SOURCE: “Belaboring the Obvious: Reading the Monstrous Body in King Richard III,” in Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 33-51.

[In the following excerpt, Charnes explains how the murderous and physically monstrous Richard transmogrifies Anne's hatred into sexual desire during the emotionally charged wooing scene.]

What we regard as “history” is always “mediated through subjectivity”: it becomes history only by the process of repetitive inscription in and through the symbolic. Consequently its “Truth arises from misrecognition”—whatever it signifies in the social formation necessarily routes through the misrecognition of consciousness (what Zizek calls “the opinion of the people”—Sublime Object, p. 61). “If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself” (p. 63). And this Truth is that the significance of history is consolidated only retroactively, like the “truth” of the analysand who has come through psychoanalysis and assigned his symptomology its place in the narrative. The very grammar of history, therefore, is proleptic: it puts later things first (just as Shakespeare chronicles later historical events in the “first tetralogy”). In this way, what was once profoundly contingent is reconstituted as “inevitable.” Richard III maps the function of repetition for the subject who wants to “spare himself the painful roundabout route,” who will not know what he knows, who refuses to read the signs, as if they were external to him and he could choose not to read them. In the figure of Richard we see the subject who will not identify with the symptom, who does not “believe” in omens and therefore secures his function as the symptom and omen of others. By rejecting his own portentousness, Richard “intervenes” and in his illusion of contingency ends up confirming “providential” history. This illusion is figured in Richard's denial of the language of intertextuality, his mistaking of his existence as a first time occurrence, as if he had no prior textual existence which had already constituted his own “symbolic necessity.” This in itself would not be remarkable if the habitus of the play (within the larger habitus of Elizabethan England) weren't structured around this “necessity,” if it weren't full of other figures who continually speak Richard's deformed frame as the advertisement of an overdetermined historical frame.¹

The centrality of Richard's physical deformity is clear from the play's opening lines, and contemptuous self-regard is the first position the play engages. Richard begins by referring to the late wars, as we are reminded of the preceding plays in the first tetralogy:

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

(5-8)

Centered in emblems of the battlefield, this language charts a move from one kind of public space—the overtly political male space violently choreographed by war—to another, less overtly political space of the gender and class relations practiced in courtly “leisure,” now made possible by a temporarily stable disposition of state power. In Althusser's terms, these lines translate the openly repressive apparatuses exercised when political power is fought for by martial means into the ideological apparatuses that interpellate the subjects of “legitimate” redistributions and delegations of that power. Such a change is, however, metonymic rather than substitutive. The gap between these two kinds of activities—the naked aggression of warfare and the social and sexual aggression of court life—is increasingly compressed as Richard's language moves “indoors” into the realm of aggression he envisions as the erotic:

Grim-visag’d War hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

(9-13)

The conflation of war and eroticism is here condensed into a narrative troping that becomes increasingly claustrophobic, as it moves from the outdoor space of the battlefield to the socially elite space of “merry meetings,” and then to the privatized space of “a lady's chamber,” until finally it reaches the personalized space of bodies:

But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made-up—
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them—
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.

(14-27)

Lacking a battlefield in which to “pass away the time,” Richard knows that he has not been fashioned to participate in the “sportive tricks” of erotic courtship. The language Richard uses to describe the facets of war—bruised arms, dreadful marches, wrinkled fronts—metonymically links his body to Grim-visag’d War. He, too, has bruised arms, a dreadful march; he, too, will smooth his wrinkled front as he manipulates others. For Richard, the absence of an opportunity openly to exercise violent aggression forces him into a position of self-regard, in which he must behold his own image and establish a relationship to his “person.” The soliloquy is rhythmically propelled by rhetorical self-reference: “I that am not shaped for sportive tricks,” “I that am rudely stamp’d,” “I that am curtail’d of this fair proportion.” These lines clearly assert Richard's “I” as the issue at stake; and the imbrication of self-regard in the social is immediately foregrounded.

