SOURCE: “Conflicting Paradigms and the Progress of Persuasion in Richard III,” in Cahiers Élizabéthains, No. 37, April, 1990, pp. 59-66.

[In the following essay, Schellenberg asserts that in Richard III's rise and fall, Shakespeare is demonstrating the “dangers of persuasive rhetoric” when it is misused.]

Shakespeare's Richard III bustles through a stage world of highly formal rhetoric, setting in motion a near-successful bid for control not only of the stage and its other actors, but also of the masterplot of history. He delights in his Richard loves Richard text, glossing his verbal manipulations at every stage of their planning and execution, while other characters provide a conservative countertext of choric commentary, historical summary, and prophecy. These two broad linguistic groups represent the opposing forces in a power struggle between Richard's efforts to persuade history into his mold and the paradigm of an-eye-for-an-eye justice expressed by an ever-swelling chorus of lamenters and cursers.

Shakespeare's exposition, in the verbal acts which make up the first four scenes of Richard III, of an inevitable cycle set in motion by persuasive rhetoric abused, serves as a paradigm for the play's overall movement. Although the first act remains generally in the major key of Richard's fortunes, its structure of rhetorical conflict delineates the broad outlines of his rise and subsequent fall.¹ Further, this portrayal of the conjunction of eloquence and immorality, described by Gloucester himself as the principle that the outward show of a man Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart (III.1.10-11),² reflects Shakespeare's sensitivity, noted by Vickers, to the dangers of persuasive rhetoric as “ambivalent or downright evil.³ In the successful persuasions of Iago, Cassius, Edmund, and Lady Macbeth, we focus in large part upon their victims, upon indiscriminate or already-tainted hearers and the complex progress of their error. Only in the earlier Richard III does Shakespeare present a paradigm for the progress of the rhetorical villain himself, beginning with his initial triumph over the audience and ending in his inevitable destruction as the public plot of history reasserts its control.

In his opening soliloquy, Richard presents himself to his audience as its interpreter of history, of his fellow characters, and of himself. No mere observer, however, Gloucester claims control of plot and players through this position. He includes within his compass the manufacture even of prophecies and dreams, usurping the rhetorical modes of the supernatural forces which he is challenging. Since this claim of control is supported by an evident mastery of language, especially in the form of witty self-deprecation, Richard has in all likelihood, by the end of his virtuoso speech, won in the audience his first persuadee. The Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes (41) which concludes the soliloquy reinforces the impression that we have been privileged with a glimpse of the undisguised Richard; this impression extends naturally, if not logically, to a suspension of disbelief in Richard's version of history as mere stage-set to the play of personal ambition.

The subsequent encounter with Clarence on his way to the Tower proves our confidence well-placed, for events proceed exactly as Richard has plotted them and Clarence is clearly duped. The immediacy of Richard's success establishes his credibility as decisive master of the short-term. Throughout the play, his actions and those of his minions are accompanied by some form of the refrain Come, come, dispatch, embodying his belief that delay leads impotent and snail-pac’d beggary (IV.3.53). Further, Richard here reveals his talent for morally defining others as a function of their momentary roles in his drama. The queen is accordingly first the jealous o’erworn widow, and then well struck in years, fair, and not jealous (81, 92).

In addition, Richard of course displays the irony and wordplay which make him appear almost omnipotent in his ability to twist language to his ends. The broad irony of Simple plain Clarence! I do love thee so, / That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven (118-19), however, reveals even more the audacity and cosmic proportion of his design by openly mocking the phraseology of Christianity. Similarly blasphemous is his antithesis of rhetorical levels near the end of this scene: God take King Edward to his mercy, / And leave the world for me to bustle in! (151-2). Shakespeare thus emphasises the scope of the conflict embodied in what is often a highly entertaining display of wit. Brooke observes that this “punctuation of rhetorical formality with sudden penetrations of the mundanely human” is uniquely associated with Richard's speech,⁴ thereby hinting at its importance as an indicator of the Persuader's determinedly secular nature and designs.

In this first scene of the play the frame of two full soliloquies, enclosing two encounters between Richard and an unsuspecting victim which are separated by Richard again alone on stage elaborating upon his designs, heightens the impression of a universe in tightly controlled revolution around the protagonist. This structure is rendered doubly effective as a model of Richard's control in that it is he himself who has authored the underlying events, and thus the scene's pattern. The audience is given the impression that this man need merely stand on stage announcing his plot against an individual in order for his victim to appear forthwith and suffer his fate. By the end of the scene, therefore, the spectator is prepared to accept the most astonishing example of Richard's persuasive powers: his wooing of the Lady Anne.

