SOURCE: "The Kings," in Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, W.W. Norton & Company, 1974, pp. 3-55.

[In the following excerpt originally published in Polish as Szkice o Szekspirze in 1961, Kott describes Richard III as part of the cycles of history showing rulers' rise and fall through murder and treachery.]

What, do you tremble? Are you all afraid?
Alas, I blame you not, for you are mortal . . .

(Richard III I, 2)

I

A careful reading of the list of characters in Richard III is enough to show what sort of historical material Shakespeare used in order to illustrate facts relating to his own period and to fill the stage with his real contemporaries. Here, in one of his earliest plays—or rather in its historical raw material—one can already see the outline of all the later great tragedies: of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. If one wishes to interpret Shakespeare's world as the real world, one should start the reading of the plays with the Histories, and in particular, with Richard II and Richard III.

Let us begin with the list of dramatis personae:

King Edward IV—deposed the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI, and imprisoned him in the Tower, where he was murdered by Edward's brothers, Gloucester and Clarence. A few months earlier, at Tewkesbury, the only son of Henry VI had been stabbed to death by Richard.

Edward, Prince of Wales, son to Edward IV, afterwards King Edward V—murdered in the Tower, on Richard's order, at the age of twelve.

Richard, Duke of York, Edward IV s other son—murdered in the Tower, on Richard's order, at the age of ten.

George, Duke of Clarence, brother to Edward IV—murdered in the same gloomy Tower, on Richard's order.

A son of Clarence—imprisoned by Richard immediately after his coronation.

A daughter of Clarence—forced, when still a child, to marry a commoner so that she could not become the mother of kings.

The Duchess of York, mother of two kings, grandmother of a king and a queen—her husband and youngest son killed, or murdered in the Wars of the Roses; another of her sons stabbed to death in the Tower by hired assassins; her third son, Richard, responsible for the murder of both her grandsons. Of all her offspring, only one son and one granddaughter died a natural death.

Margaret, Henry VI's widow—her husband murdered in the Tower, her son killed in battle.

Lady Anne, the wife of Richard III, who had killed her father at the battle of Barnet, and her first husband at Tewkesbury and had even earlier let her father-in-law be murdered in the Tower—imprisoned by Richard immediately after their wedding.

The Duke of Buckingham, Richard's confidant and right-hand man in the struggle for power—beheaded on Richard's orders within a year of the coronation.

Earl Rivers, brother to Queen Elizabeth; Lord Grey, son of Queen Elizabeth; Sir Thomas Vaughan—all executed on Richard's orders at Pomfret, even before the coronation.

Sir Richard Ratcliff, who organized the Pomfret executions and the coup d'état—killed at Bosworth two years later.

Lord Hastings, a nobleman and follower of the House of Lancaster—arrested, released, then arrested again and beheaded by Richard on the charge of plotting against him.

Sir James Tyrrel, murderer of Edward IV's children at the Tower—later executed.

We are nearing the end of the list of characters, or rather—victims. There is Sir William Catesby, executed after the battle of Bosworth, and the Duke of Norfolk, who died in the battle. There are one or two other lords and barons who saved their heads by fleeing abroad. And the last few lines of the list; characters without names of their own. It is enough to quote the end of the list: "Lords, and other Attendants; a Pursuivant, Scrivener, Citizens, Murderers, Messengers, Soldiers, etc. Scene—England."

Shakespeare is like the world, or life itself. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see. A reader or spectator in the mid-twentieth century interprets Richard III through his own experiences. He cannot do otherwise. And that is why he is not terrified—or rather, not amazed—at Shakespeare's cruelty. He views the struggle for power and mutual slaughter of the characters far more calmly than did many generations of spectators and critics in the nineteenth century. More calmly, or, at any rate, more rationally. Cruel death, suffered by most dramatis personae, is not regarded today as an aesthetic necessity, or as an essential rule in tragedy in order to produce catharsis, or even as a specific characteristic of Shakespeare's genius. Violent deaths of the principal characters are now regarded rather as an historical necessity, or as something altogether natural. Even in Titus Andronicus, written, or rewritten, by Shakespeare probably in the same year as King Richard III, modern audiences see much more than the ludicrous and grotesque accumulation of needless horrors which nineteenth-century critics found in it. And when Titus Andronicus received a production like that by Peter Brook, today's audiences were ready to applaud the general slaughter in act five no less enthusiastically than Elizabethan coppersmiths, tailors, butchers and soldiers had done. In those days the play was one of the greatest theatrical successes. By discovering in Shakespeare's plays problems that are relevant to our own time, modern audiences often, unexpectedly, find themselves near to the Elizabethans; or at least are in the position to understand them well. This is particularly true of the Histories.

Shakespeare's History plays take their titles from the names of kings: King John, King Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III (King Henry VIII, a work partly written by Shakespeare towards the close of his literary activities, belongs to the History plays solely in a formal sense. Apart from King John, which deals with events at the turn of the thirteenth century, Shakespeare's Histories deal with the struggle for the English crown that went on from the close of the fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. They constitute an historical epic covering over a hundred years and divided into long chapters corresponding to reigns. But when we read these chapters chronologically, following the sequence of reigns, we are struck by the thought that for Shakespeare history stands still. Every chapter opens and closes at the same point. In every one of these plays history turns full circle, returning to the point of departure. These recurring and unchanging circles described by history are the successive kings' reigns.

Each of these great historical tragedies begins with a struggle for the throne, or for its consolidation. Each ends with the monarch's death and a new coronation. In each of the Histories the legitimate ruler drags behind him a long chain of crimes. He has rejected the feudal lords who helped him to reach for the crown; he murders, first, his enemies, then his former allies; he executes possible successors and pretenders to the crown. But he has not been able to execute them all. From banishment a young prince returns—the son, grandson, or brother of those murdered—to defend the violated law. The rejected lords gather round him, he personifies the hope for a new order and justice. But every step to power continues to be marked by murder, violence, treachery. And so, when the new prince finds himself near the throne, he drags behind him a chain of crimes as long as that of the until now legitimate ruler. When he assumes the crown, he will be just as hated as his predecessor. He has killed enemies, now he will kill former allies. And a new pretender appears in the name of violated justice. The wheel has turned full circle. A new chapter opens. A new historical tragedy:

Then thus:
Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons:
The first, Edward the Black Prince, Prince of Wales;

The second, William of Hatfield; and the third,
Lionel Duke of Clarence; next to whom
  Was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster;
The fifth was Edmund Langley, Duke of York;
The sixth was Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester;
William of Windsor was the seventh and last.
Edward the Black Prince died before his father
  And left behind him Richard, his only son,
Who after Edward the Third's death reign'd as king
  Till Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster,
The eldest son and heir of John of Gaunt,
Crown'd by the name of Henry the Fourth,
Seiz'd on the realm, depos'd the rightful king,
Sent his poor queen to France, from whence she came,
  And him to Pomfiret, where, as all you know,
Harmless Richard was murthered traitorously.

(2 Henry VI, II, 2)

This scheme of things is not, of course, marked with equally clear-cut outline in all Shakespeare's Histories. It is clearest in King John and in the two masterpieces of historical tragedy, Richard II and Richard III. It is least clear in Henry V, an idealized and patriotic play which depicts a struggle with an enemy from without. But in Shakespeare's plays the struggle for power is always stripped of all mythology, shown in its "pure state". It is a struggle for the crown, between people who have a name, a title and power.

