[In the following excerpt, Riggs sees Richard III as Shakespeare's reappraisal of the validity of the assumptions of traditional epic heroism associated with the king.]

I Henry VI opens with a lament for Henry V, the hero-king who was "too famous to live long." As Elizabethan audiences were soon to learn, he was also too famous to be buried and forgotten. In I Henry IV Shakespeare had already begun to reassemble the legend that is forfeited in the earlier cycle, and Henry V, while it is uncompromisingly severe in its repudiation of the French chivalric style, remains the only play that he could have written with Hall's Union in one hand and Erasmus' Institutio Principis in the other. In itself, this revival of the hero-king is hardly surprising. The figure, like the theatrical conventions that secured his popularity, was an indestructible part of Shakespeare's world. The student of English drama in the seventeenth century, following this figure through the plays of Dryden and his contemporaries, is bound to be more impressed by his resilience and adaptability than by his occasional disappearance into the stereotypes of political orthodoxy. The problem at hand, once again, has rather to do with the peculiar adjustments that ensue when the heroic pattern is assimilated to English social convention. The later histories challenge our attention because they resume that problem and, more particularly, because they suggest a new way of looking at it. Where Henry VI chronicles the attrition of the chivalric legacy throughout the fifteenth century, the later histories presuppose that the legend of the hero-king has a life of its own, a currency in popular belief that will outlast any number of "vile politicians." For a legendary ideal is liable to persist indefinitely, as Machiavelli recognized, once it passes into the mythology of statecraft: whatever the Prince himself may come to know or believe, it is still required that he identify himself to the world through the rituals of chivalry.

Thus the early trilogy will stand as "heroical" literature in a sense which does not apply to the histories that follow. Whatever their peculiar misdeeds and betrayals, the principal figures of Henry VI all can give their personal assent to the heroic traditions that secure their public identities. True, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, introduces himself as an aspirant "Machiavel"; but the imagery and tone of his exposition are still controlled by the conventions of Marlovian conqueror-drama. Machiavelli would not have recognized it. Richard III, Henry Bolingbroke, and his son Hal inhabit a world that is considerably less assured about its relationship to the ideal past of epic and romance. They participate in the rituals of chivalry and courtly display, but they do not, and cannot, wholly identify themselves with what they have come to recognize as a political myth. Even Henry V, on the eve of Agincourt, acknowledges that the identity which "Ceremony" confers does not square with his deepest intuitions about himself. Like his father, he has to live with the knowledge that the formal attributes of "majesty" are, in effect, a special "person" or "presence" which must always be kept "fresh and new" (I Henry IV, III.ii.56, 55). The crux of the problem, as Richard HI discovers on the eve of Bosworth Field, lies in the relation of this "person" to the man who keeps it. "Everyone sees what you appear to be," Machiavelli reminds his new prince; "few really know what you are."² So much may be clear; but then, who does know what this new prince really is? How, if tradition does not tell him, can he know himself?

It is evident that Shakespeare comes to reappraise the heroic tradition and its significance in English history by way of these dilemmas. To pursue them through Richard III and I Henry IV, the two plays that actually try to resolve them, is to gain a fuller sense both of the values which underlie Henry VI and of the conceptual limits within which the trilogy is enclosed. In I Henry VI Shakespeare sets forth the criteria that differentiate heroic ceremony from mere "bravery." In Richard III he begins with a consummate impersonator, and proceeds to raise the larger problem of whether artifice and "form" can be taken as trustworthy determinants of a ruler's true nature. The critique that results strikes at the very notion of exemplary behavior. If the proper style really can be mastered by a self-professed "villain," what is there to prevent an unbroken chain of cynical princes and gullible subjects? In Henry VI the problem of authenticity can finally be resolved only by reference to ancestry and nurture. Talbot's rectitude is guaranteed because he is a Talbot; the Bastard's infamy is immanent in the circumstances of his birth. When these conventions break down in the succession of generations around which the trilogy is organized, there is nowhere to turn. The interested spectator can only try to weigh one man's pretensions against another's. The prince can only try to suit his performance to his audience's expectations. In I Henry IV Shakespeare takes this erosion of traditional standards for granted, as a fact of political life, and thereby secures the freedom to redefine the incentives that lead a prince to elect the chivalric vocation. What Young Talbot inherits, Hal chooses for himself; and the reasoning that underlies his choice comprises, in turn, the fullest available justification for the heroic ideals of Henry VI.