Richard's attempt to win Anne represents more than an act of persuasion in the private sphere; it is an attack on the temporal and causal structures of history itself, as they are embodied onstage in Henry VI's corpse and as they shape Anne's memory and sense of identity. Thus the corpse becomes Richard's silent opponent in the struggle for Anne's loyalty. As the scene begins, Anne is following bearers and hearse; as it ends, Richard remains on stage with them while she leaves, underlining the about-face which has occurred. The interpretation of remembered events is the focus of the conflict, as Anne addresses the body in an apostrophe, then as she struggles with Richard for control of the bearers, and finally in the subsequent verbal battle.

The first rhetorical modes of the scene, the formal lament and curse, introduce the traditional linguistic forces which will set themselves in opposition to Richard's language; they represent the inevitable and patterned retribution in conflict with the villain's designs for a self-made history. Richard's entry provides a sharp contrast to Anne's speech in his brisk assumption of control over both action and levels of address. As Burton aptly notes, Anne's adoption of Richard's language and rhythm is the first step in her defeat before his rhetoric.⁵ Through this victory over Anne's memory in the personal sphere, with its attendant implications for the interpretation of political history, Richard reveals the extent of those dramatic gifts which have already wooed the audience and will continue to deceive characters in ever-widening circles. As he argues for Christian charity, he swears by Saint Paul; as he proclaims the strength of the Petrarchan lover's devotion, he weeps, kneels, and humbly begs death. It is this ability to transform himself in keeping with the words he speaks which supplies the emotional power of Richard's persuasions. Shakespeare thus illustrates the rhetoricians' claims about the efficacy of an apte mouying of affections, while revealing the naïveté, in the face of individualistic ambition, of the assumption that No one man can better enuiegh against vice, then he can do, whiche hateth vice with al his harte.⁶

In the third scene, a widened sphere of action encompasses both the rival factions which threaten Richard's bid for absolute control of England's political sphere and the forces which will gather momentum towards his destruction. Although the villain's power to dazzle and persuade is again displayed, this structural broadening allows Shakespeare to contextualise that power. Against this new backdrop, Richard's stature is for the first time reduced somewhat, to that of an ambitious, perjured man in a turbulent sequence of ambitious, perjured individuals.

At the scene's opening, then, Shakespeare introduces a third variation upon the theme of Richard's taking control of the stage; in this case, audience expectation is aroused by his ominous presence in the mind of the queen, who describes him as A man that loves not me, nor none of you (13). Queen Elizabeth, Richard's principal adversary in the first part of this scene, is clearly less convinced by his rhetoric than are most characters in the early part of the play. But although she adjures him to match his words openly to his intentions, her conviction of the truth cannot match his rhetorical acrobatics and insinuations. Even later, in the stunned aftermath of Queen Margaret's exit, Richard finds a way to turn the former queen's general curse to present advantage over Elizabeth with Yet you have all the vantage of her wrong (310).

Meanwhile, however, a strong note of irony has intruded itself between Richard's active individualism and the audience's confidence in his control. While the protagonist may first disdain and then ignore the curses Queen Margaret has hurled at him, the audience cannot overlook the temporal sequence she introduces, in which Richard's own father's curses have already taken effect and in which downfall awaits all of Margaret's stage audience. That pattern of history which Hammond has called “a ritual expiation of collective guilt”,⁷ earlier hinted at in the curses pronounced by Anne and in Gloucester's own satire of the role of heaven's minister, has now been brought into full-voiced opposition to Richard's individualistic construct. The ironic possibility raised here, as Berry describes it, is “that Richard, the archindividualist, the archenemy of love, is not a ‘self alone’ after all but the unknowing victim of a scheme of retribution neither he nor anyone else in the play seems able to control”.⁸ Significantly, even before Margaret distributes curses among her hearers they instinctively unite with Richard against her in a collusion of the guilty against their judge.

Richard nevertheless immediately identifies Margaret as his opponent, on his stage, exclaiming, Foul wrinkled witch, what mak’st thou in my sight? (164). Their struggle for mastery of the scene emphasies the irreconcilable principles which they represent: Richard the individual's capacity to construct himself and his context; Margaret the shaping forces of history and community.⁹ Numerous critics have observed that Margaret is the only other character of the play who is given the kind of rhetorical control which Richard employs to such advantage, and is therefore his only comparable or even superior antagonist. While we have seen that Richard controls the frame of the scene, its climactic centre is almost wholly managed by the aged queen. Her unseen entry immediately establishes this fact; it is the first neither arranged nor expected by Richard and, indeed, bears the marks of a supernatural visitation.