In the Middle Ages the clearest image of wealth was a bag full of golden pieces. Each of them could be weighed in hand. For many centuries wealth meant fields, meadows and woods, flocks of sheep, a castle and villages. Later a ship loaded with pepper, or cloves, or big granaries filled with sacks of wheat, cellars full of wines, stores along the Thames emitting a sour smell of leather and the choking dust of cotton. Riches could be seen, handled and smelt. It was only later that they dematerialized, became a symbol, something abstract. Wealth ceased to be a concrete thing and became a slip of paper with writing on it. Those changes were described by Karl Marx in Das Kapital

In a similar fashion power was dematerialized, or rather, disembodied. It ceased to have a name. It became something abstract and mythological, almost a pure idea. But for Shakespeare power has names, eyes, mouth and hands. It is a relentless struggle of living people who sit together at one table.

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
  Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd—
All murthered; . . .

(Richard II, III, 2)

For Shakespeare the crown is the image of power. It is heavy. It can be handled, torn off a dying king's head, and put on one's own. Then one becomes a king. Only then. But one must wait till the king is dead, or else precipitate his death.

He cannot live, I hope, and must not die
Till George be pack'd with posthorse up to heaven.
I'll in, to urge his hatred more to Clarence
With lies well steel'd with weighty arguments;

Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy
  And leave the world for me to bustle in!

Richard III I, 1)

In each of the Histories there are four or five men who look into the eyes of the dying monarch, watch his trembling hands. They have already laid a plot, brought the loyal troops to the capital, communicated with their vassals. They have given orders to hired assassins; the stony Tower awaits new prisoners. There are four or five men, but only one of them may remain alive. Each of them has a different name and title. Each has a different face. One is cunning, another brave; the third is cruel, the fourth—a cynic. They are living people, for Shakespeare was a great writer. We remember their faces. But when we finish reading one chapter and begin to read the next one, when we read the Histories in their entirety, the faces of kings and usurpers become blurred, one after the other.

Even their names are the same. There is always a Richard, an Edward and a Henry. They have the same titles. There is a Duke of York, a Prince of Wales, a Duke of Clarence. In the different plays different people are brave, or cruel, or cunning. But the drama that is being played out between them is always the same. And in every tragedy the same cry, uttered by mothers of the murdered kings, is repeated:

QUEEN MARGARET

I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill'd him.

DUCHESS OF YORK

I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;
I had a Rutland too, thou holp'st to kill him.

QUEEN MARGARET

Thy Edward he is dead, that kill'd my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward;
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Match'd not the high perfection of my loss.
Thy Clarence he is dead that stabb'd my Edward,
And the beholders of this frantic play,
Th' adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smother'd in their dusky graves.

(Richard III, IV, 4)

Emanating from the features of individual kings and usurpers in Shakespeare's History plays, there gradually emerges the image of history itself. The image of the Grand Mechanism. Every successive chapter, every great Shakespearean act is merely a repetition:

The flattering index of a direful pageant,
One heav'd a-high to be hurl'd down below, . . .

(Richard III, IV, 4)

It is this image of history, repeated many times by Shakespeare, that forces itself on us in a most powerful manner. Feudal history is like a great staircase on which there treads a constant procession of kings. Every step upwards is marked by murder, perfidy, treachery. Every step brings the throne nearer. Another step and the crown will fall. One will soon be able to snatch it.

. . . That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, . . .

(Macbeth, I, 4)

From the highest step there is only a leap into the abyss. The monarchs change. But all of them—good and bad, brave and cowardly, vile and noble, naive and cynical—tread on the steps that are always the same.

Was this how Shakespeare conceived the tragedy of history in his first, youthful period that has lightheartedly been called "optimistic"? Or was he, perhaps, an adherent of absolute monarchy and used the bloody stuff of fifteenth-century history to shock the audience by his spectacle of feudal struggles and England's internal disruption? Or did he write about his own times? Perhaps Hamlet is not so far removed from the two Richard plays? On what experiences did he draw? Was he a moralist, or did he describe the world he knew or foresaw, without illusions, without contempt, but also without indignation? Let us try to interpret Richard II and Richard III as best we can.

II

Let us begin by tracing the working of the Grand Mechanism as Shakespeare shows it in his theatre. On the proscenium two armies fight each other. The tiny inner stage is turned into the House of Commons, or the King's chamber. On the balcony the King appears, surrounded by bishops. Trumpets are blown: the proscenium is now the Tower courtyard where the imprisoned princes are being led under guard. The inner stage has been turned into a cell. The successor to the throne cannot sleep, tormented by thoughts of violence. Now the door opens, and hired assassins enter with daggers in their hands. A moment later the proscenium is a London street at night: frightened townsmen hurry past talking politics. Trumpets again: the new monarch has made his appearance on the balcony. . . .

III

The tragic character of Shakespeare's world is thus gradually revealed. But before we return to Hamlet's great questions, we have to describe the world once again, and see that it was a real world. The world we live in. Once again we have to trace the working of the Grand Mechanism: from the foot of the throne to the streets of London; from the royal chamber to the Tower prison.

Henry VI and Duke of Clarence have been murdered, Edward IV has died. In the first two acts of Richard III Shakespeare compressed eleven long years of history, as if they were a week. There is only Richard and the steps he has yet to climb on his way to the throne. Each of these steps is a living man. Finally, only two sons of the dead king are left. They, too, have to die. It is part of Shakespeare's genius that in writing about history he has cleared it of all descriptive elements, of anecdote, almost of the story. It is history purified of irrelevancies.

Historical names, or the literal accuracy of historic events is of no importance. The situations are true; I would say: super-true. In this long unending Shakespearean week there may be morning, evening, or night. Time does not exist. Only history is present; its working, felt by us almost physically. There is night; one of those dramatic nights when the fate of the whole kingdom may depend on one council held at the castle, perhaps even on one thrust of a dagger. One of those historic nights when the air is heavier than usual and the hours longer. When one is watting for news. Shakespeare not only dramatizes history; he dramatizes psychology, gives us large slices of it; and in them we find ourselves.

Richard has already assumed power as Lord Protector. In the royal palace there are two frightened women: the Queen Mother and the Queen Dowager. Beside them a ten-year-old boy is playing: their son and grandson. The Archbishop has arrived. They are all waiting and concerned only about one thing: what will Richard do? The boy, too, knows the history of his family, of the country, the names of those who have been murdered. In a few days' time, in a few hours, he will be the brother of the King. Or . . . The boy says something careless, teasing his powerful uncle. The Queen reproaches him.

DUCHESS OF YORK

Good madam, be not angry with the child.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

Pitchers have ears.

This palace, in which every member of the royal family is named after someone murdered, is very much like Elsinore. Not only Denmark is a prison. At last comes the messenger.

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK

Here comes a messenger. What news?

MESSENGER

Such news, my lord, as grieves me to report.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

How doth the Prince?

MESSENGER

Well, madam, and in health.

DUCHESS OF YORK

What is thy news then?

MESSENGER

Lord Rivers and Lord Grey are sent to Pomfret,
With them Sir Thomas Vaughan, prisoners.

DUCHESS OF YORK

Who hath committed them?

MESSENGER

The mighty Dukes,
Gloucester and Buckingham.

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK

For what offence?

MESSENGER

The sum of all I can I have disclos'd.
Why or for what these nobles were committed
Is all unknown to me, my gracious lord.

