[In the following essay, Bromley contends that Richard III publicly presents the persona of his father but follows privately the desires of his own persona.]

No king of England ever came to the throne better prepared than Richard of Gloucester, for while his brother Edward reigned in London, Richard ruled at York. Exiled by taste and temperament from the Woodville court he so despised, he rose early in his brother's favor and, while by our standards still a boy, labored mightily in Edward's service. He was created Duke of Gloucester at nine, Admiral of England, Ireland, and Aquitaine at ten, commissioner for nine of the twentytwo counties at eleven, and Constable of England for life at eighteen, when he was also his brother's companion in victory.

Clearly the childhood and adolescence of the last of the Yorkist kings were as troubled as his later reign. As Chief Justice of Wales, he pacified and then pardoned the rebels of that troubled area which was later to betray him. At Barnet the Duke, "who lacked the physique to be a warrior, the experience to command an army corps, and the eloquence of a Clarence to stir the imagination of followers,"¹ led the right wing of Edward's army. Fresh from Barnet, he advanced with his royal brother to Tewksbury; in the London celebration that followed victory "the honor of heading the triumphal procession was bestowed upon Richard, Duke of Gloucester. .. . He was not yet nineteen."²

But Richard's most recent and partisan biographer, Paul Kendall, convincingly contends that the métier of this fierce prince was not war but peace. The youngest of the sons of the illustrious Duke of York, and the only one of them born in England, Richard was most at home in his father's dukedom and city. Indeed, the record of the city of York's defiance of Henry VII is a testament to the greatness of Richard's rule in the north, and it was only through the treacherous exercises of the Earl of Northumberland that the men of the city of York were late upon the road rather than at Market Bosworth in 1485. While it was in the most fundamental sense Richard's defect as king to attempt to impose upon all his dominions the justice that had characterized his rule of the north, it is greatly to his credit that he tried at all. At Market Bosworth Richard was betrayed rather than defeated, and Kendall argues persuasively that the ingredients of his greatness were themselves the seeds of treachery that flowered in the presence of four armies—one Tudor, one Royal, and two Stanley, waiting to pick the winner—upon that unhappy field:

The gifts which Richard had bestowed out of generosity rather than policy, the treasure he had dispensed to show his good will when he might have withheld it to toughen the sinews of his enterprise, the justice he had done at the risk of alienating powerful interests, the services he had performed for the weak—all these did little for him now. His kindness to the wives of rebels, his munificence to friends, his statutes to curb oppressions, his attention to the humble causes of commoners, would not stead him in the hour of mustering a steel host.³

Indeed, in the historical Richard before Bosworth—curiously indolent, lost in the void created by the deaths of his son and beloved wife, surrounding himself with treacherous nobles whose depths he had plumbed before—we find some of Shakespeare's Richard. But in the default at Bosworth Kendall's Richard is a man worn by grief and by betrayals, from Warwick's to Buckingham's, whereas Shakespeare's Richard is a man internally destroyed by guilt, an Antic without joy, however grim. In Richard himself, both in history and in drama, we see the glorious redemption of "the last King of England to die, or fight, in battle."⁴ Only, then, in the manner of his dying do modern historians, Shakespearean drama, and the mythographers who wrote Tudor history agree about Richard III.

But precisely because so much of what Shakespeare knew about Richard III—from the malicious and selfserving invention of John Rous to the repetitions of More and Hall—was drawn from the natural tendency to glorify the present by defaming the past, the student of Richard III needs to know more about that shortlived king than about any other.⁵ For unless one accepts Tillyard's labored assumption that "in spite of the eminence of Richard's character the main business of the play is to complete the national tetralogy and to display the working out of God's plan to restore England to prosperity,"⁶ one needs to deal with Richard the character as comical, evil, at last triumphant, and always paradoxical; and Shakespeare's presentation of Henry Tudor is not without irony. We regard Shakespeare's characters as dramatic constructs not of necessity related to Tillyard's dictum that "in the tremendous evolution of God's plans the accidents of character must not be obtruded."⁷ For Shakespeare's Richard III is a play about men—and about the accidents of their characters.