Margaret employs language as a weapon of memory, as a means of righting Richard's perversion of the situation at hand. Her response to Richard's belligerent question is the firm But repetition of what thou hast marr’d; / That will I make before I let thee go (165-6). In this repetition the old queen does indeed re-use Richard's favourite tropes (the eagle, sun, and shadow) and figures (such as antithesis and rhetorical questions), relativising them as mere metaphors and verbal acrobatics which can be, and have been, abused by successive contenders for a place in the sun. Formal figures of repetition and balance are added to erect an even more elaborate rhetorical structure through which to convey the eye-for-an-eye retribution she invokes. Although Margaret makes only one more appearance in the play, her words hover over the movement of events from this time forward, weaving individual rises and falls into the structure of a pre-ordained pattern.

Despite Richard's flippant dismissal of Margaret's suggestion that he plays only a predestined role in a larger masterplot, the fourth scene prefigures the outcome of the play's conflict in Margaret's terms. Even before Richard's bustling begins with the arrival of the murderers a supernatural element again intrudes in the form of Clarence's dream. Foretelling Gloucester's role in his brother's death and reminding the latter of the eternal framework within which his earthly deeds will be judged, the vision reinforces the fact of moral standards measuring the action of individuals.

In recounting his dream, Clarence adopts a hypnotic style of repetition, exaggerated sequentiality, and nightmarish imagery. The grotesque description of skulls on the bottom of the sea, together with the repetition in a thousand fearful wracks; / A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon (I.4.24-5), provides an ironic image link between Richard's earlier confident metaphor of the clouds of the past being permanently buried in the deep bosom of the ocean (I.1.3-4) and the same man's torture at the end of the play, where his conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale (V.3.193-4). Dream language, then, is able to suggest deeper levels of meaning which a conscious manipulation of words will not allow to surface.

In keeping with his specifically Christian tone, Clarence here also introduces the theme of conscience as a manifestation of that otherworldly frame which the play's villainous characters manage to ignore while doing evil, but which invariably reasserts itself at the moment of death. The motif is developed by the devious rhetoric of the two murderers, who first personify conscience in a humorous psychomachia and ultimately twist it into a deceptive devil in [the] mind (151). By means of this and other ‘redefinitions’ of words such as respect, reputation, and work (155-6), the two murderers parallel at a lower social level the debasement of language which results from Richard's kind of rhetoric. By contrast, Clarence's speech is simply and transparently persuasive, as Richard himself has warned the murderers, employing its art in support of arguments for justice and virtue. Although this use of rhetoric towards ideal ends fails significantly to stop the immoral action which stems from language abused, it nonetheless secures the repentance of one of the murderers immediately after the deed is done.

With Clarence's murder, the first movement of the play is brought to a close, successfully structured and controlled by Richard's definitions, despite the introduction of opposing voices. At the same time, a structural paradigm for the play as a whole has been established, delineating these opposing forces and the nature of their ultimate victory in determining the pattern of history. This victory entails not only the fall of a king but also a redefinition of Richard's own plot, making it merely the self-defeating course of hell's black intelligencer, / Only reserv’d their factor (IV.4.71-2).

The action of the play, like that of this first section, could be described as expanding outward in an ever-wider social and political sphere for Richard's bustling, countered by a lengthening and broadening of the temporal and moral frames against which his actions are measured. As the perspective is enlarged, the initial impression of Richard's ability to control his plot, created by the play's highly focused opening, is dissipated. Numerous parallels, therefore, can be traced between these first four scenes and the four major sections of the play, seen as Richard's opening soliloquy (I.1.1-41), his swift rise in influence from the imprisonment of Clarence to the announcement of the coronation (I.1.42-IV.1), his struggle to maintain control as the forces represented by Margaret's curses gain the ascendancy (IV.2.-IV.4), and his plunge towards death (IV.5.-V.5).