Richard III

When Richard announces, "I am determined to prove a villain" (I.i.30), he is paying his farewell to the noble occupations of love and war and entering a more devious theater of operations, one in which he is the trickster and his antagonists are the gulls. As A. P. Rossiter has said, he is the companion of Barabas and Volpone, a "murderous practical joker" who "inhabits a world where everyone deserves everything he can do to them."³ His evident amusement at being unsuited to play the courtier at Edward's triumphs seems calculated to stress the essential incongruity: what is this vicious, ironic comedian doing in a serious play about English history? Unlike his predecessors in the earlier trilogy, and the plays that stand behind them, Richard possesses no vision of aristocratic honor to establish his significance as a humanistic example. Nor can he be adequately described (although it is becoming customary to do so) as simply an admonitory stereotype of political ambition. The limitations of that idea are aptly summarized in Coleridge's wise and penetrating comment on the play:

As, in the last [Richard III], Shakespeare has painted a man where ambition is the channel in which the ruling impulse runs, so, in the first [Richard II], he has given us a character, under the name of Bolingbroke, or Henry IV., where ambition itself, conjoined unquestionably with great talents, is the ruling impulse. In Richard III. the pride of intellect makes use of ambition as its means; in Bolingbroke the gratification of ambition is the end, and talents are the means.⁴

If Richard were ambitious in the manner of Henry Bolingbroke—or his own father York—his character would present no special difficulty. But "pride of intellect" is less easily accounted for, in an historical framework, than heroic aspiration or ordinary political canniness.

The conception must have seemed novel even to the enthusiastic audiences who applauded Burbage's rendition of the part. There was little in the sixteenth-century portrayals of Richard that would have prepared them for it. The monster who emerges from Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III is a creature of popular demonology conceived in a spirit of classical irony. As court propagandist for Henry Richmond's son, More took pains to preserve the Tudor myth about the Yorkist Antichrist who was born with hair and teeth and grew up to kill the babes in the Tower; as an urbane humanist historian he kept the legendary monster under control by treating his aspirations as an elaborate, grotesque joke. Consequently, "The History of King Richard HI" occupies a special place in the pages of Grafton, Hall, and Holinshed. Rather than a loose collection of historical episodes, it constitutes a polished piece of rhetorical invective, designed to set forth its object as a hopeless case of depravity and deformity. For a playwright such material would seem to offer meager alternatives. Thomas Legge manfully tried to recreate Richard as a weak and vicious tyrant in the neo-Senecan play Richardus Tertius (1579). Ten years later, writing for a popular rather than a university audience, the anonymous author of The True Tragedy of Richard III simply ignored More altogether and, like Colley Cibber some hundred and ten years later, cast Richard as a Marlovian conqueror with an anguished conscience. Shakespeare took a third course. In effect, he preserved the myth about Richard's monstrosity, but he transferred More's alert sense of irony to Richard himself. In the History it is the witty and sophisticated narrator who characterizes Richard and Buckingham as mere actors, wondered at by a populace that can only regard them as figures in some private charade; in the play it is the hero himself who eagerly cultivates the role of stage manager and elicits his audience's unanimous acclaim. In theatrical terms, the youngest son of York happily assumes the role of a villain—a lineal descendant of the Vice, the clown, and the comic Machiavel, in whom the desire to entertain, to maximize the possibilities for comic impersonation and verbal wit, is always ascendant.

