SOURCE: “Richard III and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach, Associated University Presses, 1986, pp. 80-5.

[In the following excerpt, Siegel argues that the character Richard III symbolizes the self-centered, bourgeois attitude to political power as well as to the immoral domination and manipulation of others in a society based on capital.]

It may seem strange to regard Richard III, a member of the feudal house of York, whose conflict with the rival house of Lancaster marked the waning of the Middle Ages in England, as representative of the spirit of capitalism. However, as seen in chapter 2, Shakespeare regarded the Tudor order as threatened by the rampant individualism of both the old nobility, with its tradition of feudal prerogatives that superseded the national state, and the most aggressive section of the bourgeoisie, which was already in the 1590s beginning to challenge the monarchy. He more than once identified the individualism of the one with that of the other, in the same way that the American capitalists of the late nineteenth century are called “the robber barons.”

Thus King Lear, although its social setting is that of an early, primitive feudalism and its characters are members of either royal or feudal families, reflects the conflict in Shakespeare's time between the medieval and the modern worlds. The evil members of the younger generation are of the new capitalist world. The language of Goneril and Regan, says Wolfgang Clemen, citing the research of one of his students, Lotte Schmerz, has “frequent occurrence of quantitative and mercantile terms as well as the use of calculating comparatives.”¹ The words of Edmund, “Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit” (1.2.187), might have served as a motto for the acquisitive bourgeoisie, which was buying up estates from the older landowners.

Richard is very much of the new capitalist world. He uses the language of business and displays its attitudes throughout. Much attention has been paid to the stylization of the play's dialogue, with its stichomythia in the wooing scene of Anne, its ritualistic curses of Margaret, its chorused laments of the three queens, but little notice has been taken of what Charles Lamb called the “sprightly colloquial” language of Richard,² which acts as a counterpoint to this stylization. It is a colloquial language that often recalls the contemporary turns of phrase expressing the values of our own business civilization.

We might begin by looking at a line of images that can be called that of “the peddler and his packhorse.” In his soliloquy at the end of the first scene of the play, Richard says that Edward “must not die / Until George be packed with post horse up to heaven” (1.1.145-46). He regards Clarence as a bale of goods that he will sling over a horse's back and ship express from the kingdom of England to the kingdom of heaven. Richard's quick mind then leaps ahead to his plans after Clarence and Edward are dead, but he stops himself with the jocular reminder: “But yet I run before my horse to market. / Clarence still breathes, Edward still lives and reigns; / When they are gone, then must I count my gains” (1.1 160-62). “I run before my horse to market” was a proverbial phrase meaning “I’m running ahead of myself in my eagerness” or, as Kittredge glosses it, “I count my chickens before they’re hatched.”³ The packhorse has to take one's goods to the market before one can make his profit. Only then, when one has carried out his plans, can he sit down to total up what he has made. The image of the peddler and his packhorse is used again when Richard says to Queen Elizabeth of his labors in behalf of her husband Edward, “I was a packhorse in his great affairs” (1.3.121) and also, a little later, when he says in disclaiming any desire to be king, “I had rather be a peddler” (1.3.148). It is an image that seems to spring naturally to his lips.

Richard also frequently uses financial and monetary terms. “Repaired with double riches of content” (4.4.319), “advantaging their loan with interest / Of ten times double gain of happiness” (4.4.323-24), “go current from suspicion” (2.1.96)—that is, pass as genuine currency without being suspected of being counterfeit—these are but a few examples. In addition to these and subsequently cited examples, I have counted eight others.⁴

Although he may possibly use more such terms than any Shakespearean character with the exception of Shylock, what is most important is not the frequency with which Richard uses them but their effect in a number of instances. This effect may be contrasted with that of the recurring Shakespearean image of the lover as a merchant and his mistress as a treasure of great price for which he is venturing forth on an ocean journey.⁵ The image of the lover as a merchant suggests the romance of foreign commerce, the exotic appeal of strange lands in new worlds, with great fortunes to be won through high risks in ventures in which aristocrats could partake.⁶ Such are the ventures of Antonio, the aristocratic merchant prince who stands in opposition to the niggardly usurer Shylock and finances Bassanio on his romantic overseas quest to gain Portia, the “golden fleece” (1.1.170).⁷ Richard's financial and monetary language, on the other hand, undercuts the romanticism of medieval chivalry and its ideal of aristocratic honor.⁸

A noteworthy instance of Richard's use of monetary terms occurs when he says in disparagement of the queen's kindred, who are of obscure gentry origin but have been ennobled by the king, “Great promotions / Are daily given to ennoble those / That scarce, some two days since, were worth a noble” (1.3.79-81). “Worth a noble” refers to a coin of the time. Richard measures nobility by money, not by blood, in direct opposition to Bassanio, who tells Portia, “When I did first impart my love to you, / I freely told you all the wealth I had / Ran in my veins. I was a gentleman” (3.2.253-55). The words “gentle” and “noble” had long had moral connotations as well as referring to social classes, the suggestion being that members of the aristocracy had a fineness of character and sensibility peculiar to them. For Richard, however, “noble” refers to money. “Money talks.” Just so Shylock, who in his insistence on the supremacy of the bond, the sacred business contract, over the claims of humanity is the representative of the capitalist ethic, is not referring to Antonio's moral character, as Bassanio thinks, when he says “Antonio is a good man” (1.3.12), but means that he is a good business risk. The bourgeoisie, said Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “has resolved personal worth into exchange value.”⁹ The idea of personal worth as exchange value lies behind both Richard's and Shylock's lines, as it does behind our own expressions “that man is worth a million dollars” and “he is good for the money.”