(Richard III, II, 4)

The same long week continues, as does the night when power is changing hands. Earlier on Shakespeare compressed eleven years of history into a few violent scenes; now he shows us one hour after another. We are in a London street. Townsmen hurry by in frightened groups of two or three. They have just heard something, they know something. But they are not a chorus from an ancient tragedy to comment on the events or proclaim the will of the gods. There are no gods in Shakespeare. There are only kings, every one of whom is an executioner, and a victim, in turn. There are also living, frightened people. They can only gaze upon the grand staircase of history. But their own fate depends on who will reach the highest step, or leap into the abyss. That is why they are frightened. Shakespearean tragedy, unlike ancient tragedies, is not a drama of moral attitudes in the face of immortal gods; there is no fate which decides the hero's destiny. The greatness of Shakespeare's realism consists in his awareness of the extent to which people are involved in history. Some make history and fall victims to it. Others only think they make it, but they, too, fall victims to it. The former are kings; the latter—the kings' confidants who execute their orders and are cogs in the Grand Mechanism. There is also a third category of people: the common citizens of the kingdom. Grand historical events are performed on the fields of battle, in the royal palace, and the Tower prison. But the Tower, the royal palace, and the battlefields are actually situated in England. That was one of the discoveries of Shakespeare's genius which helped to create modern historical tragedy. Let us, then, listen to the voices in the street:

THIRD CITIZEN

Doth the news hold of good King Edward's death?

SECOND CITIZEN

Ay, sir, it is too true. God help the while!

THIRD CITIZEN

Then, masters, look to see a troublous world.

FIRST CITIZEN

No, no! By God's good grace his son shall reign.

THIRD CITIZEN

. . . For emulation who shall now be nearest
Will touch us all too near, if God prevent not.
O, full of danger is the Duke of Gloucester,
And the Queen's sons and brothers haught and proud;
And were they to be rul'd, and not to rule,
This sickly land might solace as before.

FIRST CITIZEN

Come, come, we fear the worst. All will be well.

THIRD CITIZEN

When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks; . . .

(Richard III, II, 3)

Still the same long week, and the same London street. Only one day has passed. Richard has sent his confidants to fetch the Prince of Wales. Trumpets are blown. The child successor to the throne is entering London. But he is not greeted by his brother, or his mother. The Duke of York and the Queen Dowager have, for fear of Richard, sought refuge in the white Gothic Cathedral of St. Paul's, as if they had been common criminals, whose right of sanctuary was protected by law. They have to be got out of there. The Archbishop of Canterbury has objections. But the Duke of Buckingham knows how to produce convincing arguments:

You are too senseless-obstinate, my lord,
Too ceremonious and traditional.
Weigh it but with the grossness of his age, . . .

And the Cardinal replies:

My lord, you shall o'errule my mind for once.

(Richard III, III, 1)

The long week does not seem to end. Both successors to the throne—the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York—have been placed in the Tower; the executioner is on his way to Pomfret Castle to cut off the heads of the Queen's closest relatives and friends. Richard is making long strides towards the throne. But the coup d'état is yet to be accomplished. The House of Lords and the Privy Council have yet to be cowed, the City intimidated. It is only now that we shall see how those, who think they are the makers of history, are actually enmeshed in the Grand Mechanism. We shall see the image of political practice in its pure form, free from all mythology, and sketched in broad outlines. We shall see a dramatized version of a chapter from Machiavelli's Prince, the great scene of the coup d'état. But this scene will be played by living people, and it is in this fact that Shakespeare's superiority over Machiavelli's treatise is revealed. It will be played by people who know they are mortal, and try to save their skins, or bargain with history for a little self-respect, a semblance of courage, of decency. They will not succeed. History will first of all disgrace them, and then will cut off their heads.

IV

It is four A.M. For the first time in tragedy, Shakespeare gives the exact time. It is significant that this should be four A.M. It is the hour between night and dawn; the hour when decisions in high places have been taken, when what had to be done has been done. But it is also the hour when one could still save oneself by leaving one's home. The last hour in which freedom of choice is still possible. The sound of a knocker is heard: someone knocks hastily on the door.

MESSENGER

My lord! my lord!

HASTINGS (within)

Who knocks?

MESSENGER

One from the Lord Stanley.

HASTINGS (within)

What is't o'clock?

MESSENGER

Upon the stroke of four.

Enter LORD HASTINGS

Cannot my Lord Stanley sleep these tedious nights?

MESSENGER

So it appears by that I have to say.
First, he commends him to your noble self.

HASTINGS

What then?

MESSENGER

Besides, he says there are two councils kept; . . .

I greatly admire in Shakespeare those brief moments when tragedy is suddenly projected onto an everyday level; when the characters, before a decisive battle, or having woven a plot on which the fate of a kingdom will depend, go to supper, or to bed. ("Come, let us sup betimes, that afterwards / We may digest our complots in some form.") They sleep, or cannot sleep, they drink their wine, they call their servants, do all sorts of things. They are only men. Like Homer's heroes they eat, sleep and fidget about on their uncomfortable beds. Shakespeare's genius shows itself also in the way he depicts the events occurring at four A.M. Who has not been awakened in this way at four A.M. at least once in his life?

Therefore he sends to know your lordship's pleasure,
  If you will presently take horse with him
And with all speed post with him toward the North
To shun the danger that his soul divines.

Lord Hastings was awakened at four A.M. He has been warned by his friends. But he cannot bring himself to flee. He waits.

Go, fellow, go, return unto thy lord;
Bid him not fear the separated councils.
His Honour and myself are at the one,
And at the other is my good friend Catesby;

Tell him his fears are shallow, without instance;
And for his dreams, I wonder he's so simple
To trust the mock'ry of unquiet slumbers.
To fly the boar before the boar pursues
Were to incense the boar to follow us
  And make pursuit where he did mean no chase.
Go, bid thy master rise and come to me,
And we will both together to the Tower,
Where he shall see the boar will use us kindly.

(Richard III, III, 2)

The hour of decision is over. All are assembled in the Tower. Lord Stanley, who had given the warning; Hastings, who ignored the warning; the Bishop of Ely; and Ratcliff, who has just carried out the executions at Pomfret. All of them are assembled at one table. The Council of the Crown, the most powerful lords of the realm, temporal and spiritual; the men who wield power over Church, Treasury, Army, and Prisons. These are the ones before whom others tremble. They are all there, except Number One: Richard, the Lord Protector. He has not come. And in the meantime they have to speak, vote, express their opinions. They are to do so before the Lord Protector will express his. No one knows what Richard thinks. No one except his confidants. But they have no wish to speak. They are waiting. And the Council, the men before whom all England trembles, are silent.

BUCKINGHAM

Who knows the Lord Protector's mind herein?
Who is most inward with the noble Duke?

BISHOP OF ELY

Your Grace, we think, should soonest know his mind.

BUCKINGHAM

We know each other's faces; for our hearts,
He knows no more of mine than I of yours;
Nor I of his, my lord, than you of mine.
Lord Hastings, you and he are near in love.

HASTINGS

I thank his Grace, I know he loves me well;
But, for his purpose in the coronation,
I have not sounded him, nor he deliver'd
His gracious pleasure any way therein;
But you, my honourable lords, may name the time, . . .

At this point Richard enters. The noble lords will hear his voice at last. They will learn what is going on. And they do hear him speak:

My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn
I saw good strawberries in your garden there.
I do beseech you send for some of them.

Where and when did Shakespeare hear the tyrant's cruel laugh? And if he did not hear it, how did he have a presentiment of it?

Let us look again at the men before whom England trembles. They sit in silence; they avoid looking in each other's eyes; they try to penetrate into the minds of others. Above all, they want to know what he, the Lord Protector is thinking. But he has left again, without another word.

STANLEY

What of his heart perceive you in his face
By any likelihood he show'd to-day?

HASTINGS

Marry, that with no man here he is offended;
For were he, he had shown it in his looks.

