SOURCE: "History, Character and Conscience in Richard III" in Comparative Drama, Vol. V, No. 4, Winter 1971-72, pp. 301-21.

[In the following essay, Wheeler discusses how this play dramatizes, through the life of King Richard III, two divergent views of history: that events are determined by divine will, and that events are determined by human will but are repeated in cyclical patterns.]

Criticism of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of English history plays has moved away from the attempt to correlate precisely the history dramatized in these plays with that presented by official Tudor apologists. C. L. Barber's essay on the Henry IV plays,¹ for instance, finds in them a much more profound understanding of historical rhythms and of human involvement in the dynamics of power than E. M. W. Tillyard could establish by interpreting Shakespeare through concepts expressed in the chronicles and other sixteenth century poetry.² Alvin B. Kernan, in his recent essay on the Henriad, demonstrates the sophisticated artistry through which Shakespeare comprehends the essential conflict of power and self as it is presented to modern western civilization.³ The first tetralogy and King John perhaps fail to achieve this sophistication, but in these plays Shakespeare begins to win for himself a difficult and sobering emancipation from official historical attitudes. I will examine this struggle as it shapes the drama of Richard III.

A wide range of historical attitudes have been assigned to Richard III. The extremes are represented by Jan Kott's stunning, free-wheeling essay on "The Kings" and Tillyard's scholarly, background-oriented study of Shakespeare's History Plays. From Shakespeare's histories, writes Kott, "there gradually emerges the image of history itself. The image of the Grand Mechanism."⁴ Shakespeare presents a history stripped of all illusion and mythology, indeed, of all meaning, a cruel, amoral, impersonal history of manipulators and victims. Inevitably the manipulators, the kings and the king-makers, become the victims of history's "recurring and unchanging circles" (p. 8). Gloucester understands and expresses the essence of this history, though he, too, becomes its "victim, caught in the wheel" (p. 51). Richmond's victory at Bosworth Field begins a new variation of the old pattern of kingship. Henry VII becomes the new face and voice of history, smoother, higher sounding, but equally implicated in the power process. Tillyard, on the other hand, sees Shakespeare faithfully dramatizing the Tudor myth of a divinely ordained unification of the houses of York and Lancaster. For Tillyard, Richard III is a profoundly religious play: "The play's main end is to show the working out of God's will in English history.... "⁵ Victorious Richmond represents the sacred force of right providentially triumphing over the forces of evil.

What is remarkable is not that these polar approaches to Richard III have been made, but that the play can so readily accommodate both. Historical outlooks close to each are essential to this play. Richard III dramatizes a struggle, never quite resolved, between conflicting ways of interpreting historical experience. In this play Shakespeare is finding his way toward an understanding that ultimately undermines a simple adherence to Tudor historic myth, but is not yet in full awareness and control of its disturbing implications.

Caught between contradictory conceptions of history, Shakespeare is profoundly drawn toward both. The two point toward views which, according to Mircea Eliade,⁶ distinguish the modern historical sense from that of earlier cultures. The Tudor historic myth—a strange adaptation of reactionary trends in Reformation and Counter-reformation political thought to the need for an official apologetic which could celebrate and stabilize Tudor succession—develops a traditional view of history which denies that life is tied to an irreversible procession of time which cannot be redeemed. Throughout the various levels of sophistication developed within this view of history, there runs the central idea of redeeming time-bound, worldly experience by immersing it in transcendent systems of meaning. Redemptive destiny makes the suffering of life bearable. By giving historical cycles a profound regenerative meaning, it invests the moment of suffering with a quality of meaningful, historical necessity:

... whether history was governed by the movements of the heavenly bodies or purely and simply by the cosmic process, which necessarily demanded a disintegration inevitably linked to an original integration, whether, again, it was subject to the will of God, a will that the prophets had been able to glimpse, the result was the same: none of the catastrophes manifested in history was arbitrary. (Cosmos and History, p. 133)

This way of understanding the present through a redemptive destiny makes history sacred. In contrast, "modern non-religious man" has come to regard himself

solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god. (The Sacred and (he Profane, p. 203)

To the extent that profane man can 'create' history without submission to archetypal prescriptives, he has a freedom and individuality that mythic, sacred history denies. On the other hand, profane history has no means of justifying the terrors of history because it can neither escape nor regenerate time. Patterns continue to repeat themselves, but devoid of their redemptive content.

But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity. (Ibid., p. 107)

Profane man must come to terms with a history in which "time presents itself as a precarious and evanescent duration, leading irremediably to death" (Ibid, p. 113).