Other monetary terms Richard makes use of are also indicative. “My dukedom to a beggarly denier,” he exclaims (1.2.251), when he wishes to express a certainty. His dukedom is for him a source of wealth and power, which he will wager against a denier, a small French coin; it is not a heritage of honor that he must jealously protect. His concept of it is worlds apart from that of his father, who had said, “And for these wrongs, those bitter injuries, / Which Somerset hath offered to my house, / I doubt not but with honour to redress” (1 Henry VI, 2.5.124-26). But Richard had said of himself, “I have no brother, I am like no brother; / And this word ‘love,’ which greybeards call divine, / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me: I am myself alone” (3 Henry VI, 5.6.80-83). The bourgeoisie, to quote The Communist Manifesto again, with its “egotistical calculation,” “reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”¹⁰ The notion of family honor and family devotion is alien to Richard, who has Buckingham suggest to the citizens that his brother Edward was the illegitimate issue of an affair of his mother’s. He is indeed motivated only by “egotistical calculation.”

When Richard wishes to propose to Buckingham that he murder the two young princes, he tells him, “Ah, Buckingham, now do I play the touch / To try if thou be current gold indeed” (4.2.8-9). Personal worth is again spoken of in terms of money. Richard is to be the touchstone that will measure the genuineness of Buckingham's gold. If Buckingham is really “as good as gold,” he will murder the two children.

When Richard wishes to entice Elizabeth to marry her daughter to him, he tells her that, after having conquered Buckingham, he will to her daughter “retail my conquest won, / And she shall be sole victoress” (4.4.335-36). “Retail,” derived from the earlier meaning (OED 1) “to sell (goods, etc.) in small quantities,” signifies (OED 2) “to recount or tell over again,” suggesting not only relating in detail but counting and recounting money. Richard is, therefore, promising Elizabeth's daughter the joys of gaining all of England, which he represents as something to be counted out bit by bit.

Richard uses not only monetary terms but business language. He greets the men he has hired to kill Clarence with “How now, my hardy stout-resolvèd mates! / Are you now going to dispatch this thing?” and sends them off with “about your business straight. / Go, go, dispatch” (1.3.339-40, 353-54). “Dispatch” was a word with business connotations. One of its meanings was (OED I, 3) “to dismiss (a person) after attending to him or his business; to settle the business and send away.” This was easily extended to (OED I, 4) “to get rid of or dispose of (any one) by putting to death; to make away with, kill.” Richard is playing on the word: the murder of Clarence is just a little business matter to be speedily taken care of. Clarence may try to talk them out of it, but the professional killers, enterprising free-lance forerunners of Murder, Incorporated, know their jobs (after all, “business is business”) and will not allow themselves to be diverted. The word “business” in “about your business straight” suggests the same coldbloodedness as in Edmund's words in calculating his course, “A credulous father, and a brother noble … I see the business” (1.2.183-86).

Richard is twice referred to by other characters as a business agent. Buckingham, urging him before the citizens to rule in his own stead, not as the lord protector of the boy king, tells him to take on “the charge and kingly government of this your land; / Not as protector, steward, substitute, / Or lowly factor for another's gain” (3.7.130-33). “Steward” meant, of course, the business manager of an estate, and “factor” meant the business agent acting in behalf of his principal. Richard, despite his public professions, was really not content to be either, but the irony is that in the last analysis a business agent is all that he is: Margaret, reciting the many deaths of guilty persons that have already occurred, says, “Richard yet lives, hell's black intelligencer, / Only reserved their factor to buy souls / And send them thither” (4.4.71-73). He is the business agent of hell, buying souls and shipping them off to it.

As a businessman, Richard is, to use the language of Babbitt, a “real hustler,” a “go-getter.” He displays enormous energy from the time he says, in 3 Henry VI, that he is as one “lost in a thorny wood” from which he will “hew” his “way out with a bloody ax” (3.2.174-81) until the time of his last battle when he dashes frantically about calling “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (5.4.7). Hustle and bustle characterize his behavior throughout. “Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary” (4.3.53)—inactivity is invariably followed by bankruptcy—he exclaims, calling forth to combat. On the eve of his last battle, he says, in an attempt to regain his old zest, “Tomorrow is a busy day” (5.3.18). And before entering the final fray he cries out, “Come, bustle, bustle. Caparison my horse” (5.3.290). His underlings in their way speak his language. “Tut, tut, my lord, we will not stand to prate. / Talkers are no good doers,” says the First Murderer (1.3.349-50), assuring him that they will not allow Clarence to engage them in conversation and move their pity. “Talk is cheap” and “time is money”.