Richard enters again. He has made his decision. He knows already who has doubts. He has chosen his victim. In this great Council scene, Shakespeare maintains a tremendous tension and does not let the audience relax for a moment. It is so still that one hears people breathing. This is indeed the essence of history.

Richard speaks. We know these words by heart:

I pray you all, tell me what they deserve
That do conspire my death with devilish plots
Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail'd
Upon my body with their hellish charms.

Lord Hastings did not want to provoke the boar. Lord Hastings had friends on the Council. He believed in legality. He was not against a coup d'état, but wanted it to be backed by the majesty of law. Only three hours ago he had defended the rule of law. He refused to take part in what was clear outrage. He wanted to preserve the last vestiges of shame and honour. He was a brave man. He was. It is possible that Shakespeare never saw the sea or, as other learned commentators maintain, a battlefield. He did not know geography. He gives Bohemia a seashore. Proteus boards a ship to go from Verona to Milan, waiting moreover for the tide. Florence, too, is for Shakespeare a port. Shakespeare did not know history either. In his plays Ulysses quotes Aristotle, and Timon of Athens makes references to Seneca and Galenus. Shakespeare did not know philosophy, had no knowledge of warfare, confused customs of different periods. In Julius Caesar a clock strikes the hour. A serving maid takes off Cleopatra's corset. In King John's time gunpowder is used in cannons. Shakespeare had not seen the sea, or a battle, or mountains; he did not know history, geography, or philosophy. But Shakespeare knew that at the Council meeting the noble Hastings will have spoken first, after Richard, and pronounced a death sentence on himself. I can still hear his voice:

HASTINGS

The tender love I bear your Grace, my lord,
Makes me most forward in this princely presence
  To doom th' offenders, whosoe'er they be.
I say, my lord, they have deserved death.

It is too late to save one's head, but not too late to disgrace oneself—to bring oneself to believe in witch-craft and the devil, in anything; to accept anything, even in the last hour before one is due to die:

RICHARD

Then be your eyes the witness of their evil.
Look how I am bewitch'd. Behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling, wither'd up;
And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,
  Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.

HASTINGS

If they have done this deed, my noble lord—

RICHARD

If? Thou protector of this damned strumpet,
Talk'st thou to me of ifs? Thou art a traitor.
Off with his head! Now by Saint Paul I swear
I will not dine until I see the same.
Lovel and Ratcliff, look that it be done.

(Richard III, III, 4)

I see this scene in Olivier's film. They all have dropped their eyes. Nobody looks at Hastings. One by one all those sitting next to him at the big table move away from him. Richard pushes aside his chair and takes his leave. The others, too, push aside their chairs and one by one leave the chamber. Bishop of Ely, as well as the faithful friend, Lord Stanley. No one has turned his head to look behind. The chamber is empty, except for Lord Hastings and the two grand executioners of the realm: Lord Lovel and Sir Richard Ratcliff. They have drawn their swords.

The crime must now be legalized. There has not been time for a trial. But the trial must and will take place, with all the appropriate ceremony. Except that the accused cannot be brought to court. Shakespeare knew the working of the Grand Mechanism. What are the Lord Mayor of London and the judges for? They have only to be persuaded. Richard and the Duke of Buckingham call for the Lord Mayor. He comes at once. No, he does not have to be persuaded. He is persuaded already. He is always persuaded.

MAYOR OF LONDON

Now fair befall you! He deserv'd his death,
And your good Graces both have well proceeded
To warn false traitors from the like attempts.

BUCKINGHAM

Yet had we not determin'd he should die
Until your lordship came to see his end,
Which now the loving haste of these our friends,
  Something against our meanings, have prevented;
Because, my lord, we would have had you heard
  The traitor speak, and timorously confess
The manner and the purpose of his treasons,
That you might well have signified the same
Unto the citizens, who haply may
Misconster us in him and wail his death.

MAYOR OF LONDON

But, my good lord, your Grace's word shall serve,
  As well as I had seen, and heard him speak;
And do not doubt, right noble princes both,
But I'll acquaint our duteous citizens
  With ail your just proceedings in this case.

(Richard III, III, 5)

This scene has a really fine ending. The Mayor rushes to the Guildhall. Gloucester and Buckingham go to dinner. The proscenium is empty. It is still the same long week. Morning has come. A Scrivener enters, with a paper in his hand:

Here is the indictment of the good Lord Hastings,
Which in a set hand fairly is engross'd
That it may be to-day read o'er in Paul's.
And mark how well the sequel hangs together:
  Eleven hours I have spent to write it over,
For yesternight by Catesby was it sent me;
The precedent was full as long a-doing;
And yet within these five hours Hastings liv'd,
Untainted, unexamin'd, free, at liberty.
Here's a good world the while! Who is so gross
  That cannot see this palpable device?
Yet who so bold but says he sees it not?
Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
  When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.

(Richard III, III, 6)

"Here's a good world the while!" .. . It is remarkable how closely this court clerk, with his cruel irony, resembles the fools of later Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. Would the clown, who philosophizes, for such is his job at court, and the scrivener, who knows everything, but is not allowed to speak, be the only ones to know the truth about the world? "Here's a good world. ... " But what world? What sort of world is it that Shakespeare writes about?

What did Shakespeare want to say in Richard III? He took the historical substance of the play from Hall's and Holinshed's chronicles, based on notes made by Sir Thomas More. He did not change the characters, or the order of events. Even the outrageous scene with the strawberries had been described in almost the same words by More. Was Shakespeare merely reshaping, and putting a new life into old historical dramas, popular in the London theatre, such as Richardus Tertius by Thomas Legge, or the anonymous True History of Richard III? Was Richard III intended to be just a page from history, a cruel chapter in the old annals of England?

"Here's a good world the while!" .. . But what world? Richard Ill's? Shakespeare's? What world did Shakespeare write about, what times did he want to depict? Was it the world of feudal barons, slaughtering one another in the middle of the fifteenth century, or perhaps the world of the reign of the good, wise and devout Queen Elizabeth? That same Elizabeth who cut off Mary Stuart's head when Shakespeare was twenty-three years old, and sent to the scaffold some fifteen hundred Englishmen, among them her own lovers, ministers of the realm, doctors of theology and doctors of law, generals, bishops, great judges. "Here's a good world . . ." Or did Shakespeare consider history to be one continuous chain of violence, an unending stormy week, with the sun only very infrequently breaking through the thick clouds at noon, with an occasional quiet, peaceful morning, or a calm evening when lovers embrace and go to sleep under the trees of a Forest of Arden?

Go hie thee, hie thee from this slaughterhouse,
Lest thou increase the number of the dead.

(Richard III, IV, 1)

"Here's a good world. ... " But what did in fact the Grand Mechanism mean for Shakespeare? A succession of kings climbing and pushing one another off the grand staircase of history, or a wave of hot blood rising up to one's head and blinding the eyes? A natural order that has been violated, so that evil produces evil, every injury calls for revenge, every crime causes another? Or a cruel social order in which the vassals and superiors are in conflict with each other, the kingdom is ruled like a farm and falls prey to the strongest? A naked struggle for power, or a violent beat of the human heart that reason cannot accelerate or stop, but a dead piece of sharp iron breaks once and for all? A dense and impenetrable night of history where dawn does not break, or a darkness that fills the human soul?

V

Richard III contains answers to only some of those great questions. In this tragedy, which abounds in violence, equalling, if not surpassing, that of Titus Andronicus, only one character has some scruples and experiences a brief moment of doubt. It is a hired assassin, one of the two sent by Richard to murder the Duke of Clarence in the Tower.

FIRST MURDERER

What? Art thou afraid?