Gloucester's first soliloquy to the audience, as we have already seen, is the general exposition of his intentions, couched in the rhetoric which exhibits his control of language. Its movement is from the general to the particular, thereby emphasising his rejection of the long-term concerns of history and royal houses in favour of his own immediate gratification. By means of this narrowing process, Richard also focuses the audience upon his own perspectives and interests, which become for a time its only standard and field of vision. The stage is thus set for Richard's quick victories over Clarence, Hastings, and Anne, while on a large scale the audience is prepared to see Richard's plan to spy [his] shadow in the sun (I.1.26) realised. As Blanpied points out, Richard promises the audience a comic structure, but one which is built upon “the myth of [his] centrality.”¹⁰

We have noted that Richard's encounters in the first two scenes are characterised by a heavily ironic treatment of his victims, reinforced by frequent asides and soliloquies. This hierarchy of knowledge dominates the whole second movement of the play. It is particularly striking in Clarence's refusal to believe that his brother is his betrayer in I.4, and in Hastings’ insistent variations upon I know he loves me well throughout two entire scenes before his death at his trusted ‘friend’s’ command.¹¹ The protagonist's control of irony is parallelled by his persuasive control of the action of every scene in which he takes part. This manipulation includes, for example, his introduction of the news of Clarence's murder to mar the reconciliation arranged by King Edward, as well as his forcing of the young princes into the Tower. Far from diminishing, Richard's power appears to know no limits, reaching even to the staging of complex plots involving large numbers of characters and elaborate properties, as in the scenes of Hastings' accusation and of the citizens' plea that Richard accept the crown.

Anne's lament and rehearsal of her wrongs in I.2 swell to a chorus of wailing women as Richard's crimes multiply. The highly patterned rhetoric of the curse also takes on a choric function by virtue of its repetition, while simultaneously shifting the balance of response from passive lament to active invocation of retribution. This motif is particularly effective when employed by a character at the point of his untimely death, since it thereby suggests a fuller vision of life's pattern than that with which Richard, in his self-created, secular universe, temporarily blinds himself. Although in the second movement the accumulating rhetoric of this paradigm of history appears ineffectual in stemming the tide of Richard's successes, its repetitive and inexorable character hints at its ultimate victory over Gloucester's ready tongue. Like the corpse's mute reminder in I.2 that history will out, young Prince Edward's reflection that the truth should live from age to age, / … Even to the general all-ending day (III.1.76-8) provides a glimpse of a reality that even Gloucester acknowledges with his response of So wise so young … (79). Similarly, those curses which come home to roost pave the way for an ironic reinterpretation of Richard's own flirtations with judgement, particularly when, in II.1, he goes so far as to assert that God will revenge Clarence's death (138).

These alternative versions and dramatic ironies drive small wedges of separation between Richard and the audience, wedges that are reinforced by the diffusion of dramatic focus which inevitably accompanies the extension of Richard's conquests. The introduction of Buckingham, for example, as Richard's fellow deep tragedian (III.5.5) results in a division of interest between the two clever actors in several scenes. In an extension of his earlier manipulation of the corpse bearers, the logistics of Richard's multiple activities require the increasing involvement of henchmen such as Ratcliffe and Catesby because Richard simply cannot be everywhere at once. The role of star performing in his own play is increasingly exchanged for that of script-writer: still a powerful position, but one accompanied by a loss of the former energetic intimacy between Richard and his audience. The momentum of the complex plot appears, moreover, to be taxing Richard's capacities to the limit. When Buckingham questions him about Lord Hastings' fate if the latter should prove unyielding, Richard's reply of Chop off his head. Something we will determine (III.1.193) reveals not only exuberant self-confidence, but also the frenetic pace of evil which will inevitably lead to the mistake of asking Buckingham to kill the princes. Richard's audience and even his confederates are being left behind because persuasion has become too time-consuming.

Richard nevertheless successfully wields a full range of rhetorical weapons in this movement of the play. His tactics are displayed particularly in his development of the role of pious, plain-spoken public servant begging his mother's blessing, warning his nephew against hypocrisy, and demurring at state visits while in prayer. He continues to define others for his manipulative purposes as he did Elizabeth in I.1. Edward's children, for example, become bastards, while Hastings is reclassified from the man who knows me well, and loves me well (III.4.31) to that ignoble traitor, / The dangerous and unsuspected Hastings (III.5.22-3). Staging a second great persuasion scene, Richard rewrites the evolved process of succession according to his personal script, and then tells the Mayor and citizens how to interpret his history in case of future black scandal or foul-fac’d reproach (III.7.231). His version apparently convinces, for the Mayor affirms, we see it, and will say it (237). Thus Richard duplicates on a larger scale his earlier success in persuading Anne to accept a rewriting of the facts; the success here is all the more spectacular, however, in its manipulation of the actors so that the persuasion comes not from Richard, but from his victims.