Indeed, the entire notion of the tetralogy is no more helpful to the student of Richard III than is the inclusion—erroneous but frequent—of Antigone as the middle term between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. If we view Richard III only as necessary completion, the play must arbitrarily be relegated to inferiority: "In its function of summing up and completing what has gone before," wrote Tillyard, "Richard III inevitably suffers as a detached unit."⁸ But Richard III is by no means simply a conclusion to the three parts of Henry VI, and while it is true that the Duke of Gloucester indicates, in 3 Henry VI, that his story will be continued, the play which bears Richard's name contains so great an enrichment of the depth and range of the protagonist's dimensions that we have, if not a new Richard, surely a far different one. In his own play Richard poses problems which range from dramatic demonology to political and ethical philosophy. He is not, as he was in 3 Henry VI, simply a fierce extension of his father's will, molded by deformity and grief, moved by a vaulting, if as yet ill-formed, ambition. He is, as he promised to be, his own man—and a different man.

Even the title of Rossiter's admirable "Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III' is an ironic commentary upon the notion that Richard HI merely dramatizes the fulfillment of God's design; "for in the pattern of divine retribution on the wicked, he [Richard] functions as an avenging angel."⁹ As Rossiter suggests, the idea of Richard as God's instrument cutting a wide swath through the populace in preparation for the Godly Knight places a most uncomfortable burden upon the orthodox Christian reading of the play. Richard is not God's man; no more is he the Devil's; he is, as he has told us, his own man. The "I am myself alone" (3 Henry VI, V, vi) of the misanthropic Yorkist prince is a prefiguration of the king's "I am I" (Richard III, V, iii) after the apparitions at Bosworth field, and each is the expression of absolute alienation.

It is precisely this alienation, personal and dramatic, which sets not only Richard III apart from the Henry VI plays, but also the protagonist apart from his own play. As Rossiter and Middleton Murry have noted, Richard is the actor's actor; for three acts, he sweeps all before him—and his audience, by virtue of their privileged relationship, before him also.¹⁰ No little measure of our affinity with Richard derives from the fact that his initial soliloquy places us as far from the play as it does Richard, and we delight in his antic villainy partly because it is ours. Only as Richard falters does our sympathy falter. Anticipating Iago in his privileged relationship and Macbeth in his regal horror, Richard is unique in the degree to which he is an exercise in participatory evil. God, who at one point after all reserved vengeance to himself, may not by orthodox conceptions be disposed to permit us to relish exercise of His vengeance in human hands so inhuman as Richard's.

Therefore the problem of Richard III is, fundamentally, a problem of critical method. If we were to postulate a structure in which Richard is Vice, Richmond the Godly Knight, the queens Nemesis, and the princes Purity, the bias upon which the Morality is based might warp the play away from its political implications altogether. Modern psychology, coupled with the remarkable degree to which Palmer renders Richard plausibly, even movingly, misanthropic in 3 Henry VI, leaves us able only to agree that what the Elizabethans considered moral deformity was in Richard physically depicted, but while we shall attempt to render Richard's murders understandable, we shall not labor to make them forgivable. Nor can we deny that the historical Henry Tudor expunged from England a very real evil—Medievalism—although he may well have replaced that evil with a worse. And the "Tudor Myth" serves us not as an ending point, but as a beginning; we are concerned, after all, with a dramatic construct from which emerges a most unusual hero—not with a view of history, however distorted, with which Shakespeare no doubt amiably agreed.

The study of Richard III becomes, then, the measurement of mixtures: an ironic use of Christianity, history, and myth which owes quite as much to native wit as to the Inn-yard Morality; an astutely inverted blend of political, ethical, and psychological considerations in which guilt is at least partly a product of power rightly used; and a hero drawn in part from the Vice but developed with the full range of the poet's expanding artistry into a character whose initial confession—indeed, advocation—of purposive villainy is both richer and blacker than all the ink spent since to describe that villainy.