SECOND MURDERER

Not to kill him, having a warrant; but to be damn'd for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me.

In this world of kings, bishops, judges, chancellors, lords and generals, the only man who, for a brief moment, shrinks from committing murder, is the one whose profession it is to murder for money. He is not afraid of violating the laws of the kingdom or the social order. He knows he occupies in it a definite place; not a very honourable one, but none the less generally tolerated and necessary. He has a warrant for this murder from the King himself. The hired assassin fears the Last Judgement, damnation and hell. He is the only believer in this play. He hears the voice of conscience but at the same time realizes that conscience cannot be reconciled with the laws and order of the world he lives in, that it is something superfluous, ridiculous and a nuisance.

SECOND MURDERER

I'll not meddle with it; it makes a man a coward. A man can not steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour's wife, but it detects him. 'Tis a blushing shame-fac'd spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that (by chance) I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turn'd out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and live without it.

Only two people in this tragedy reflect on the order of the world: King Richard III, and a hired assassin. The one who is at the top of the feudal ladder, and one placed at its very bottom. Richard III has no scruples or doubts; the hired assassin experiences a moment of doubt. But they both see the Grand Mechanism equally clearly, although from opposite angles. Neither of them has any illusions: they are the only ones who can afford not to have them. They accept the world as it really is. Moreover, the king and the hired assassin represent the world's order in its "pure form." Shakespeare wanted to say just this. There are sudden flashes of genius in this early, youthful play. One of them is the equation of a hired assassin with the King's brother:

CLARENCE

In God's name, what art thou?

FIRST MURDERER

A man, as you are.

CLARENCE

But not as I am, royal.

FIRST MURDERER

Nor you as we are, loyal.

This fragment of dialogue already foreshadows Hamlet. For what are hired assassins if not history's gravediggers? In the Elsinore churchyard, too, gravediggers talk to a king's son. They too look at great historical events and human dramas from the same point of view: of those who dig graves and put up gallows. Viewed from this angle there is no difference between a king's son and a beggar. They are both mortal. They were born to die. A hired assassin and the king's son have been made doubly equal. In the order of history they both are just cogs in the Grand Mechanism. From the perspective of a cemetery and the gallows they both are only human beings. Shakespeare excels in unexpected confrontations in which—as if illumined by lightning—the entire immense landscape of history suddenly comes into view. Thus Richard III already points the way to the interpretation of Hamlet as a political drama, and, conversely, Richard, interpreted through Hamlet, becomes a philosophical drama about discrepancy between the moral order and the order of practical behaviour.

Two assassins come to the prison cell in order to murder Richard's own brother at his request. Both the Duke of Clarence and the assassins kill by the order of the King and in his name. Only yesterday Clarence could, on the King's behalf, order them to commit any murder. Today he is in prison himself, and must die by the order, and in the name, of the same King. The Duke and the hired assassins are only men, and cogs in the same mechanism.

Let us consider this scene once more. The King's brother used to command assassins to kill for the sake of political order. He has been put in prison and meets the same assassins. He defends himself. He speaks to them of conscience. Their reply is that he himself had mocked conscience. He tells them that he is a minister of the crown. Their reply is that in prison there are no ministers. He speaks to them of lofty ideas. They reply that the very same ideas now demand his death.

CLARENCE

. . . Wherein, my friends, have I offended you?

FIRST MURDERER

Offended us you have not, but the King.

CLARENCE

I shall be reconcil'd to him again.

SECOND MURDERER

Never, my lord; therefore prepare to die.

FIRST MURDERER

What we will do, we do upon command.

SECOND MURDERER

And he that hath commanded is our king.

(Richard III, I, 4)

And so the two hired assassins drown the Duke of Clarence in a barrel of malmsey.

Thus has the long week begun. It will end with the great coronation scene. Richard has by now eliminated all those who had stood in his way to the throne. He has terrorized the Council, the House of Lords, and the City. It is night. The proscenium represents a court-yard of the royal palace. The terrified nobles, assembled here, watch in silence. Gloucester's agents walk about everywhere. In a corner of the courtyard there is a crowd of townspeople dragged from their houses. It is they who are to proclaim Richard king. For he has agreed to reign only by the will of the people. At last he shows himself on the balcony, with a prayer book in his hand. He is praying. After all, he is to be king by the will of God.

MAYOR OF LONDON

See where his Grace stands, 'tween two clergymen.

BUCKINGHAM

Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity; . . .

On this little wooden circle, the "O" to which Shakespeare has several times compared his own stage, one of history's great scenes is now being performed. Richard lets himself be implored to accept the crown.

MAYOR OF LONDON

Do, good my lord. Your citizens entreat you.

BUCKINGHAM

Refuse not, mighty lord, this proffer'd love.

CATESBY

O, make them joyful, grant their lawful suit!

(Richard III, III, 7)

Both the nobles and the townspeople are silent They will only say: "Amen". This is enough. Richard has agreed to accept the crown. He has put away his prayer book. He turns to the bishops still standing at his side, and says:

Come, let us to our holy work again.

VI

History in the theatre is mostly just a grand setting; a background against which the characters love, suffer, or hate; experience their personal dramas. Sometimes they are involved in history, which complicates their lives, but even then does not cease to be a more or less uncomfortable costume: a wig, a crinoline, a sword knocking about their feet. Of course, such plays are only superficially historical. But there are plays in which history is not just a background or a setting, in which it is played, or rather repeated on the stage, by actors disguised as historical personalities. They know history, have learned it by heart, and do not often go wrong. Schiller was a classic author of this kind of historical drama. Marx used to call his characters speaking trumpets of modern ideas. They interpret history because they know the solutions it offers. They can even sometimes express real trends and conflicts of social forces. But even this does not mean that the dramatization of history has been effected. It is only a historical textbook that has been dramatized. The textbook can be idealistic, as in Schiller and Romain Rolland, or materialistic, as in some dramas of Büchner and Brecht; but it does not cease to be a textbook.

Shakespeare's concept of history is of a different kind from the two mentioned above. History unfolds on the stage, but is never merely enacted. It is not a background or a setting. It is itself the protagonist of tragedy. But what tragedy?

There are two fundamental types of historical tragedy. The first is based on the conviction that history has a meaning, fulfils its objective tasks and leads in a definite direction. It is rational, or at least can be made intelligible. Tragedy consists here in the price of history, the price of progress that has to be paid by humanity. A precursor, one who pushes forward the relentless roller of history, but must himself be crushed by it for the very reason of his coming ahead of his time, is also tragic. This is the concept of historical tragedy proclaimed by Hegel. It was near to the views of the young Marx, even though he substituted the objective development of ideas. He compared history to a mole who unceasingly digs in the earth.

Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th' earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!

(Hamlet, I, 5)

A mole lacks awareness, but digs in a definite direction. It has its dreams but they only dimly express its feeling for the sun and sky. It is not the dreams that set the direction of its march, but the movement of its claws and snout, constantly digging up the earth. A mole will be tragic if it happens to be buried by the earth before it emerges to the surface.

There is another kind of historical tragedy, originating in the conviction that history has no meaning and stands still, or constantly repeats its cruel cycle; that it is an elemental force, like hail, storm, or hurricane, birth and death. A mole digs in the earth but will never come to its surface. New generations of moles are being born all the time, scatter the earth in all directions, but are themselves constantly buried by the earth. A mole has its dreams. For a long time it fancied itself the lord of creation, thinking that earth, sky and stars had been created for moles, that there is a mole's God, who had made moles and promised them a mole-like immortality. But suddenly the mole has realized that it is just a mole, that the earth, sky and stars had not been created for it. A mole suffers, feels and thinks, but its sufferings, feelings and thoughts cannot alter its mole's fate. It will go on digging in the earth, and the earth will go on burying it. It is at this point that the mole has realized that it is a tragic mole.