As this second sequence of the play closes, the growing fear with which Richard is regarded rises to a climax when the four women meet before the Tower. This scene marks the fulfilment of, and enlarges upon, Elizabeth's ominatia of I.3 just before the confrontation between Richard and Margaret. The imminent completion of Richard's iniquities before judgement is thus suggested by the parallel. Significantly, the chorus of women forms an increasingly unified body against Richard, indicating a rising up of England as mother for the rejection of her vicious offspring. This rising up is made symbolically complete in the third movement by the addition of Margaret, the voice of history. For the moment, Queen Elizabeth's warning to her son to flee reintroduces the significant name of Richmond, waiting from the reach of hell (IV.1.42), just as that name was first introduced by her in I.3.

In the subsequent three scenes, Richard's position is suddenly attacked from both within and without. He is clearly dwelling upon thoughts of Richmond; Richmond (or its variant Rougemont) is repeated eight times in IV.2, and becomes increasingly prominent thereafter. Significantly, it is Richard's own remembrance of prophetic utterances which first links Richmond with the threat of downfall to the new king. Thus it is initially an internal malaise from which he suffers, recalling the worm of conscience which Margaret has wished upon him (I.3.222). Her desire that he might his friends suspect for traitors (223) also finds fulfilment in his dismissal of Buckingham. The connection between Queen Margaret's first curse and Richard's present crisis is underlined by her reappearance, in which she teaches the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth to curse their own kinsman and former ally against her House of Lancaster.

Although Richard does not give in to the downturn without a struggle, Act IV scenes 2 and 4 are marked by numerous rhetorical failures, realising the possibility suggested by Richard's earlier difficulty in controlling Margaret. The first of these is Buckingham's shocked or deliberate inability to understand the language of innuendo, which has hitherto served Richard so well with his allies, in the exchange that ends with the king's exasperated Cousin, thou wast not wont to be so dull: / Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead (IV.2.17-18). In quick succession, we have Richard's non-conversation with Buckingham regarding Richmond and the earldom of Hereford, Buckingham's threat which ends the scene in lieu of the usual statement by Richard, the latter's inability to silence the cursing women who intercept his train, and his plea that Queen Elizabeth serve as attorney of [his] love to her daughter (IV.4.413). This plea's success is of course highly ambiguous, for Elizabeth manipulates Richard's arguments in a reversal of their wonted roles.

In the latter exchange in particular, Richard appears to have lost his paramologic intuition; far from anticipating Elizabeth's accusations, he is stymied by them. Most tellingly, he can find no self, no past, and no God to swear by in response to the memory which shapes her rhetoric. Having abused all of these in his creation of the Richard that hath done all this (287), he is left with a negative identity, void because it has destroyed its defining contexts of history and community. Even a vow mortgaging his own future is unpersuasive, as Elizabeth points out: Swear not by time to come, for that thou hast / Misus’d ere us’d, by times ill-us’d o’erpast (IV.4.395-6).

When a series of messengers informs the King of Richmond's imminent attack and of the rebellion of his countrymen, he is unable to formulate a single coherent order, finally retreating into invective against Richmond and threats against Stanley. Verbal manipulation gives way to increasing physicality in Richard's actions, and his power of persuasion wanes. As Clemen has pointed out, for example, Richard's former asides to the audience have now become mere talking to himself,¹² and he resolves to converse [only] with iron-witted fools / And unrespective boys (IV.2.28-9), actors whose performance is unlikely to threaten his own.

Richard's loss of control of events, thus figured in a loss of control of scenes and verbal encounters, is counterbalanced by the increasingly insistent clamour of the tell-tale women rehearsing the past, demanding that the breath of bitter words … smother / [The] damned son that … two sweet sons smother’d (IV.4.133-4, 149). He nevertheless appears to maintain the same kind of disregard for the mounting opposition to his rule as he has earlier shown for Margaret's prediction of it. He continues to insist upon his own plot, ordering Catesby to clear Anne out of the way of a marriage to his niece. He is on the defensive, however, pursuing an Uncertain way of gain in order to stop all hopes whose growth may damage [him] (IV.2.64, 60). Furthermore, the verbal irony is now operating completely against Richard. He himself introduces the moral category of sin here (But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin [64-5]) which, together with an increasing preoccupation with the supernatural, prepares the audience to accept the terms by which Richard's acts must now be judged. The dreams and ensuing accusations of conscience which have figured so prominently in Clarence's death at the close of the first act now come to the fore in his brother's anticipation of death. The parade of eleven accusing ghosts which passes before Richard during the last night of his life is a development of the two accusers Clarence has met in his vision; like the latter, Richard wakes to the thousand several tongues of his conscience.