How was it that Shakespeare, in recounting the final, ghastly aftermath of Henry VI, took such a figure for his hero? And what are the connections between the play's comedy and its sombre historical backdrop? Such questions as these do not loom very large in recent criticism of the play. It is rather the explicitly moral dimension of Richard's character that has attracted the most attention from the historically minded criticism of this century. The classic account of the "modern" Richard is set forth in the chapter on Shakespeare's villains in E. E. Stoll's Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method.⁵ By Stoll's reckoning all of Shakespeare's great villains personify one side of a traditional Christian dualism, projecting the eternal struggle between good and evil onto the secular stage through such historical analogues as the Vice, the Machiavel, and the Senecan badman. The villainies of a character like Richard can thus be taken as a self-fulfilling exercise in anarchy and evil, utterly divorced from any plausible human motivations. More specialized studies, particularly those of Bernard Spivack, Mario Praz, and F. L. Lucas, along with Wolfgang Clemen's magisterial Kommentar zu Shakespeares Richard III, have all tended to confirm the hypothesis.⁶ The play may be taken, in other words, as part revenge drama, with Margaret as Divine Nemesis, and part morality, with Richard as "the formal vice, Iniquity" (III.i.82). As such it will appear not to be a history, in the sense that I have been using the term, but rather a tragedy, more precisely, a tragedy that now and again affords glimpses, through Margaret's elaborate choric laments and Richard's crisis of conscience, into the formal configurations and traditional homiletics of Christian historiography. This reading offers the surest guide to the moral scaffolding of the piece—but it takes the risk of reducing the adroit theatrical intellect that delighted Lamb, Hazlitt, and generations of playgoers, to a mere cipher in a providential scheme. It exposes the ethical confusions implicit in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idealizations of Richard's character, but it fails to account for the intellectual brilliance that prompted them in the first place.

I recur to the play's comedy because it bears directly on many of the topics that occupied the previous chapter. The jokes originate, it will be recalled, in 3 Henry VI, with Richard's mock-heroic promise to emulate and outdo the most successful orators of antiquity, Ulysses, Nestor, and Sinon, and the godlike pattern of quick-change artistry, Proteus. If he opens Richard III by formulating his ideal in less spacious phrases, the shift in tone, from classical allusion to unvarnished assertion, only serves to underscore the irony of his original citations: "villains"—clowns, parasites, time-servers, men who live by their tongues—have a way of insinuating themselves into history and epic, genres where they cut an unlikely figure just as the "unfashionable" Richard looks out of place at Edward's triumph. In public, however, Richard is still careful to keep decorum, with the result that the humanistic history of Henry VI repeats itself in this play: only it repeats itself as farce. For much of the first four acts, Richard flaunts his "pride of intellect" by mimicking the visible forms of aristocratic and heroic virtue as if they were just so many parts to be learned. Speaking through his mouth-piece Buckingham, he makes the sternest appraisal of that "base declension and loathed bigamy" (III.ii.189) which would disqualify Edward's lineage from the throne. He can be a courtly lover like Suffolk (I.ii), a loyal brother in adversity like Warwick (I.iii), and a forthright, plain-speaking counselor like Gloucester (I.iii). When occasion demands, he proves as stirring a martial orator as Talbot (V.iii), and an even more pious recluse than Henry VI (III.vii). In the civilized world of the court these postures serve Shakespeare's "slave of nature" just as the armor and curtle-axe that Tamburlaine puts on serves Marlowe's hero: they are the "adjuncts" by which he establishes his claims to that high status which his birth had apparently denied him. Richard, however, never dreams of suggesting that the outward forms of nobility should fit the man beneath; indeed he is quite explicit to the contrary. He becomes a lover to frustrate the ends of love, a counselor to inhibit the exercise of good counsel, and a patriot to subvert the respublica. Where Marlowe's aspirant hero selects one commonplace definition of nobility and lives it out, Shakespeare's aspirant villain selects them all, but views each in the reductive light of satire.