It seems to me that the latter concept of historical tragedy was nearer to Shakespeare, not only in the period when he was writing Hamlet and King Lear, but in all his writings, from the early Histories up to the Tempest.

.. . for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
  Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
  To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;

. . . and humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

(Richard II, III, 2)

We began our considerations with a metaphor of the grand staircase of history. It was on such a staircase that Leopold Jessner set Richard III in his famous production at the Berlin Schauspielhaus. That metaphor has philosophical consequences and is also dramatically fruitful. There are no good and bad kings; there are only kings on different steps of the same stairs. The names of the kings may change, but it is always a Henry who pushes a Richard down, or the other way round. Shakespeare's Histories are dramatis personae of the Grand Mechanism. But what is this Grand Mechanism which starts operating at the foot of the throne and to which the whole kingdom is subjected? A mechanism whose cogs are both great lords and hired assassins; a mechanism which forces people to violence, cruelty and treason; which constantly claims new victims? A mechanism according to whose laws the road to power is at the same time the way to death? This Grand Mechanism is for Shakespeare the order of history, in which the king is the Lord's Anointed.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
  The deputy elected by the Lord.

(Richard II, III, 2)

The sun circles round the earth, and with it the spheres, planets and stars, all arranged in a hierarchic order. There is in the universe an order of the elements, an order of angelic choirs, and a corresponding order of rank on earth. There are superiors and vassals of the vassals. Royal power comes from God, and all power on earth is merely a reflection of the power wielded by the King.

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
  Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd
Amidst the other, whose med'cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
  In evil mixture to disorder wander,
  What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds! Frights, changes, horrors
  Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
  The unity and married calm of states
  Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shak'd,
  Which is the ladder to all high designs,
  Then enterprise is sick!

(Troilus and Cressida, I, 3)

Richard II is a tragedy of dethronement. It is, however, not just Richard's dethronement, but that of the King. Dethronement, in fact, of the idea of regal power. We have seen how Shakespeare equated a prince of royal blood—the King's brother—with a hired assassin. In Richard II, the Lord's Anointed, the King deprived of his crown, becomes a mere mortal. In the first acts of the tragedy the King was compared to the sun: others had to lower their eyes when faced with his dazzling Majesty. Now the sun has been hurled down from its orbit, and with it the entire order of the universe.

. . . what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

. . . Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
  Need friends. Subjected thus,
  How can you say to me I am a king?

(Richard II, III, 2)

"E pur si muove! " These words can be read with different intonations. "And still it moves . . ." There is also a bitter sort of laughter in those words. There is no heaven and hell, no order of the spheres. The earth moves round the sun, and the history of the Renaissance is just a grand staircase, from the top of which ever new kings fall into the abyss. There exists only the Grand Mechanism. But the Grand Mechanism is not just cruel. There is another side to it: it is a tragic farce.

Richard III foreshadows Hamlet. Richard II is a tragedy of knowledge gained through experience. Just before being hurled into the abyss, the deposed King reaches the greatness of Lear. For King Lear, like Hamlet, is also a tragedy of man contemporary with Shakespeare; a political tragedy of Renaissance humanism. A tragedy of the world stripped of illusions. Slowly, step by step, King Lear walks down the grand staircase, to learn the whole cruelty of the world over which he had once ruled, but which he did not know; and to drain the bitter cup to the dregs. Richard II is brutally and suddenly pushed into the abyss. But with him will founder the structure of the feudal world. It is not only Richard who has been deposed. It is the sun that has ceased to move round the earth.

Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine
  And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
  Like to my followers in prosperity,
  Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
  Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that fac'd so many follies
And was at last outfac'd by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face.
As brittle as the glory is the face,
(Dashes the glass to the floor.)
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, . . .

(Richard II, IV, 1)

The tragedy of Richard II has been performed on the uppermost step. The main scenes of Richard III are unfolded on the lower steps, on the protagonist's way up. There is no tragedy of history without awareness. Tragedy begins at the point when the king becomes aware of the working of the Grand Mechanism. This can happen when he falls victim to it, or when he acts as executioner. These are the points at which Shakespeare carries out his great confrontations, contrasting the moral order with the order of history.

Richard III compares himself to Machiavelli and is a real Prince. He is, at any rate, a prince who has read The Prince. Politics is to him a purely practical affair, an art, with the acquisition of power as its aim. Politics is amoral, like the art of bridge construction, or the practice of fencing. Human passions, and men themselves, are clay that can be shaped at will. The whole world is a huge piece of clay which can be shaped by hand. Richard III is not just a name of one of the kings who have mounted the grand staircase. Nor is he a collective term for one of many royal situations depicted by Shakespeare in his historical chronicles. Richard III is the mastermind of the Grand Mechanism, its will and awareness. Here for the first time Shakespeare has shown the human face of the Grand Mechanism. A terrifying face, in its ugliness and the cruel grimace of its lips. But also a fascinating face.

VII

Richard III is the first of those great personalities that Shakespeare endowed with the full range of historical experience in order to conclude his tragic reckoning with the real world. This reckoning starts with Richard's meeting with Lady Anne. It is one of the greatest scenes written by Shakespeare, and one of the greatest ever written.

Lady Anne follows an open coffin in which servants are carrying the body of her father-in-law, Henry VI. Richard has had him murdered in the Tower. He had earlier killed her husband, Edward, and her father, the Earl of Warwick. Was it the day before? A week, a month, a year ago? Time has no meaning here. It has been condensed to one long night, one long, oppressive week.

Richard interrupts the funeral procession. In the course of six minutes, counted by the tower clock, in the space of three pages of the Folio, in forty-three speeches, he will persuade the woman, whose husband, father, and father-in-law he has murdered, to enter his bedchamber of her own accord.

Stay, you that bear the corse, and set it down.

These are Richard's first words in this scene. Lady Anne, like furies in ancient tragedies, is all suffering and hate. But Lady Anne knows well what times she is living in. From the outset Shakespeare places the scene in a country of terror and awe, where all are paralysed by fear, and no one is sure of his life. Halberdiers flee before Richard, servants throw down the coffin. Nothing surprises Lady Anne any more. She has seen everything:

What, do you tremble? Are you all afraid?
Alas, I blame you not, for you are mortal, . . .

She will be left alone with Richard. She has lost all her dear ones. She is now free from fear. She cries, implores, curses, mocks, sneers:

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

And Richard replies:

But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Once again Shakespeare reminds us that the action takes place on earth, the cruellest of planets, and among men, who are more cruel than beasts. In order to conclude his reckoning he searches for ultimate, extreme forms of love and suffering, crime and hate. Lady Anne is as yet the superior in this duel. Richard is insipid, tries to deny his crime, tells lies. Lady Anne will make him admit it. And only now, in the world stripped of appearances, and in which violence has been openly revealed, in the world where the murderer stands face to face with his victim, Richard will be stronger than Anne. He admits he has killed the king.

RICHARD

Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.

LADY ANNE

And thou unfit for any place, but hell.

RICHARD

Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.

LADY ANNE

Some dungeon.

RICHARD

Your bed chamber.

This is the moment of Richard's first victory. As long as he lied, beat about the bush, denied his crime—he recognized the existence of moral order. Now he has annihilated it. They are alone on the stage; but not only there. They are alone in the world full of murder, violence, brute force and cruelty.

LADY ANNE

III rest betide the chamber where thou liest!

RICHARD

So will it, madam, till I lie with you.

