machiavellian assertion of his own energies:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

(5.3.309-11)

The ostensible irony is of course that this defiance is proved futile: ghosts still haunt Richard before Bosworth, and Richmond's arms are made stronger by his clear conscience. But the deeper irony is that the providence which defeats Richard appears to have a human face, magnified; and the face thus magnified looks disconcertingly like Richard's, at once jesting and malevolent.

It is Richard who opens the play, announcing himself as still the Machiavellian trickster who boasted in Henry VI that he could 'smile, and murder whiles I smile':

I can add colours to the chamelon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

(3 Hen. VI, 3.2.191-3)

This ability to frame his face to any occasion is demonstrated in the first scene, where Richard has one voice for us:

I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(1.1.30-1)

and another for brother Clarence, on his way to be murdered on Richard's orders, though he doesn't know it:

We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe.

(1.1.70)

with a worried shake of the head. As Clarence leaves the voice changes again:

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.

(1.1.118-20)

This is the image we keep of Richard as the play unfolds. The effect is like that of the play within a play. Clarence and most of the other characters exist in a single dimension, as distant puppet-like figures for the most part at the back of the stage, while Richard exists also in an extra dimension, front of stage, where he shares with the audience his delight in his skills as a puppet-master. We watch him put on the masks as he enters the main arena of the play's action, and remove them as he returns to comment on it. The shapes Richard can adopt are various and brilliant. He can be the 'plain man', who is 'too childish-foolish for this world': thus he convinces Hastings that 'by his face you shall know him straight', just a moment before he re-enters with 'a wonderful sour countenance, knitting his brow and gnawing his lip', to send Hastings to death (1.3.48, 3.4.48). He can be the passionate wooer, the anxious defender of the realm called out in a crisis in 'rotten armour', even a saint, with a prayer-book and two bishops, who begs to decline the crown offered him. The extravagance of all this is underlined by Richard's commentaries on his performances:

I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl . . .
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
  With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

(1.3.324, 336-8)

Richard and his co-plotter Buckingham even exchange technical notes on the arts of shape-changing; Richard discusses voice:

Come, cousin, canst thou quake, and change thy colour,
  Murder thy breath in middle of a word,
And then again begin, and stop again,
  As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror?

(3.5.1-4)

Buckingham discusses gesture and movement:

Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at the wagging of a straw . . .

(3.5.5-7)

And indeed their performances bear out their claims.

But evidently there is something else here, as well as the necessary skill of the Machiavel. Richard is not simply one who can smile and be a villain (Claudius in Hamlet can do as much), he is one whose villainy causes him to smile. We can see this in psychological terms as an instance of compensation, but it is more important to the economy of the play as a whole to see how Richard has added to his role of Machiavel the role of the Jester, the (in this case) quasi-diabolical mocker of human pretensions and pieties. His delight flows from this mockery. Much of it we too register as essentially comic; for example, Richard's filial duty as he kneels for his mother's blessing:

Amen! (Aside) and make me die a good old man,
  That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing:
I marvel that her grace did leave it out.

(2.2.109-11)

This is very funny, but Richard makes our laughter uneasy. It is disconcerting to discover that our usual moral attitudes are so much in abeyance that we are amused at the fraternal love which shows itself in giving away the brother's soul (and not, as Clarence's dream tells us, to Heaven). At the same time, we do see what gives Richard occasion for his mockery. The other characters on stage continually present themselves as if they were in touch with a moral order whose validity we could all admit; thus Queen Elizabeth:

So just is God, to right the innocent.

(1.3.182)

But their appeals to this order serve mainly to discredit it, or at the least render it equivocal; Elizabeth is addressing a former Queen, whose son and husband were murdered by Elizabeth's own husband and his brothers. It is this duplicity of conscience which gives license to our mockery. Thus when Clarence cites the sixth commandment, and warns that God 'holds vengeance in his hand' (1.4.199), we recognise that it is the fear of death which has finally converted him to these arguments. The damaging case against Clarence, that he is himself ripe for the vengeance of God against murderers, is made by hired murderers. The Lieutenant 'will not reason what is meant hereby' as he admits the murderers to the Tower, the Mayor will take on trust the assurances of the murderers that the murdered man had confessed his treasons. The Cardinal will not 'for all this land' break the 'holy privilege of blessed sanctuary', but:

My lord, you shall o'er-rule my mind for once.

(3.1.57)

One can always add 'for once' when surrendering the sanctities to the pressures of greed or fear. Richard thus appears as a kind of Elizabethan shaman, regardless of the official God but seemingly in touch with the other and unacknowledged gods of this world, so that at his approach the ready corruptibility of all around him seems to leap into evidence. His delight in his powers combines with our sense of the general moral laxity, to release some of the constraints from us, allowing us to respond with detached amusement as both persons and pretensions fall before Richard's onslaughts.