In Richard III a disturbing awareness of the possibility of a profane view of history suggesting the lines sketched by Eliade is eating into Shakespeare's faith in regenerative, historic myth. Eliade's distinction between sacred and profane history thus provides a useful interpretive frame for approaching the conflict in this play between Shakespeare's allegiance to an old order of thought and the doubts and discoveries which trouble that allegiance. But the relationship between the tensions of the play and the dichotomies of the modern writer's theoretical speculations is also to be understood as a mythology in common. This shared myth identifies the persistence in our time of the problem that worries Shakespeare's play. Eliade's writings are saturated with a profound nostalgia for the lost order, which he is able to preserve through his own Christian position. His vision of profane history—which he sees as necessarily a process in which the price of freedom for a few strong individuals is paid with the terror, futility, and constraint of the many—is shaped by this commitment to a sacred order which alone can infuse human life with meaning and comfort. Just so, Shakespeare needs at this stage to approach history through the assurance of the Tudor myth, solidly grounded in a Christianity that invests all historical events with the quality of meaningful necessity. With this need he confronts the England of the 1590's, and the result, projected into the past, is the delightful but nightmarish monster of individual will, Richard III, whose terrible presence is a source of fascination so long as it can be shrouded with the very ordered meaning of history which he threatens.

Richmond's victory is shaped by the Tudor myth of divine union; the blood-soaked land is regenerated and the violence is redeemed with peace and joy. This triumph culminates a thematic structure that can be clearly traced throughout the play. Richard III explicitly provides a single, well-defined interpretive frame for its events. Irving Ribner sums it up as

a stern morality which combines a Senecan notion of Nemesis with a Christian faith in providence, for the evil path of Richard is a cleansing operation which roots evil out of society and restores the world at last to the God-oriented goodness embodied in the new rule of Henry VII.⁷

Once it is understood that Richard is the scourge of God, his actions, however evil, serve a divinely ordained end. He becomes the paradoxical "Angel With Horns" brilliantly analyzed by A. P. Rossiter.⁸ But trends toward a profane view of history which emerge from the action of the play threaten the controlling power of the mythic structure. Whereas Richmond fulfills the destiny of one kind of history, Richard appears to make the other kind. Richard embodies the creative individuality that profane history grants its agents, just as he comes to embody the doom that such history demands.

The play is carefully constructed so that two levels of reality interact through the mediating agency of Margaret's curse. Richard's cruel manipulation of profane existence fulfills Margaret's prophetic curse, which in turn fulfills the divine plan, purging England of evil and clearing the way for Tudor ascension through Richmond. The play asks us to endorse such a view, but it also invites us to question it. The very structure that uses Richard as the scourge of God destined to aid providence is also constructed so as to put a severe and disruptive strain on its providential message. This threat is created by strong pressures toward a profane view which are never allowed thematically to break out of the sacred view which encloses them, but which show through the sacred veneer. The thematic structure surrounds but cannot completely control the violent energy of the inner, emotive structure. What follows is an attempt to locate those trends in the play that disrupt its stated meaning.

The desacralizing quality of the play cannot easily be accounted for in the thematic development toward an optimistic resolution. The roles of Margaret and Richmond are too carefully controlled to allow that. Steeped in vengeful anguish, Margaret delivers and presides over a prophetic curse which comes to be realized in the action of the play. First go Rivers, Vaughan and Grey: "Now Margaret's curse is fall'n upon our heads" (III.3.16)⁹; then Hastings: "O Margaret, Margaret, now thy heavy curse/Is lighted on poor Hastings' wretched head!" (III.4.91-93); then Buckingham: "Thus Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck" (V.1.25). Richard himself is served his end according to Margaret's explicit predictions—betrayed by friends, his soul victim to "the worm of conscience," sleepless except for "some tormenting dream." Richmond's name is brought into the play as a potential counter to Richard just after Richard has become king. As Richmond draws nearer to England, his power steadily growing, Richard becomes increasingly troubled, his self control visibly shaken. A sense of fatefulness attaches itself to the approaching victory of Richmond that is experienced as destiny.

But even within the roles played by Margaret and Richmond there are tendencies which either disrupt the complete assimilation of history to a mythical pattern, or fail to make that assimilation completely convincing. The very fact that Margaret's prophetic power is manifested in a curse obscures the clarity of the sacred perspective. There is a difference between Richard's thematic function as scourge of God—one who can only serve divine ends regardless of the depths of his evil—and Margaret's as conscious agent of God's will—one who would have her curse "pierce the clouds and enter heaven." She tarnishes the purity of the sacred, for she serves God only as she serves her own gluttonous revenge: "I am hungry for revenge, / And now I cloy me with beholding it" (IV.4.61-62). Margaret finds the same cruel delight in her bloodthirsty success that Richard does. Margaret's purpose conforms to a divine end, but her presence suggests what Eliade describes as the "magico-religious paraphernalia" of "hybrid forms of black magic and sheer travesty of religion," steps in "the process of the desacralization of human existence" (The Sacred and the Profane, p. 206).