LADY ANNE

I hope so.

At this point Lady Anne is already lost. Richard has pulled the ground from under her feet. So the entire cruel mechanism, the death of her dear ones, the sufferings of great lords of the realm, the struggle for power and the crown—all this it seems was for her, and only for her. The world has been stripped of appearances, the moral order has been annihilated, now history ceases to exist. There is only a woman, a man, and a sea of spilt blood.

RICHARD

Your beauty was the cause of that effect—
Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
  So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.

LADY ANNE

If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide,
These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks.

Shakespeare has the gift of psychological clairvoyance. In this great scene he undertakes, in bold short-cuts of frantic dialogue, his own journey to the heart of darkness. He reduces the world to elemental forces of hate and lust. Lady Anne still hates Richard, but is already alone with her hate, in a world in which only lust exists. This scene should be interpreted through our own experiences. One must find in it the night of Nazi occupation, concentration camps, mass-murders. One must see in it the cruel time when all moral standards are broken, when the victim becomes executioner, and vice-versa. Lady Anne will spit in Richard's face, but this is her last gesture, her last defence before surrender.

Lady Anne does not give herself to Richard out of fear. She will follow him to reach rock-bottom. To prove to herself that all the world's laws have ceased to exist. For when all has been lost, only memory remains, but it, too, must be stifled. One must kill one-self, or kill in oneself the last vestiges of shame. Lady Anne goes into Richard's bed to be destroyed.

If history is no more than a gigantic slaughter, what does remain, except a leap into the darkness, a choice between death and pleasure? Shakespeare was great in the way he made Lady Anne take exactly this choice, the final and only choice left to her.

Richard gives her his sword.

RICHARD

Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry—
But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now dispatch. 'Twas I that stabb'd young Edward—
But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on. . . .

LADY ANNE (falls the sword)

. . . Though I wish thy death,
I will not be thy executioner.

Half a century later another play was written in which a man faces a woman whose father he has killed. Chimène's father had insulted Rodrigue's father, and Rodrigue avenged his father's shame. Chimène in turn has to avenge her father and demands Rodrigue's head. Throughout the whole tragedy there goes on a dialogue between love and duty conducted in smooth alexandrines, whose hard rhythm is not broken even for a moment. Corneille's world is cruel, too, but neither its moral order, nor its intellectual order have been violated. Honour, love and law have remained intact. In Shakespeare's royal Histories there is only hate, lust and violence; the Grand Mechanism, which transforms the executioner into a victim, and the victim into an executioner. Corneille's heroes are worthy of each other and self-confident. They do not experience doubt, and their features are never twisted by passion. They live in an unshaken world. This may be the reason why they seem to be people from another planet. In full view of the audience they try to outbid each other with their noble-mindedness, but this does not cost them much and does not inwardly change them. I cannot help preferring the wild snatches of Shakespearean dialogue to Corneille's grand rhetoric, in which passion is declined according to immutable rules of grammar.

LADY ANNE

I would I knew thy heart.

RICHARD

'Tis figur'd in my tongue.

LADY ANNE

I fear me both are false.

RICHARD

Then never man was true.

LADY ANNE

Well, well, put up your sword.

RICHARD

Say then my peace is made.

LADY ANNE

That shalt thou know hereafter.

RICHARD

But shall I live in hope?

LADY ANNE

All men, I hope, live so.

(Richard III, i, 2)

Corneille's heroes are stronger than the world, and there is no darkness in their innermost souls. But Lady Anne, who spits in the face of her husband's murderer and then goes to bed with him, seems to me more human, or perhaps only more contemporary than the statue-like Chimène. In Shakespeare all human values are brittle, and the world is stronger than men. The implacable steam-roller of history crushes everybody and everything. Man is determined by his situation, by the step of the grand staircase on which he happens to find himself. It is that particular step that determines his freedom of choice.

In Richard II Shakespeare deposed not only the king, but the idea of kingly power. In Richard III he showed the crumbling of the entire moral order. After the great abdication scene Richard II calls for a mirror, and when he finds his face unchanged, breaks it. The King has become a man, the crown has been torn off the head of the Lord's Anointed. But the world has not been shaken in its foundations, and nothing has changed, not even his own face. So the crown was no more than sham.

Having forced Lady Anne to his bedchamber, Richard III, too, calls for a mirror. Everything has turned out to be sham: loyalty, love, even hate. Crime goes unpunished; beauty has chosen beast; human fate is clay that can be shaped in one's hands. There is no God, no law.

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And 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?

(Richard III, I, 2)

Richard III calls for a mirror. But he is wiser than Richard II. He calls for a mirror, but at the same time he calls for tailors to cut him a new suit.

VIII

Shakespeare views the implacable mechanism without medieval awe, and without the illusions of the early Renaissance. The sun does not circle round the earth, there is no order of the spheres, or of nature. The king is no Lord's Anointed, and politics is only an art aiming at capturing and securing power. The world offers a spectacle similar to a storm or hurricane. Weak bushes are bowed down to the earth, while tall trees fall uprooted. The order of history and the order of nature are both cruel; terrifying are the passions that breed in the human heart.

Only in his comedies does Shakespeare recall the images of Renaissance utopia. In the Forest of Arden lovers find each other, a son regains the property of which he had been deprived, free men hunt and sing, a just prince is restored to his throne. But even the utopia of Arden forest and the hot dream of a midsummer night are split by inner contradictions. Harmony is only a brief and fleeting moment of stillness. The idyll is disturbed by Jaques's bitter mockery.

Of all the important works written by Shakespeare before 1600, i.e. in what nineteenth-century scholars called his optimistic period, only Henry IV can be called a cheerful play. In both the Richard plays, and in the other Henrys, history is the only dramatis persona of the tragedy. The protagonist of Henry IV is Falstaff.

The great feudal barons are still butchering one another. King Henry IV, who had recently deposed Richard II, and let him be murdered together with his followers, did not atone for his crimes by a journey to the Holy Land. The allies who have put him on the throne are rebelling. For them he is a new tyrant. Wales and Scotland rise. History will begin from the beginning. But in Henry IV history is only one of many actors in the drama. It is being played out not only in the royal palace and in courtyards of feudal castles; not only on battlefields, in dungeons of the Tower, and in the London street where frightened townsmen are hurrying by. Nearby the royal palace there is a tavern called "The Boar's Head". In it Falstaff is king. Somehow, between the chapters of an austere historical chronicle there has been interpolated a rich Renaissance comedy about a fat knight, unable for many years to see his own knees under his huge belly.

I prefer Richard II and Richard III to Henry IV. They seem to me a far deeper and more austere kind of tragedy. Shakespeare exposes in them the mechanism of power directly, without resorting to subterfuge or fiction. He dethrones regal majesty, strips it of all illusion. He finds that the succession of reigns, the mere mechanism of history, is sufficient to achieve this. In Henry IV the position is different. The successor to the throne is a future national hero, the victor of Agincourt. Henry IV is already a patriotic epic.

Shakespeare never renounces his great confrontations. It is only that he poses them differently. Against the feudal barons butchering one another he sets the gargantuan figure of Falstaff. Sir John Falstaff not only personifies the Renaissance lust for life and thunderous laughter at heaven and hell, at the crown and all other laws of the realm. The fat knight possesses a plebeian wisdom and experience. He will not let history take him in. He scoffs at it.

There are two excellent scenes in Henry IV. The first one shows Falstaff as a newly created captain walking with his men to the place where the army has assembled. He has recruited only cripples and the poorest wretches in rags and tatters, because all those who had a little money could evade enlistment. The young prince looks aghast at this sorry army. But Falstaff, undisturbed, replies:

Tut, tut! good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They'll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

(I Henry IV, IV, 2)

This entire scene might have been put, as it stands, into a play by Brecht. And only on reading it does one realize how much Brecht has taken from Shakespeare.