Beneath his Protean transformations there is a stable, unchanging Richard, but he is identifiable not so much as a moral stereotype as an extension of Marlowe's belief in the efficacy of the individual will to shape the world by its own force of character. In Richard's case the conception has all been channelled into "pride of intellect"; but the pride, the core of heroic self-assertion, remains intact. Hence the curious fact that this "villain" never stoops to such mere devices as the forged letters, shuffled corpses, and poisoned rapiers that are the stock in trade of his predecessors Barabas and Lorenzo. As if in deference to the more lofty decorum of an historical action, he engages his enemies at first hand; and even as they are tricked by his imitations of virtue, they are tried, tempted, and over-come by his comic assault on their ethical defenses. Invariably the success of his impersonations depends on the victim's inability to distinguish the false from the genuine article. As the scourge of whatever God stands behind Margaret's unremitting moral calculus, Richard tempts each inhabitant of this "dark monarchy" with the illusion of virtue best calculated to elicit his personal failing: Clarence's blind adherence to fraternal ties (which had led him to rejoin Edward after taking the sacrament to fight for Warwick); Anne's readiness to forgive Richard his murders at Tewkesbury—if they were all for love; Hastings' fatuous satisfaction at the execution of his ancient enemies, Dorset, Rivers, and Grey; and, finally, Buckingham's naive supposition that usurpation can be compacted by a gentlemen's agreement. Like Tamburlaine, much of Richard III is about the intrinsic superiority of a natural virtue for sovereignty in a corrupt world; only it views the phenomenon through parody and impersonation rather than aristocratic idealism. By so doing, the play finally calls into question the whole notion of a "public" aristocratic style of life based on humanistic ideals.

If the comedy were not so relentlessly mock-heroic, if Richard had made his way to the throne by forged letters and poisoned rapiers, presumably the conclusion would have shown us Wily Beguiled, as in "the farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour" that T.S. Eliot associates with The Jew of Malta,⁷ But Shakespeare's intention was not to produce a bloody farce contrived by "God your only jig-maker," nor was he interested (as was the author of The True Tragedy) in casting Richmond as a bold and bloody revenger. It may be, as Hamlet says, that "the enginer / Hoist with his own petar" (III.iv.206-207) provides the most entertaining of ironies; but Richard is not permitted to continue as an "enginer" beyond the fourth act. Beneath the brilliant impersonations that decorate its surface, Richard III moves inexorably towards the consummation of the Tudor myth about English history; and as if to preclude any ambiguity on this point, the final act externalizes the moral constituents of the myth in the most uncompromising terms. The battleground shifts from the guilt ridden court to Bosworth Field, and the representatives of good and evil, Richmond and Richard, are presented as two sides of a stable polarity.

This movement into a fully providential vision of history does not depend, however, on Richard's simply being reduced to a figure in a pattern. The externalization of moral values on the plane of national history is exactly paralleled, and extended into an individual conscience, when Richard looks within himself. As the lights burn blue, he at last begins to apprehend inexorable processes of historical time ("It is now dead midnight" [180]) moving towards their appointed end. Now his "villainies" reappear to him as sins, all crying out for the moment of judgment:

Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree,
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, "Guilty! guilty!"

(V.iii. 197-200)

The villain who would be king discovers what it means to be a "murderer" in a providential universe, and his astute mockery of what the world admires as virtue now returns to mock him as well: "Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter" (193). It has frequently been argued that Shakespeare was trying, at this point, to do something for which he was not yet prepared: to portray the conscience of an earlier Macbeth, a murderer tormented by self-knowledge. But there is another way of taking these lines. For what has always been denied by Richard's postures and calculations—as it is denied here—is just that core of personal honor, or "worth," which would have left him with a self to know. Had he ever possessed it, his recognition that "I am I" might indeed have foreshadowed the tragic ironies that result when Othello and Macbeth, as well as lesser men (like Claudius and Laertes), confront themselves. Instead we get a momentary glimpse into the hall of mirrors where Machiavelli's player king must look for self-knowledge. "Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are." Having made his "person" solely the creature of his audiences' expectations, Richard finds it impossible to know what he is, or to imagine what he might have been. On the one hand there is the most austere of moral appraisals, on the other, flattery; but no recollection of, or any meaning for, the performance itself.