When Richmond arrives with his army (V.2), he encourages his troops "To reap the harvest of perpetual peace / By this one bloody trial of sharp war." He plans his battle for the next day, and prays that his forces may be able to serve God as "ministers of chastisement." Asleep, he dreams the "fairest-boding" half of a dream he shares with Richard. Richmond inspires his soldiers with the prospect of glory and peace through "God and Saint George! Richmond and victory!" Finally he defeats and kills Richard in the Battle of Bosworth Field, accepts the crown, and promises Tudor union, worthy heirs, and peace. This is a work of historical redemption done with God's sanction and in his presence. Richmond's speeches and the action of the final scenes bring the play to a thematic conclusion wholly consistent with the Tudor historic myth. The play demands a peaceful world to succeed a world of misery. The structuring of this theme insists that Richmond first be kept to the background, then austerely brought into the center of the action. But such a strategy, though adequate thematically, is simply not able to balance the tremendous emotional investment in its countertheme. In the early parts of the play, Shakespeare pushes unrelieved terror and misery toward the status of general human conditions. The play presents a world, as Queen Elizabeth tells Richard, "full of thy foul wrongs." The cumulative effect of this expansive emphasis on cruelty, deceit and misery creates a lingering impression that becomes independent of the simple cause (Richard) and effect (evil in the world) system that is thematically, but not emotionally, absorbed by the optimistic structure of the play.

Richmond's promise is fulfilled hope and perpetual peace. But Richmond must take over a rhetoric that has already been colored by the sardonic humor of Richard and the prolonged laments of his victims. Richmond's person simply does not carry enough force to jolt his key terms free from associations that have accrued to them in the course of the previous four acts. Through Richard's victims, the prospect of peace becomes fused with false hope and deception, as in the sickening irony of King Edward's wish to leave behind him a united kingdom.

And more at peace my soul shall part to heaven,
  Since I have made my friends at peace on earth,

followed by,

There wanteth now our brother Gloucester here
  To make the blessed period of the peace.

(II.1.3-4; 43-44)

Richard makes peace a tool of his savage wit, and uses the promise of peace in his various deceits. He would be reconciled to King Edward's "friendly peace," and entreats "true peace" of Queen Elizabeth. With Edward dead, Richard hopes that "the king made peace with all of us;/And the compact is firm and true in me." Hastings is executed for the "peace of England." Wooing Elizabeth for her daughter, Richard argues, "Infer fair England's peace from this alliance." But only the peace of death is salvable in the world Richard rules, and this is turned to when access even to false hope is impossible, as it becomes for the Duchess of York: "I to my grave, where peace and rest lie with me.

Richmond's purpose, of course, is to change all this. He brings "perpetual peace," "sleep in peace," and "smooth-faced peace" that "lives again." But because the preceding parts of the play identify the quest for peace so strongly with false hope, despair, blasphemy, and deceit, the language of peace carries into the last act affective associations that Richmond's promises are not entirely able to dispel. Behind the optimistic conclusion presided over by Richmond is an affective content already created by the earlier parts of the play, and which attaches itself to the language of the last act even though it contradicts the redemptive theme. This affective power is generated by the force of Richard's actions earlier, and to Richard we must turn in order to clarify the implications of this force.

The keys to Shakespeare's presentation of history in this play lie primarily in the relationship between Richard and the thematic apparatus used to subdue him. Richard's outstanding features are, of course, his extraordinary wit, his exceptional abundance of energy which this wit channels and releases, his total lack of scruples in the pursuit of power, his skill as an actor, and his penetrating insight into the psychology of persons with whom he deals. As master of face to face encounter, Richard is without peer. His virtuosity is demonstrated from the first, in his meeting with Clarence, where Richard displays his knack for playing on the weakened position of others to win their total confidence. But Clarence is a pushover, the real triumphs are to come. A more subtle development within this scene (I.1) is the side exchange with Brackenbury, who feels the bind between the royal order to let no one speak with Clarence and Richard's witty confiding as he violates this order. The quiet, almost inconspicuous terror conveyed in Brackenbury's response to Richard's intimidating congeniality establishes a quality that grows in magnitude and intensity throughout the play.