Nonetheless our laughter remains uneasy. Richard's mocking vision clouds even the most obvious 'positives' in ambiguity; even Peace looks disagreeable when seen by Richard:

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

(1.1.12-13)

The final tendency of Richard's mockery is revealed in his most versatile piece of shape-changing, the defeat of Anne. Richard successfully woos her, having previously killed her husband and her father, as she goes to bury her father-in-law—also one of Richard's victims. His triumph here is a matter of voice: at first she matches him, so that his 'Fairer than tongue can name thee' becomes her 'Fouler than heart can think thee', his 'divine perfection of a woman' becomes her 'diffused infection of a man'. But Richard's resources are endless, and at the last she falters as he kneels with his sword against his breast; now his voice matches hers:

Anne. I would I knew thy heart.
Rich. 'Tis figured in my tongue.
Anne. I fear me both are false.
Rich. Then never man was true.
Anne. Well, well, put up thy sword.

(1.2.192-6)

This marriage is supposedly part of Richard's path to the crown, but we never see its advantage to him. Its real purpose seems to be to prove that nothing in Anne's purposes or memories can resist his resourcefulness:

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won? . . .
What! I, that killed 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 her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
  And I no friends to back my suit at all,
  But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her! all the world to nothing!

(1.2.227-37)

In this encounter are tested the values notionally respected in Anne's world, the conscience which makes one loyal to God and to the dead. The Machiavel-Jester defeats them all. Richard does not need to keep a Fool in his court to expose the vanity of human pretensions: here the king is his own Jester.

As the opposition to Richard shows itself willing to yield to him, our sense of him as the puppet-master, and of the others as his puppets, is moment by moment confirmed. Thus, Hastings is not seen as an innocent man caught in the toils of the powerful, but as a fool who tumbles blindly into snares long evident to us. He is even blind to his own ironies, as when he opposes the coronation of Richard:

I'll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders,
  Before I'll see the crown so foul misplaced.

(3.2.43-4)

He doesn't realise it, but this is almost the only thing he is to get right. He belongs entirely to the play within a play, and is interesting to us only in that he calls forth a virtuoso performance from Richard. This makes matters difficult, when we realise that we have to take Hastings seriously at his death. He reflects on the 'momentary grace of mortal men', prophesies the 'fearfull'st time' for England, and then asserts the weight of the providential scheme:

They smile at me who shortly shall be dead.

(3.4.106)

All that Hastings is felt to have achieved is that he now has a right to be one of the ghosts who later haunt Richard, and he can be swallowed up in Margaret's list of the murdered:

I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him. . . .
Thy Clarence he is dead that killed my Edward;
And the beholders of this frantic play,
Th'adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smothered in their dusky graves.

(4.4.40 et seq)

None of these characters moves out of the single dimension of the play within a play. Hastings and his enemies can all be bundled into the same line, where the rhyme of Grey-play, and a near rhyme on Grey-graves, smothers their names as effectively as the graves smother their bodies. The one name alive to us from this list is that of Richard, who is not the 'beholder' but the director of this 'frantic play'. The implication seems inescapable, that the path chosen by the Machiavel-Jester is the one that leads to freedom and individuality: the alternative is to become grist to the mill of providence. But Richard too is to fall victim to this scheme, and to be buried by it as surely as was Hastings.

The ironies of this lead us to the central ambiguities of the play. There are numerous reasons for mistrusting this providential Grand Design. Our recognition of Richard's energies leads us to feel repelled at its mechanical nature. Richard's Machiavellianism has exposed those who pay lip-service to it as fools and puppets. His role of diabolic Jester has exposed its equivocal nature: it can be used to justify personal revenge, lax evasions, and cynical opportunism. Those who speak for it seem to have surrendered their humanity: Margaret, its main prophetess, is a ghostly figure whose entrances are unnoticed, asides unheard and exits unmotivated. It even requires an act of will of the most self-destructive kind to perceive the scheme, if we recognise in Margaret's advice to Elizabeth the pattern of her own previous life:

Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;

Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were,
  And he that slew them fouler than he is.

(4.4.118-21)

Nonetheless, this is the scheme which brings Richard down, and sets Richmond up. There are two levels of irony in this. One is that this providence is able to employ Richard. Clarence was a self-appointed 'bloody minister' when he helped to murder Henry VI, but Richard, the 'bloody dog', proves to have been appointed by providence. Clarence's protest, that God does not use an 'indirect or lawless course' to punish the guilty, seems to have been an error, since Richard is used to punish Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey and the rest. This is troubling enough. But the irony which underlies this is more so. Throughout the play Richard has seemed free. This is why he has been able to move in and out of the play within a play. He has remained the master of his face, able to gnaw his lip to affect anger, but now he is overseen gnawing his lip in real, not assumed, rage (4.2.27). Previously Richard has been of one mind, mocking those whose minds he could change ('Relenting fool, and shallow changing woman' (4.4.432)), but now he has to confess, 'my mind is changed' (4.4.457). All through Richard has appeared as the puppet-master, but now he too proves to have been a puppet, his strings needing to be pulled pretty hard to make him fall into place (he suddenly acquires a kind of conscience, and becomes an uncertain organiser, for example). A trick is being played on Richard, exactly like that he played on Hastings; the free man suddenly finds himself with strings tugging his limbs, he is an actor at the mercy of another will. Richard was after all in a play within a play within a play, and the real director was providence, now revealed as a Jester: providence employs Richard, mocks Richard, and—in the end—looks like Richard. . . .