Unlike his brother, however, Richard chooses, as do Clarence's murderers before him, to defy this coward conscience (V.3.180) and the divine judgement it represents in favour of his schema of the assertive self. He exhorts his forces to let Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law in a march hand in hand to hell (311, 313). To the end, Richard refuses to accept the paradigm of Margaret's curses with its underlying suggestion that he might be the duped instrument of a retributive God. Thus in his final despairing soliloquy he turns not against God, but against himself as the author of his own destiny. Despite his resolute denials, however, the King's obsession with shadows and the blackness of the day is reminiscent of Clarence's terror at the shadow like an angel in his dream (I.4.53), suggesting that the forces which Richard has mocked are in fact the opponents against which he has been pitted from the beginning.

This inward spiral, parallelled by an opposite outward movement of the plot away from any semblance of Richard's control, completes the separation of Richard and the audience begun in the second movement. While Richard himself may refuse to submit to a larger scheme of history, the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the overall structure of the plot follows not Richard's plan but Margaret’s. Of the last six scenes, Richard is present in only two; in the first of these two, he shares the stage and action with Richmond and is thereby depersonalised as the descending arm of a historical balance. Richard is permitted to die as he has lived, as the gambler who has set [his] life upon a cast, / And … will stand the hazard of the die (V.4.9-10). Immediately after his death, however, he becomes merely the bloody wretch whose existence is only significant as the last convulsion of that England which hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself (V.5.23).

Richmond's rhetoric in the play's concluding speech, couched in the form of a prayer, emphasises the end of laments and curses as the necessary rhetorical modes of opposition to Richard's language. The social chaos embodied in Richard's twisted rhetoric, a rhetoric finally debased, like the language of Clarence's murderers, to the crude definitions of poor rats and bastard Bretons, is now to be resolved in balance and harmony; thus Richmond's plain and measured rhetorical style, with its overtly Christian argument, echoes Clarence's ideally transparent language. In this larger outworking of the play's pattern of persuasion, such rhetoric is finally successful because it expresses a true paradigm of historical causality: Richard hath ever been God's enemy, and if you fight against God's enemy, / God will in his justice ward you as his soldiers (V.3.252-4). In the end it is not, and cannot be, Richard who is his own creator, persuasive though his role of self-defined man may initially be to a fascinated audience. Language must again be restored to a pure unity of words and meaning whose function is to persuade that a permanent structure of justice upholds the public good.

Notes

1. Dolores M. Burton's detailed examination of “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III”, Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 55-84, is very helpful in its general emphasis upon Richard as a persuasive orator in the classical tradition. It stops short, however, of putting the first act in the larger context of the play's movement and thematic concerns. Burton can thus claim, rather too simplistically, I think: “By making Gloucester admit that he has perverted the legitimate use of persuasive arts, Shakespeare affirms their legitimacy” (p. 83).

2. For all citations of the play I have used the Bevington revised edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Scott, Foresman & Co. (Glenview, 1973).

3. Brian Vickers, “‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare”, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James M. Murphy, University of California (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), p. 423.

4. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies, Methuen (London, 1968), p. 54.

5. Burton, p. 71.

6. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, intro. Robert Hood Bowers, Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints (Delmar, 1977), pp. 154, 158.

7. Antony Hammond, Introduction to King Richard III, Arden edition, p. 43.

8. Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1975), p. 83.

9. This argument does not, of course, deny Hammond's interpretation of Margaret as “morally myopic” (p. 110) regarding her own past crimes. Hammond himself describes her as a figure “brought back from the past” (p. 109); I wish to argue that although she may not know or deserve to know the precise nature of her curses' fulfilments, she is nevertheless the representative voice of a moral causality in history which the play itself ultimately affirms.

10. John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories, University of Delaware Press (Newark, 1983), p. 91.

11. Bertrand Evans, in his study of discrepant awareness in the tragedies (Shakespeare's Tragic Practice, Clarendon Press [Oxford, 1979], p. 117), points in passing to Richard III as a particularly “bold exploitation” of such irony.

12. Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's ‘Richard III’ (1957), trans. Jean Bonhein, Methuen (London, 1968), pp. 166-7.