The other scene shows Falstaff on the battlefield. He soliloquizes while looking for the best place to hide himself:

What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.

(I Henry IV, V, 1)

In Henry IV two notions of England are continuously set in contrast to each other. The feudal barons slaughter one another. The young crown prince robs merchants on the highways and has a gay time in taverns with a band of rascals. Henry IV is one of the few apologetic dramas written by Shakespeare. The young prince grows up to become a wise and brave king. There is, however, a sting in the moral. It appears that the company of Falstaff and cutpurses is a far better school for royalty than the feudal slaughter. After all, the two occupations are not so very different. It is enough to recall King John:

Cousin, away for England! Haste before;
And ere our coming see thou shake the bags
Of hoarding abbots; set at liberty
Imprison'd angels. The fat ribs of peace
Must by the hungry now be fed upon.

(King John, III, 3)

IX

We have now to return for the last time to Shakespeare's metaphor of the grand staircase. Richard II grows in the course of his tragedy. On the lower steps he is just the name of a king; only on the last step do we see him in a big tragic close-up. He has regained his human face. The dramatic optics of Richard III reverse this order. Here the king is, in the first half of the tragedy, the mastermind of the Grand Mechanism, a demiurge of history, the Machiavellian Prince. But Shakespeare is wiser than the author of The Prince. As he walks up the grand stairs, Richard becomes smaller and smaller. It is as if the Grand Mechanism was absorbing him. Gradually he becomes just one of its cogs. He has ceased to be the executioner, he is now a victim, caught in the wheels.

Richard had been making history. The whole world was for him a piece of clay to shape in his hands. And now he himself is a piece of clay, shaped by someone else. In the Histories I have always admired Shakespeare's perception of the moment when history pushes the hitherto all-powerful prince into a blind alley; the moment when he who has been making history, or thinks he has been making it, becomes no more than its object. The moment when the Grand Mechanism turns out to be stronger than the man who has put it in motion.

In the last act of the tragedy, Richard III is only the name of a pursued king. The scene shifts from battle-field to battlefield. They are after him. He flees. He becomes weaker and weaker. They have caught up with him. Now he just tries to save his life.

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

(Richard III, V, 4)

So, this is how much all his efforts have been worth. This is the real price of power, of history, of the crown adorning the Lord's Anointed. One good horse is worth more than the entire kingdom. This is the last sentence of the great cycle of Shakespeare's historical chronicles.

X

In 1958, Jacek Woszczerowicz with a group of young actors performed some scenes from Richard III in the Warsaw House of Culture. The room was full and the tiny platform was almost covered by the crowd. No special lighting and no props were used. Woszczerowicz took off his coat and remained dressed in a thick black pullover with a high collar. He rolled up his left sleeve exposing a withered hand. On the forefinger of his right hand there was a large ring. Lady Anne wore an ordinary dress. The man in the black pull-over had murdered her father and husband. Now he asked her to sleep with him. The black pull-over, with a collar covering the lower part of his chin, looked like armour. But does one need armour to commit murder? I had never before seen a Shakespeare performance so compact and consistent. After that I waited for Richard III with Woszczerowicz. At last, early in the winter of 1960, Woszczerowicz produced Richard III at the Atheneum Theatre in Warsaw.

He walks briskly in, dragging one of his feet slightly. He stops and begins to laugh. He says that the war is over, that peace has come, and jagged swords can be laid aside. From above, rows of iron bars are lowered down to the stage, one after the other, forming the background. Richard talks to himself, not to us. He laughs again, not at himself, but at us. He has a broad face, untidy hair, and wears a soiled and torn tunic. "Woszczer" might thus begin the part of Sganarelle: with the same make-up, the same tone, the same laughter. He stands there with legs wide apart, and his withered left arm hanging down.

Sir Laurence Olivier was fascinating from the outset. His deformity was only slightly sketched, he was overpowering and awesome, a brother of the King. Woszczerowicz speaks about peace—laughing. This misshapen dwarf begins with tomfoolery. This is the first revelation, and shock. He is smaller than all the other characters: he has to look up in order to look them in the face. He is a figure of fun. He knows it; he knows everything.

In the nineteenth century the part of Richard was acted by tragedians, in a tragic fashion. He was represented as a pathological type of great criminal, or a "superman". Woszczerowicz is the first to build up Richard's part with all the means available to a comic actor. His Richard shows off, goes down on his knees, affects pity and anger, kindness, rage, and lust, even cruelty. His Richard is above all situations; he does not identify himself with them, he just plays them. He is not, he only pretends he is. Woszczerowicz is a great actor, but his Richard is an even greater actor. An actor in the literal sense is the one who acts and plays his cards. In legal terminology an actor is the plaintiff, not the defendant. Similarly, one talks about great actors of history. They both act and play their cards. They are not ashamed of tomfoolery. They are not ashamed of anything, just as the actor is not ashamed of any part he is to play, because he only enacts it. He is above the part. If he is the producer, he chooses the part and imposes situations. Then everything is a theatre to him. He has "outplayed" everybody. When he remains alone on the empty earth, he can laugh. He can even afford to recognize himself as a clown; a super-clown.

Shakespeare was very fond of comparing life to the theatre. It is a comparison that goes back to ancient times, but it was Shakespeare who endowed it with depth and clarity. "Teatrum Mundi" is neither tragic, nor comic. It just employs tragic and comic actors. What is the tyrant's part in that theatre? Richard is impersonal like history itself. He is the consciousness and mastermind of the Grand Mechanism. He puts in motion the steam-roller of history, and later is crushed by it. Richard is not even cruel. Psychology does not apply to him. He is just history, one of its ever-repeating chapters. He has no face.

But the actor who plays Richard must have a face. Woszczerowicz's Richard has a broad face and laughs. It is a frightening laughter. The most terrifying kind of tyrant is he who has recognized himself as a clown, and the world as a gigantic buffoonery. Of all actors in the part, Woszczerowicz has been the first thus to interpret Shakespeare. To my mind it is an interpretation with a mark of genius. He begins his performance with buffoonery, and buffoonery is the substance of his part. All his attitudes are those of a clown: the sly and cruel ones, as well as gestures of love and power. But buffoonery is not just a set of gestures. Buffoonery is a philosophy, and the highest form of contempt: absolute contempt.

Richard has become king. On his shoulders he wears the royal robe. It has been tailored in a couple of hours. Others may care about pretty clothes; he does not need them. He is always in a hurry. Others have time for trifles, not he. A throne has been carried onto the empty stage. It is a wooden structure looking rather like gallows. The dwarf is now sitting high like a spider, holding the royal insignia. He despises them, too. He has put his sceptre under one of his thighs. What is a sceptre? A golden stick. Richard knows the price of that stick.

Richard ceases to be a clown only in the last act. Until then he affected outbursts of rage and fury, devotion, even fear. Now he is really afraid. Until now he had been the one to choose the part and stand above others. Now he is simply himself: a man whom they want to murder. Richard does not want to accept this part, but he must. He is not laughing any more. He is just a heavy, misshapen dwarf. In a while he will be butchered like a pig. From the head of the corpse the crown will be torn. A new, young king will now talk of peace. Rows of bars are lowered from above. Henry VII speaks of peace, forgiveness, justice. And suddenly he gives a crowing sound like Richard's, and, for a second, the same sort of grimace twists his face. The bars are being lowered. The face of the new king is radiant again.