Richard's technique builds on his knowledge of the human tendency to substitute wish for reality when the facts of reality are intolerable. Richard can create both the oppressive reality and the outlet of illusory escape through false hope. By the end of the first devastating courtship scene, the easiest alternative for Anne is to hope for a redeeming sincerity in Richard's appeal for her hand in marriage, though she should better know the futility of this hope than anyone. Faced with the gruesomely real prospect of stabbing Richard's bared breast (killing him by word or deed in her mind are equal alternatives by this point, so thoroughly has Richard constructed a false reality through words), Anne slides into a realm of false hope in which Richard's remarkable love rhetoric becomes credible, however distant it is from the true situation. Instead of acting she pauses, "I would I knew thy heart," and the moment is Richard's. So is Anne Richard's, but the moment is what counts, not the woman: "I'll have her; but I will not keep her long."

This power to manipulate the wishes of others works both to create and shatter illusions. When Richard, ranting of injustice and violations of the social hierarchy, bursts in on the queen and her group (I.3), Elizabeth knows well what is on his mind:

Come, come, we know your meaning, brother Gloucester;
You envy my advancement and my friends!
God grant we nevei/may have need of you!

But during the long intrusion of Margaret's curse, Richard is able to deflect their animosity for him toward her, and bind the group to him with a kind of fellow feeling against the widow of Henry VI. His master stroke of feigned forgiveness when Margaret leaves is praised by Rivers as a "virtuous and Christian-like conclusion." Richard reverses this process of building from insecurities a false sense of good faith in his next encounter with the court regulars (II.1). He first enters into the spirit of dying King Edward's wish to reconcile the affairs of family and state before his death. Then still in his pious mode, Richard shatters this wishful optimism with the news of Clarence's death—as if by the king's too slowly rescinded order.

Richard retains his power to dominate intimate personal encounter through the last chance he has to exercise it—the courtship of Queen Elizabeth for her daughter (IV.4). Once again he triumphs over incredibly formidable conditions in getting this woman to relent. Queen Elizabeth is no more able than Anne had been to withstand Richard's psychic assault; she does not fend him off with a false promise, but is driven to consent to his request. The difference between the two courtship scenes is the changed nature of the play's political situation, which does not allow Richard to sustain the triumph of the moment in the time that follows it. Richard brings Elizabeth to relent, but he now faces a problem in power that extends far beyond the limited time and space of intimate personal encounter. Offstage, Elizabeth realizes what has happened to her, just as Anne did, but Elizabeth simply slips away to the camp of Richmond, a possibility that did not exist in the power arrangement that Anne faced.

Richard is the most famous of Elizabethan Machiavels, but the Machiavelli who wrote The Prince would have little patience with his tactics. Rule by fear is, of course, a principle Machiavelli endorses, but this rule is effective only when carefully controlled:

A prince, however, should make himself feared in such a manner that, if he has not won the affection of his people, he shall not incur their hatred.¹⁰

Machiavelli repeatedly asserts that a prince must "avoid everything that would make him odious and despised. And in proportion as he avoids that will he have performed his part well, and need fear no danger" (Ibid., p. 79). Richard, on the contrary, does everything possible to make himself "odious and despised." His very triumphs create the conditions that result in his down-fall.

Nobody protests the execution of Hastings. The contrivance which traps Hastings into falsely but fatally condemning himself (III.4) is one of Richard's most impressive exhibitions of imaginative coercion. But although no one protests, neither is anyone fooled by this trumped up charge of treason, as the Scrivener indicates:

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.

(III.6.10-14)

The political reaction against Richard that follows from the proliferation of such attitudes as the Scrivener's need not be considered the response of a divinely guided universe to Richard's wickedness. Machiavelli would have foreseen it. That the successful exercise of political power derives from a broad base is not a divine nor a mythic nor even a moral law. "Never," writes José Ortega y Gassett,

has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion. . . . The fact that public opinion is the basic force which produces the phenomenon of rule in human societies is as old, and as lasting, as mankind.¹¹

Richard the master of palace politics does everything possible to prevent himself from attaining this broad base in popular support, which in his England was manifested in the strength of the nobility.