The Duke of Gloucester, in his powerful introduction both to himself and to his play, tells us that he is bored. His remarkable martial gifts are now superfluous; his deformity is invoked solely to evidence that he cannot, in these days of idleness, play the lover—though shortly he will play the lover with rapacious success. The Duke, sardonic and grim, tells his audience about a lazy time in which his patently superb intellect rusts unused. A great part of our initial identification with Richard is founded simply upon our selfserving unwillingness to see intellect, however evil, frustrated. We know, as Shakespeare's audience knew, that Richard will fall; but the very diabolism of Richard's introduction to us lends a most unholy fascination to his rise.

That rise is notable not only in that it is fast, but also in that it is founded upon a dramatic dualism; for when Richard is not himself—and he is totally himself only when alone with his audience—he plays his father, the Duke of York. The public Richard is a man of intense family feeling, as with Clarence; the Protector of princes and people, as he is at his brother's deathbed; or a pious and reticent noble, who, like Caesar, arranges that the people shall call him three times—but, unlike Caesar, Richard accepts. In all this he is a caricature of his father York. But the private Richard knows that the first axiom of power is the destruction of all who might impede its obtainment, and that the second axiom of power is the obliteration of all who assisted in procuring the prerogative.

It is in this blend of the illusory public incarnation of the bluff, rude, but well-meaning father with the private reality of the Machiavellian son—who, like Hotspur later, wants work—that we find the essential Richard, for Richard is precisely that blend, a union of his private and public selves.

The Duke of York's medicine for the state was rule by the sword; his son's medicine for the state is rule by the knife—a medicine not as different in kind as in degree. Richard of Gloucester is surrounded by the colossally inept. His father by contrast was surrounded by equally maladjusted peers, but the state of Henry VI was no more ill than will be the state of Edward V. Whereas the Duke of York moved, when he moved, into battle, his son the Lord Protector, blending a very real political function with a most unholy relish in the exercise of that function, steps into a political void. The Protector's—and the state's—enemy is Faction, writ large, and the Protector's three references to St. Paul, the apostate organizer, are an immensely ironic recognition that to Richard, alone of the royal dukes, duty is pleasure.

Clarence is no less duped by the public Richard than is their reigning brother, and the wooing of Anne is conducted by the public Richard as a hugely witty reduction to absurdity, in which Richard proceeds from a discussion of Henry VI's proper resting place—heaven—to his own proper resting place—in Anne's bed. "The eternal bully speaks to the everlasting trollop—and knows that he will prevail."¹¹ The wooing of Anne, which, like the protestations of loyalty to Clarence, is performed in purposive consciousness of the imminent death of each, serves as a fitting introduction to Richard as a party man; upon meeting the Woodvilles, whom shortly he will exterminate or render powerless, the public Richard, gruff and seemingly out of his depth, performs superbly—and positively apes his father. His pious "The world is grown so bad/That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch./Since every Jack became a gentleman/There's many a gentle person made a Jack" (I, iii) might, save for the neat irony of his phrasing, have graced the mouth of his father.

The litany of the Wars of the Roses which follows is most significant in that Richard silences Queen Margaret with power and force—simply by the use of her name. But the purpose of the scene is to provoke faction to its destruction, a provocation which makes Edward's deathbed amity even more a mockery than it was by nature. Richard, alone, begins, "I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl." (I, iv.) Richard's public function is never so well performed as here, and is remarkably clear: Richard lives in the opportunistic present, his enemies in the past. Even Clarence, instead of thinking, dreams—surely a retrospective exercise, even if prophetic. And he is murdered by the servitors, however conscience-bound, of future greatness, however brief.

The death of Edward is no less an exercise in retrospective folly than the death of Clarence. The hatreds of contending nobles are exorcised with specious piety, and Edward himself—the eternal dupe—is, like Anne, reduced to absurdity by the ultimate exercise in futility which his lament over his inability to save his brother, contrasted with his pardon of Stanley's servant, represents. Richard tells his brother that "some tardy cripple bare the countermand/That came too lag to see him [Clarence] buried." (II, i.) But the grim cripple is never tardy, and Richard, aping his father, is at last his father's only son.