No one would question that Richard's sudden apprehension of his own past shows, to borrow Coleridge's words again, "the dreadful consequences of placing the moral in subordination to the intellectual." Whether Shakespeare was able to convey this lesson "at the same time that he taught the superiority of moral greatness"⁸ is rather more problematic. In order to establish Richmond in his special role as God's Captain, Shakespeare found it necessary to expunge all traces of what his audience would have recognized as "heroic" from the character; and readers ever since have noted the relative flatness of Richard's conqueror.⁹ Richmond's final prayer, of course, has a way of disarming this criticism: one would not wish to be among those "traitors" who do not say "Amen." But the very fact that Shakespeare found it appropriate to go to this extreme indicates the extent of his disillusionment with the tradition of fame. Conventional ideas of personal worth enter this play only as brittle parodies: for Richard they are springes to catch woodcocks; for Shakespeare, the bait of falsehood by which he takes his carp of truth. Small wonder that Richmond elects to say a prayer rather than celebrate his triumph.

The prayer celebrates a paradise regained. Not a "paradise within thee happier far," to be sure, but nonetheless one in which God's Captain chooses piety over all those uncertain virtues that would elicit the last infirmity of a noble mind. This study has dealt, for the most part, with a narrow range of theatrical conventions and rhetorical strategies; but Shakespeare's experience with humanist history, at least in its wider implications, was scarcely an isolated phenomenon. The high regard of his own generation for the moral value of worthy exempla is captured in the stanzas that Fame addresses to Fortune in Drayton's Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy:

But I alone the Herald am of Heaven,
Whose spacious Kingdome stretcheth farre and wide,
Through ev'ry Coast upon the light'ning driven,
  As on the Sunne-beames, gloriously I ride,
  By them I mount, and downe by them I slide,
I register the Worlds long-during houres,
And know the hie Will of th'immortall powers.¹⁰

It is this Christianized Fama who presides at the death of Talbot in I Henry VI. Shakespeare, more farsighted than his predecessors, seems to have recognized from the start that what she has to offer should never be confused with mere worldly success: it is rather a formal, humanistic consolatio, one that gives a permanent, didactic significance to the apparent failures of history.

Yet no one in the early histories ever learns from Talbot's example. Instead, the characters who succeed him drift further and further towards the Machiavellian premise that fame is the creature of earthly fortune.¹¹ Richard of course becomes the most eloquent spokesman for this point of view, urging his father, his brother, and finally himself, on towards the crown

Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.

(I.ii.29-31)

The moral and political confusions that necessarily result are perhaps nowhere more expicit than in the scene where Sir John Montgomery declares to York's son Edward:

What talk you of debating? In few words:
If you'll not here proclaim yourself our King,
I'll leave you to your fortune and be gone
To keep them back that come to succour you.
Why shall we fight, if you pretend no title?

(IV.vii.53-57)

It is an easy leap from here to the logic that openly refutes any attempt to distinguish between legitimate aspiration and brazen fakery:

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.¹²

Richard III, then, comes to embody Shakespeare's severest appraisal of the quest for earthly fame, and, by extension, of the humanistic values which support that quest. The high permanence of fame is invoked only once in the play, and that occasion provides, I believe, the exception that proves the rule.