Richard's strategy in winning the crown (III.7) exhibits the discrepancy between his brilliance as an actor and his failure as a politician of real strength. The crowd, long silent, that finally concedes a reluctant "amen" to Richard's acceptance of the title of "England's worthy king," is simply joining, for the expedience of the moment, the play that Richard and Buckingham have staged using the rusty armor, the priests, and the lord mayor as props. It is an impressive display of acting virtuosity, but an artifice is created, not a solid political reality, which is no more able to sustain itself in the broad world of political power than any such artifice not solidly grounded. Judged only by conditions of a political reality that the play establishes, Richard's power is so disintegrated by the last act that virtually anyone able to attract to himself the eager support of the frustrated and fearful English nobility could have unseated him. Richard, politically, ironically is the "bottled spider" that Margaret calls him, able to poison whomever ventures into his web, but not able to extend this web as a means of embracing the power of the kingdom. The force of Richmond as Agent of God is diminished by there being no need for a resort to a higher system of causality, of what Paul Goodman¹² calls a "miracle" to relieve England of the "impasse" of Richard's tyranny. There is no impasse. Richard's political and military might have been so drained that there is little doubt about the outcome. This, of course, does not deny the play's prerogative to interpret the events of history in terms of the sacred or mythic, as it does. But Richard III establishes a rigorous inner integrity within an essentially profane system of political causality which makes the Tudor-Christian myth seem more the ornament of history than its essence.

The arc of Richard's development through a series of triumphs to final defeat best can be understood through his highly self-conscious role as an actor who imposes the conditions of stage onto the real world. Richard's vice role reflects far more than Shakespeare's indebtedness to an old theatrical tradition. Anne Righter comments that Richard—who "through the power of illusion . . . blinds honest men and accomplishes their overthrow"—"seems to be regarded by Shakespeare more as an example of the power wielded by the actor than as a figure of treachery and evil."¹³ But Shakespeare also shows, through Richard, the limits of the actor, both in controlling power and in controlling the whole person that lies behind the actor's mask.

Machiavelli, of course, insists that a ruler be an actor, a dissembler who appears to act in the interest of the good while actually contriving to maintain and extend his power by any means necessary. Richard's ascent to power is grounded in his acting artistry, in his ability to fabricate reality, to create a world of illusion that others accept as real. He turns his world into a stage, history into a play which he creates. But similarly, his failure is an artistic one. Shakespeare's Richard violates the basic laws of mimesis; he distorts the world so out of shape in his play-acting that the artificiality of it becomes only too clear. By the time he has become king, he simply is no longer fooling anyone. Instead of adapting himself to a part dictated by the precarious political conditions he encounters, Richard attempts to re-shape these conditions in terms of the part he craves to play. No artist is more powerful than his materials, and Richard's attempt to be so leads to his destruction at their hands. Richard's theatricality, through which he manifests his strength, is also his essential political weakness, because he believes the momentary illusion of reality that he creates by acting can be extended through time over the real sources of political power.

Just as Richard's relations to the external world are focused through his role as actor, so are his relations to himself. The vice role allows him to avoid facing the complicating demands of his inner self, and is essential to the defensive structure of his character. As Hazlitt saw, Richard uses his talents and his drive for power "to shield himself from remorse. . . . "¹⁴ Richard feels, as do most men, a need for power, a need for love, and a bondage to conscience. Rather than attempt a working compromise of these inner demands, Richard strives for an identity built solely around an unmitigated drive for power. He substitutes sadistic violence for the need for love; he transforms shame for his own deformity into disgust for others. The guilt that such an inversion arouses is consciously warded off through a total commitment to sadistic aggression, although this maneuver divides Richard against himself. He is fierce and cunning in the manipulation of others, but as his queen tells us, at night he has "timorous dreams."

Richard has constructed a role that projects onto the outer world the violence of his inner conflicts. As the objective power structure he has created begins to crumble, there is a corresponding weakening of Richard's capacity to keep repressed needs at a distance. Eventually, Richard is forced to see himself from the vantage point he has outrageously flaunted before. Helpless before his accumulated guilt in the dramatized dream in which his victims return to accuse him, Richard finds himself alone, afraid, and unloved:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree,
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, 'Guilty, guilty!'
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me.

(V.3.194-202)

The culturally defined conflict to which Richard finally succumbs—that of a Christian political morality opposed to the individual rage for power—corresponds psychologically to an unresolved ambivalence belonging to the earliest stages of infancy. Richard is driven by inner needs which present themselves to him in the contradictory extremes of the infantile imagination: the need for a feeling of omnipotence, around which he builds his aggressive drive for power; and the need for love of a sort which could be achieved only by total, selfless submission. So long as he has before him the promise of an ever growing sense of externally realized power, Richard can relegate his self-disgust and the fear of being unloved to the domain of witty detachment, as in the famous opening soliloquy. Richard, "not shaped for sportive tricks/Nor made to court an amorous looking glass," delights in his "own deformity," and decides to "prove a villain" since he "cannot prove a lover." The need for power and the consciously repudiated need to be seen as the worthy object of the love of others both appear, however, in his major triumphs. The aggressive drive for power furnishes the propelling force, but the need to be loved emerges—to be mocked—in the disguise. He bares his breast to Lady Anne, offering her the option to destroy him or to love him. He presents himself as victim and martyr—"too childish-foolish for this world"—to the court of dying Edward. He plays "the maid's part" before his London audience, reluctantly accepting the burden of a crown forced upon him. Even in persuading Queen Elizabeth to woo her daughter for him, Richard attempts to picture a situation in which he and the queen and her daughter are all helpless before the conditions of the time, duty bound to effect the marriage:

In her consists my happiness and thine;
Without her, follows to myself and thee,
Herself, the land, and many a Christian soul,
Death, desolation, ruin and decay.
It cannot be avoided but by this;
It will not be avoided but by this.

(IV.4.407-11)

Richard's guise to "seem a saint, when most I play the devil" (I.3.337) is not only a clever expedient, but reflects his conflicting drives to be both, one of which is necessarily repressed in order that the other may be asserted. An exchange between Richard and the Duchess of York provides an essential key to these contradictory needs. Richard turns to her after the death of Edward:

Madam, my mother, I do cry you mercy;
I did not see your grace. Humbly on my knee
  I crave your blessing.
DUCHESS OF YORK
God bless thee, and put meekness in thy breast,
  Love, charity, obedience, and true duty!
RICHARD
Ameni [aside] and make me die a good old man!
That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing;
I marvel that her grace did leave it out.

(II.2.104-II)

His mother's blessing, for Richard, amounts to a curse. Christian obedience and the possibility of receiving love are fused in Richard's mind with passive, effeminate submissiveness to others and to the force of conscience. The demands of love and duty can lead only to frustration of his drive for power. And power, for Richard, means the narcissistic triumph of unbounded self-esteem through the sadistic reduction of others to helpless, inferior, repugnant objects. He strives for self love through a destructive repudiation of the need to be loved. The real pleasure in this power—which betrays its origins in early infantile ambivalences—comes through inflicting suffering on women. Men must be destroyed in order for Richard to gain his power; the sequence of killing started in 3 Henry VI is extended by the deaths of Clarence, of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey, of Hastings, of the two princes, of Buckingham. But the real pleasure of sadistic aggression begins for Richard in the cruel courtship of Anne, and the real suffering of the play comes to be focused in the voices of widowed mothers. Richard does not kill men so much as he kills sons and husbands.

As the play progresses, and all of Richard's visible enemies are destroyed, the dramatic situation is polarized into a verbal battle between Richard—the terrible son his mother's "womb let loose to chase us to our graves"—and a chorus of bereaved mothers—old Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York. It is appropriate that just after Richard's own mother leaves him with her "most grievous curse," Richard persuades Elizabeth to court her daughter for him, for it is as to a mother that he turns to Edward's widowed queen.

If I did take the kingdom from your sons,
To make amends I'll give it to your daughter;
If I have killed the issue of your womb,
  To quicken your increase I will beget
  More issue of your blood upon your daughter.

(IV.4.294-98)

He goes on to promise her first "grandam's name," then the chance to be "mother of a king." As he moves toward increased intimacy, he calls her "my mother," then "dear mother." He celebrates his success by calling her "happy mother."

As before with Anne, the triumph gives Richard a chance to confirm his disgust with female weakness: "Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!" But this time the effort shatters Richard's self-composure. Confronted almost immediately with news of Richmond's increasing power, Richard is irritable, shaken, and confused. His conquest of Elizabeth, like that of Anne, has expressed his defensive hatred of women, as it has parodied his deep but denied need to purify himself through the love of a woman, ideally of a mother. But the disintegration of the power situation, which has previously allowed the separation of defense and need, has created a corresponding interior disintegration. The inner defensive balance—which sacrificed the need to be loved for the narcissistic feeling of omnipotence achieved through sadistic aggression—is completely tied to the external situation. The victory over Elizabeth parodies and mocks but does not fulfill a deeply repressed need; without the compensatory assurance of power, Richard feels the absence of what he has pretended to gain.

As the political artifice crumbles, the actor's mask is pulled away, and the weakness of Richard, his human susceptibility to conflicting needs, comes to the surface. Before lying down on the eve of the battle, Richard is baffled by the disappearance of his vigor and self-assurance: "I have not that alacrity of spirit/Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have." During the night, he confronts his guilt, and shudders before it. The inner torment is fiercer now than any danger he can face in the field:

By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
  Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond.

His speech before the troops the next day is an attempt to reassert a power that is no longer his. Richard bolsters his courage with a magnificent half-truth in which he defines the nature of conscience as he would still like to regard it:

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

(V.3.310-12)

He dies in the same vein, true in the action of battle to a private obsession with power that has lost its sway in the public realm and its unchallenged supremacy in his personal struggle for an omnipotent self: "Slave, I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die."