And then, Gloucester and Buckingham paying lip service to Edward's "peace," the prince Edward is to be drawn from his Woodville tutors. The scene is followed by the citizens' dark meditations:

3 CIT. Woe to the land that's govern'd by a child!

2 CIT. In him there is a hope of government,
That in his nonage, council under him,
  And in his full and ripened years himself,
No doubt, shall then and till then govern well.

1 CIT. So stood the state when Henry the Sixth
Was crowned in Paris but at nine months old.

(II, iii.)

In that parallel is all the justification required for Richard's usurpation. While the hats of these citizens will not be thrown up with pleasure at Richard's accession, still they will go up—and not implausibly so, for only Richard, in this play, is fit to rule. But Richard is not fit to live.

"The murder of the princes was a necessary act of state,"¹² argues Palmer, in defense not only of maligned Richard but also of his own idea that Richard represents a universal political type. "The crime of Richard," Palmer continues, "is the secular crime of the power politician in every age and there is a sense in which every political leader is a wicked uncle who kills little children in their beds."¹³ And Prince Edward dooms himself. "I want more uncles here to welcome me," he cries—Woodville uncles. "God keep me from false friends!" he exclaims, and we pity him. "But they were none," he adds, referring again to his Woodville uncles. (III, i.)

Prince Edward is, we suspect, far more than half Woodville; his saucy brother is all Woodville. Of York, Richard remarks, "He is all the mother's, from the top to toe." (III, i.) And to be a Woodville during this Protectorate is mortal. Rivers, Grey, and Vaughn are already at Pomfret; Hastings will die, as much for his misplaced rejoicing at Woodville deaths as for his connection with Mistress Shore; and the princes must die. Politically, they die as do the rest of the Woodvilles—unlamented, by those who have heard the parallel between Edward and Henry VI. And not a few in Shakespeare's audience must have remembered the minority of another Edward and the over-mighty nobles who flourished with him. The little boys killed by their wicked uncle here seem to be very bad little boys indeed, making the murderous intentions of their uncle a ruthless but perhaps preferable alternative to their survival. Richard's decision to murder them is as directly taken when he commits them to the Tower as his decision to murder, however judicially, the Woodvilles was taken at the moment of their commission to Pomfret.

Richard HI, then, is the perfect union of iron will and superb intellect, complemented as well as sullied by a grim, self-directed, ironic perception that makes his conquest of the world implicit in his vision of himself. But mastery of the world is not mastery of self, and Richard—to our shock—is too moral a man to be a successful Machiavellian. His first remorse is for Clarence (I, iii), and into Richard as king there creeps that curious paralysis of will, where indecision and ferocious activity alternate, which is his destruction. The fire is out, and it will flash but once again. We hear of his dreams, watch him countermand orders. He is tricked by Queen Elizabeth and drowns the curse of his mother in a flourish of trumpets. Before Bosworth, he despairs and dreams. Haunted by the apparitions, for a moment he pities himself—and then, in what is his most magnificent moment save his dying, denies himself even his own pity:

There is no creature loves me.
And if I die no soul shall pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(V, iii.)

Wild, whirling words. His battle order, "let us to't pellmell/If not to heaven, then hand to hand to hell," (V, iii) is as chaotic as Richmond's is pedantic, and the horse which he dies requesting is the symbol of his reversion to type: the Knight.