Richard's energy is the energy of the bourgeoisie. “The bourgeoisie,” says The Communist Manifesto, “has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”¹¹ The word “business,” it may be pointed out, is derived from “busyness.”

With Clarence dead, says Richard, “God take King Edward to his mercy / And leave the world for me to bustle in!” (1.1.151-52). The world that had been rejected by medieval otherworldliness as one of the three great temptations—”the world, the flesh, and the devil”—he welcomes as his sphere of activity, gladly relinquishing an alleged heaven to Edward. In response to Gratiano's attempt to joke away Antonio's melancholy by telling him that he has too great care for the things of this world, Antonio replies, “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano— / A stage, where every man must play a part” (1.1.77-78)—a theater with the ephemerality of the theater in contradistinction to the eternity of heaven. But for Richard this world is all. The bourgeoisie, says The Communist Manifesto, “has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”¹²

In his disdain for religion, in his contempt for the generality of men, to whom he regards himself as far superior, in his ruthlessness, cunning, and dissimulation, Richard is, as has often been noted, the greatest Machiavellian villain of Elizabethan drama. In the drama the Machiavellian villain is generally a powerful nobleman or a usurper of a throne or a dukedom, often that of a corrupt Italian court, with the great exception being Marlowe's Jew of Malta, the precursor of Shylock. But in Elizabethan satiric literature Machiavellians are either “Italianate” members of the old aristocracy or Puritan members of the bourgeoisie, the two threats, from the right and the left, to the Tudor order.¹³ Robert Greene's satiric portrait of Gorinus the usurer, who on his deathbed advises his sons to devote all their energies to amassing money and advancing in this world by following the precepts of Machiavelli on trickery and dissimulation, is an example of the Machiavellian under the guise of bourgeois respectability: “Wise he was, for he bore office in his fox-furred gown, as if he had been a very upright-dealing burgess. He was religious, too, never without a book at his belt and a bolt in his mouth, ready to shoot through his sinful neighbor.”¹⁴ So Richard, when approached by the mayor and other city dignitaries whom Buckingham has persuaded to petition him to become king, presents himself with a bishop on each side of him and a Bible in his hand, supposedly not ready to receive any “worldly suits” (3.7.62), but he has had Buckingham make some aspersions about the lustfulness of Edward and the legitimacy of his sons.

Richard, like the other Machiavellian villains produced by the Elizabethan imagination contemplating the new world coming into existence, is governed by the principle that the entire world may be destroyed as long as he achieves his will. This is the principle that has governed the ruling bourgeoisie of the advanced capitalist countries and plunged the world into two great wars, costing the lives of millions. Shakespeare, incarnating in the monstrous form of Richard III the spirit of the bourgeoisie at the time of its menacing approach to power, was able to anticipate the bourgeoisie's behavior when it gained world domination. For that spirit did not die at Bosworth Field.

Notes

1. W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 135n.

2. “Cooke's Richard the Third,” repr. in Richard III, ed. Mark Eccles (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 213.

3. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Layman Kittredge (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn, 1971), p. 639.

4. 1.2.249, 355, 262; 3.7.157; 4.2.34; 4.3.34; 5.3.11.

5. Cf. G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 72ff.

6. Foreign trade was permitted as an occupation for gentlemen, for whom it was regarded as improper to stand behind the counter of a shop. Cf. Ruth Kelso, “The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century,” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 14 (1929): 68ff.

7. Shakespeare in his early sonnets plays with the idea of physical beauty as a treasure freely loaned by nature that must be freely spent. The youth is a “beautous niggard” and a “profitless usurer” (Sonnet 4) because he hoards his beauty instead of marrying and begetting sons like himself. The “use” of his “beauty's treasure” in marriage would not be “forbidden usury” (Sonnet 6), for the loan of his body would make his wife happy, unlike the loans made to the victims of genuine usurers.

8. Compare the attitude toward the military profession of the mercenary soldier Iago with that of the romantic warrior Othello, who speaks of the “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war” (3.3.351). Iago, using mercantile language and imagery, speaks of the “trade of war” (1.2.1) and advises Roderigo to use money as a weapon in besieging Desdemona: “Put money in thy purse. Follow thou the wars” (1.2.334–35). Earlier he had used such terms as “lined their coats [with money],” “cashiered,” and “I know my price.” (1.1.50, 45, 10)

9. Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, p. 9.

10. Ibid., p. 10.

11. Ibid., p. 10

12. Ibid., p. 9.

13. Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 59–62.

14. Robert Greene, The Life and Complete Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Huth Library, 1881–83), 12:104.

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