Prince. I do not like the Tower, of any place
Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?
Buck. He did, my gracious lord, begin that place,
  Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified.
Prince. Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
Buck. Upon record, my gracious lord.
Prince. But say, my lord, it were not regist'red,
  Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
  As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
  Even to the general all-ending day.
Rich. [Aside] So wise so young, they say do never live long.
Prince. What say you, uncle?
Rich. I say, without characters fame lives long.
  [Aside.] Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.
Prince. That Julius Caesar was a famous man:
With what his valor did enrich his wit,
  His wit set down to make his valor live.
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.
I'll tell you what, my cousin Buckingham—
Buck. What, my gracious lord?
Prince. An if I live until I be a man,
I'll win our ancient right in France again
Or die a soldier as I lived a king.
Rich. [Aside.] Short summers lightly have a forward spring.

(III.i.68-94)

It is hardly necessary to expound Richard's cryptic "meanings" in order to appreciate the ironies of the situation. This is the one case where the rule given earlier—that "everyone deserves everything he can do to them"—does not apply. The young prince inquires whether Julius Caesar indeed began the building of the Tower of London. His faith in the enduring, worldly efficacy of his grammar-school training in the humanities ("Death makes no conquest of this conqueror") and his eagerness to "win our ancient right in France again" can only be a source of private amusement to his uncle, the callous veteran of 2 and 3 Henry VI. It was also, one supposes, the focus of more poignant ironies for the bookish young playwright who had already measured the distance between Talbot and Gloucester. Youth is betrayed by the "formal Vice, Iniquity"; the Tower is not a "monument"—it is a charnel house.

The irony, of course, includes Richard as well. Despite his efforts to falsify the account, his own infamy is assured "Even to the general all-ending day," not because of what chroniclers will set "upon record"—but because "murder will out." The playwright's idea of history, like his ideals of personal "worth," has undergone a drastic transformation. Coming to terms with one historical tradition, Shakespeare arrives at another, which we may tentatively identify as Christian and providential. . . .

Notes

¹ See J. H. Walter's introduction to the text of Henry V edited by himself for the New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1954), pp. xiv-xviii. Walter's treatment of the play as it relates to humanistic conceptions of the ideal ruler is thorough and well documented; therefore 1 have not felt that it was necessary to discuss it in this concluding chapter.

² Max Lerner, ed., The Prince and the Discourses (New York, 1950). Quotations from The Prince in my text are based on (but do not always exactly correspond to) this translation.

³Angel with Horns and Other Shakespearian Lectures (London, 1961), p. 16.

⁴ Thomas M. Raysor, ed., Coleridge 's Shakespearean Criticism (rev. ed., London, 1960), II, 141 (the Lectures of 1811-12).

⁵ New York, 1927, pp. 337-403.

⁶Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958); "Machiavelli and the Elizabethans," Proceedings of the British Academy, XIV (1928), 49-97; Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1922); Kommentar zu Shakespeares Richard III (Göttingen, 1957). The Kommentar has been translated and abridged by Jean Bonheim, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III (London, 1968).

⁷Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York, 1938), p. 5.

⁸Shakespearean Criticism, I, 205; II, 165.

⁹ See the discussion of this scene in Clemen's Kommentar, pp. 311-315.

¹⁰ J. William Hebel, ed., Works, II (Oxford, 1932), 391. The passage is cited in Edward O, Benjamin, "Fame, Poetry, and the Order of History in the Literature of the English Renaissance," Studies in the Renaissance, VI (1959), 64-84.

¹¹ The text most frequently cited in this regard by seventeenth-century historians was the comment on Caesar in chapter 10 of the Discourses: "Nor let any one be deceived by the glory of that Caesar who has been so much celebrated by writers; for those who praised him were corrupted by his fortune, and frightened by the long duration of the empire that was maintained under his name, and which did not permit writers to speak of him with freedom" (The Prince and the Discourses, ed. Max Lerner, p. 142). Shakespeare may have had it in mind while writing the exchange (discussed below) between Richard and Prince Edward concerning the permanence of Caesar's fame. See Benjamin, "Fame, Poetry, and the Order of History" for citations of this passage.

¹² Sir John Harington, The Letters and Epigrams, ed. Norman E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1926), p. 164.