When "the bloody dog is dead," (V, v) so is gallantry, and so are all the Plantagenets. That Henry Tudor, cold and harsh here as well as in history, soils his hands with the dog's blood is simply a lapse of taste (as well as a lapse of verisimilitude) necessitated no doubt by the tender sensibilities of Henry's reigning granddaughter. It is also, of course, a nod to Hall and to the True Tragedy of Richard III, the structure of which the poet could not break without its being painfully obvious. But Shakespeare's portrait of Henry Tudor is far from pleasant. If he is God's avenging angel, he is a most self-righteous, pedantic angel indeed. He simply refers to God too many times to be palatable as His agent.¹⁴

But Richard III is written about the Plantagenet prince, not the Tudor, and at Market Bosworth the king, surrounded by traitors in whose tents, in one most unregal moment, he would skulk (V, iii), is no longer himself. In some measure his soul is struck by remorse, but, far more important, his achievement has outrun his capacity to make achievement meaningful. "Richard," writes Palmer, "in acquiring the crown was seeking an outlet for the exercise of his genius. When the crown was won, his interest was abated."¹⁵ Richard at Bosworth is as bored as was the magnificently animated Richard of the first soliloquy, but the earlier boredom was that of a man suspended between kinds of activity—or, if you will, between murders. The Richard of Market Bosworth has seen the horror at the bottom of ambition's mire, and his boredom now is that of suicidal despair. Richmond is an anticlimax, because to Richard effort was all and achievement nothing. There is nothing left for the king but to die well, and that he does magnificently.

The reign of Richard III was as meaningful as was the knightly manner of his dying. Henry VIII will be a quarter Woodville, not all Woodville; and, at last, the French influence is expunged. Margaret at her leavetaking sardonically observes, "These English woes shall make me smile in France," (VI, iv), and the ambition of Edward V's "I'll win our ancient right in France again/Or die a soldier as I liv'd a king" (III, i) is extinguished with his life. Indeed, that ambition is a part of his death warrant. The French influence remains only in the Tudor army, which Richard describes with devastating accuracy, and the fact that Richmond conquered England with the sweepings of Breton jails—a memory here deliberately invoked—lends no grandeur to Shakespeare's portrait of Henry Tudor.

Remember whom you are to cope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,

A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants,
Whom their o'er cloyed country vomits forth
To desperate ventures and assure'd destruction.

(V, iii.)

We may presume that Tudor conquest by force of foreign arms was a memory that even Elizabeth did not relish. The ugly reminder of the composition of Richmond's army enforced here might have been, in 1593, only reminiscent of Philip's Spanish host so barely repelled by weather and sea dogs five years before.

So if, in Richard III, Shakespeare created a horror, it was at least a totally domestic horror, for Shakespeare's Richard is as English as his Henry Tudor is foreign. And at the end, the evil ironist is assumed into the greater—and more haunting—figure of the Yorkist Knight, so greatly alone, and, at last, so like his father.

Notes

¹ Kendall, Paul Murray, Richard the Third, 1965, p. 92.

² Kendall, pp. 103-4.

³ Kendall, p. 390.

⁴ Kendall, p. 417. I am indebted to Mr. Kendall for such of the factual details in the preceding section as are not common knowledge, and also for the conclusions I have drawn from the study of Richard's life, for they are, while not explicit, clearly implied in his text.

⁵ "It is Rous who begins the tale that Richard lay sullenly in his mother's womb for two years, and was born with teeth and with hair streaming to his shoulders." (Kendall, p. 470.)

⁶ Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare's History Plays. 1964, p. 199.

⁷Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 201.

⁸Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 199.

⁹ Rossiter, A. P., in Shakespeare: The Histories, ed. Eugene M. Wraith, 1965, p. 82.

¹⁰ Rossiter, p. 79. In a footnote the editor indicates that the conception of Richard as an "actor" was anticipated in Middleton Murry's Shakespeare.

¹¹ Palmer, John, Political and Comic Characters of Shakespeare, 1962, p. 83.

¹²Characters of Shakespeare, p. 99.

¹³Characters of Shakespeare, p. 101.

¹⁴ That the Tudor Myth was myth indeed is attested by the continuance of the Wars of the Roses, which Henry Tudor was forced to suppress by execution; "the names of the leading victims—Lincoln, Warwick, Suffolk, Courtenay—mark the steps up which the Tudors clambered to the safety of supremacy." Bindoff, S. T., Tudor England, 1959. p. 48.

¹⁵Characters of Shakespeare, p. 103.