Richard, who becomes an actor-king with near demonic powers by repudiating a part of his own humanity, eventually becomes a slave to the role he has created for himself. His realization that he must marry the daughter of Elizabeth brings with it an ironic step toward self-recognition:

I must be married to my brother's daughter,
Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass;
Murder her brothers, and then marry her—
Uncertain way of gain! But I am in
  So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

(IV.2.59-64)

Though Richard tries to turn this oblique step toward self-understanding into an assertion of his pitiless cruelty, the irony lies in his partial awareness of the political and psychological determinants that have made him their pawn. The role Richard has created has become a part in a play no longer shaped solely by his egoistic drive for power, but by forces not within his control. These forces—within him, within the play, and within Shakespeare—are moral and religious in form, but do not reflect precisely the historical morality of Tudor chroniclers.

The return of the suppressed forces of conscience in a moment of personal vulnerability is a major organizing principle in the play. When Clarence's dream on the eve of his execution releases a surer knowledge of his relationship to Richard than he has conscious access to, his fear is accompanied by waves of guilt and retribution. As the two murderers prepare themselves for killing Clarence, the second murderer shudders to find that "some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me" (I.4.120-21). The murderers openly regard conscience as the enemy to manly assertion: "Tis a blushing, shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom; . . . and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it." Of the two murderers, only one will accept his reward once the killing is accomplished; the other would wash his hands "of this most grievous murder!" What is interesting, however, about the extraordinary scene in which Clarence's killing is carried out, is the means by which the assassins prepare themselves for it. In order to escape the obstructions of a conscience they regard as effeminate and inhibiting, they turn to an outrageous delight in the cruelty of their plan:

1 MURDERER
Take him on the costard with the hilts of thy
sword, and then throw him into the malmsy
butt in the next room.
2 MURDERER
O excellent device! and make a sop of him.

The murderous identity they achieve through sadistic activity that simply seems to fly in the face of internal restraint presents in small the story of Richard himself.

A clear pattern emerges, developed in large by Richard and elaborated by lesser figures, Clarence, the assassins, and Buckingham: a violent release of cruel energy—which serves an egoistic need for power, which is expressed through sadistic aggression, and which must overcome the inner restraints of conscience by projecting its self-tormenting force onto the outside world—is finally unable to elude the grasp of conscience, and succumbs to it. This pattern accounts for the action of Richard as a character, and also for his relationship to the moral theme of the play. This latter relationship expresses in an external, cultural context the same drama that goes on inside the character of Richard. The night before the battle, Richard's dream of omnipotence is destroyed; during the battle the political objectification of that dream is dealt its final blow. With the rhetoric of Richmond's victory, Shakespeare clears his own conscience by destroying the egoistic monster through which he has eluded it.

The relationship of Richard to the moral theme is presented by Shakespeare as the message bequeathed by past history, but it actually expresses better the historical conditions under which the play was written. Richard III dramatizes, ultimately, neither the past as it had been interpreted by Tudor historians (Tillyard), nor the confrontation with history we face today (Kott), but the historical pressures experienced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries anxious about the approaching death of the last, aging Tudor. This is an experience which created in the Elizabethan theater fascination with Richard, tolerance for Margaret, and the need for Richmond. The massive cultural pressures presented by the power struggle of church and state, by the economic forces which dissolved feudalism and threatened the stability of class distinctions, by the emergence of an intellectual freedom and awareness which overthrew the shackling dominance of medieval thought, these and other powerful social disruptions brought confusion, anxiety and opportunity into the key relationships which bind an individual to his society. Zevedei Barbu speculates suggestively on the experience of inhabiting this world in which traditional answers are shaken by the prospects of an emerging but as yet unclarified social reality greatly changed from the one that created them:

On the psychological level, the situation was characterized by an outburst of primary mental energy—instincts and wishes—which escaped the moulding and repressing influence of traditional values and patterns of behaviour. People passed through a period of reorientation of their mental structure, and particularly their conscience. It would perhaps be appropriate in this case to speak about a period of interlude in the human conscience in the sense that the conscience articulated by the old world of values was weak while the new was not yet formed. Thus, the period was one of mental freedom verging on inner anarchy.¹⁵

Barbu's remarks seem to describe aptly a condition out of which Shakespeare's Richard III might arise, since Richard builds his success around the explosive force of crude instinctual demands masked by a role that parodies traditional values. Richard's rampant egoism would appear to channel into shared, theatrical fantasy the released energies of a people who not only were "becoming more and more prepared to admit that their minds were often activated by primitive egoistic impulses, but also that this should be so."¹⁶

Apt as Barbu's comments may seem, a contradiction nevertheless emerges. Richard's egoism is not condoned but condemned by the play. Richard must privately face the terrors of his conscience and publicly succumb to the restorative power of Richmond. The contradiction points to a mis-emphasis in Barbu's analysis of the historical experience. Barbu posits a weakening and a reshaping of the individual conscience, but Freud has stressed the persistence in the individual of values formed in the past even when altered social and economic conditions draw men toward activities which contradict them.

Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego; and so long as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions.¹⁷

The release of energy given dramatic expression in Richard is a release that incurs the wrath of a conscience still powerful in the inner life even if violated in the pursuit of egoistic opportunity. Richard as a character offered to Elizabethan audiences the chance to indulge through the vicarious medium of theater egoistic drives striving for liberation; Richard III the play allowed them a rapport with the persisting demands of an old morality. Indeed, the relationship is even more thoroughly pervaded by the power of conscience than this, because the special delight in cruelty that characterizes the play derives from the cruelty of super-ego forces projected into relationships with others. That the attempt of the play to contain Richard within an optimistic historical frame is only partially successful points to the very precariousness of the historical situation as it was faced by the individual of Elizabethan England. In attempting to resolve Richard's cruelty into an optimistic re-integration of past values, Shakespeare projects into dramatic form the division of moral, religious self against egoistic self central to the crisis of the individual during his lifetime. This division within the individual corresponds to the opposing trends toward sacred and profane history with which we started, for it is Shakespeare's age that faced the exhilarating and terrifying origins of that conflict in historical awareness that is still in progress.

The collapse of a unifying perspective within the play yields a volatile mixture of insight, fantasy and cliché ignited by the collision of doubt with faith in the historical order, release with restraint in the personal order. Richard as a character expresses Shakespeare's fascination with the possibility of a creative, self-assertive individuality, unleashes his intoxicating delight with the escape from traditional, moral restrictions through the power of imagination as it serves egoistic demands. But as a figure exercizing his egoistic freedom in the world of other men, Richard presents to Shakespeare the possibilities for terror and destruction which can accompany that freedom. The grotesque proportions of Richard's evil reflect Shakespeare's radical distrust of the individual not controlled by a divine moral plan. Shakespeare's "villainizing" of the idea of individuality in the person of Richard expresses his disbelief that there can be any real power to sustain order located in agencies (social, economic, political, institutional, etc.) which mediate between the divine scheme of things and the demands of individual men. With the inner disintegration of Richard, Shakespeare sees deeply into the psychological persistence of internal restraints in those who will to escape them. In presenting Richard's political triumph and defeat, Shakespeare discovers in dramatic action the rigid causality of Machiavellian politics. But the sacralization of history through Richmond's triumph is an attempt to nullify these discoveries, to hold in check the fascinating and terrifying Richard by assimilating him to a view of history Shakespeare can no longer quite believe and not yet afford to abandon.

Notes

¹ "Rule and Misrule in Henry IV" Shakespeare 's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 192-221.

²Shakespeare's History Plays (New York; Collier Books ed., 1962).

³ "The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays," Modern Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), pp. 245-75.

⁴Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 10.

⁵Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 238. A. L. French has recently argued that Richard III "by no means conforms to the Tudor morality-play pattern proposed by Tillyard and others...." and that "the play enlists feelings wide of any conceivable Tudor mark." "The World of Richard III," Shakespeare Studies, IV (1968), 31-32. But French fails to appreciate the anxieties aroused by diminishing the control over historical experience offered by the official Tudor view.

⁶ The discussion of Eliade's ideas derives primarily from Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1959) and from The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Harper Torchbook, 1961), both translated by Willard R. Trask.

⁷The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, revised ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 118.

⁸Angels With Horns, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), pp. 1-22.

⁹ Quotations from Richard III are from the Pelican Shakespeare text, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969).

¹⁰The Prince, trans. Christian E. Detmold, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 73.

¹¹The Revolt of the Masses, authorized trans. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), pp. 126-27.

¹²The Structure of Literature (Chicago: Phoenix Books ed., 1962), p. 55.

¹³Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Harmonds-worth, England: Penguin Shakespeare Library ed., 1967), pp. 87, 88.

¹⁴Characters of Shakespear's plays, quoted in F. E. Halliday, Shakespeare and His Critics, revised ed. (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1958), p. 138.

¹⁵Problems of Historical Psychology (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 154.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 155.

¹⁷ "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality," The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans, and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 531.