Since Richard claims he cannot “prove a lover” (a claim he will, significantly, disprove later) his alternative is to “spy my shadow in the sun, / And descant on mine own deformity.” To “descant,” as the OED tells us, is to enlarge upon a theme. Enlarging upon his deformity would mean establishing a perspective in relation to it. Ernest Gilman, in discussing the emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of perspective painting, points to the centrality of the human body in contriving contingent perspectives:

Perspective, like music and mathematics, was seen to be based on a satisfying system of proportions—between the objects to be painted and their images, between the braccio and every figure in the painting, and between the distance of the observer's eye and the entire construction. It embodied and revealed the substratum of the harmonious order of nature, and put the painter, no less than the philosopher, in touch with the intelligible world. At the center of this order is man. The proportions of the human body provide the basic unit of perspective measurement, and the painting is organized around the viewpoint of the individual spectator.²

If we imagine for a moment Richard as spectator to his own shadow, he becomes at once the individual viewer Gilman describes above, and the object that provides the proportions of the image he witnesses. Richard's awareness of his deformity, reflected back at him by his shadow, can lead him to two possible perspectives. In the first, he can perceive the deformed shadow as a perverted structure in an otherwise harmoniously ordered world. But this would require detaching himself from the image of his shadow (figuratively speaking), regarding it only as an external image to which he is the spectator, the “other.” In the second, however, we might imagine that he sees his shadow on the ground (rather than, say, against a wall); in this instance the shadow is visibly connected to him (presumably at the feet) and such a detachment is impossible—he is positioned as both spectator to and represented object of the deformed image. In such an orientation there could be no clear distinction between spectator and spectacle. Richard, however, “incorporates” both perspectives; that is to say, he knows he has been “curtail’d of this fair proportion,” but at the same time his perspective is itself overemplotted: the place from and through which he looks is fixed by his deformed proportions. It is this straddling that leads him to attempt to “dispossess” his deformity. But such a dispossession can be no mere denial; rather, it requires a restructuring of the world according to his own proportions: the creation of a world in which all behavior, values, and perceptions are extensions of his body image. A world—according to Richard—in which the misproportions of his body provide the “normal” perspective from which all ways of seeing are derived.

In his opening soliloquy Richard speaks of himself as the victim of a surround—alternately conceived as maternal, natural, social—that is assigned mysterious agency: he is “rudely stamp’d,” “curtail’d” of fair proportion, “cheated of feature.” Contrary to the rumors others have generated about his remaining too long in the womb and being born with teeth and hair, Richard claims to have been “sent before [his] time,” “unfinish’d” and “scarce half made-up.” The discrepancy of versions of Richard is apparent even here; and the emotional significance of his sense of being born before he was ready will permeate his relations with the play's female figures. Richard replaces a language of overgestation, of prodigious belatedness, with one of underdevelopment, of rude and untimely prematurity, and in doing so speaks a fantasy of preceding his own legend. By literally conceiving himself, this time as “unfinish’d,” “scarce half made-up,” he speaks a fantasy of arriving early at the scene of his own story, with the possibility of “making up” the rest himself. However, Richard's fetal self-revisionism denies the conditions that compel the activity in the first place; and his efforts to reorganize the relationship between his body and the social becomes the driving impetus toward a status in which he will be not excluded (because he is not shaped for sportive tricks) but at the very center.

I do mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds—although I cannot—
Myself to be a marvellous proper man.

Richard III (1.2.252-254)

After Richard's acknowledgment of his deformity in the first scene, it is others, and most notably the women, who repeatedly refer to his body in the most scornful and degrading terms. The project, then, of reorganizing the relations of social perception begins properly with Richard's courtship of Anne Neville. In this scene, and apparently against all odds, Richard produces himself as an object of libidinal attraction. I say “apparently” because however preposterous his success may seem, it reveals as much about the play's libidinal structures and affective investments as it does about Richard, and possibly more. Although critics diverge in their views of the courtship—its success, its apparent absurdity, its “psychological veracity” (or more commonly its lack thereof), most tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they find it unbelievable that Anne capitulates, or they see Richard's “genius” and his success as a function of rhetorical skill.³ Although Richard must (and did) marry Anne as part of his progress toward the crown, this scene does far more than just establish the requisite “traffic in women” necessary for the disposition of property and lineage. The reach of its effectiveness, however—what Richard calls his “secret close intent” (1.1.158), cannot be understood by appealing to notions of psychosexual “health” or “normalcy.” On the contrary. It is precisely its preposterousness that renders the scene dramatically successful, erotically convincing, and centrally revealing of the rest of the play's social and libidinal relations. The scene works by revealing the socially productive fascination that always underlies revulsion, and by demonstrating the discursive and libidinal identities between contempt and desire, revulsion and attraction, political obsession and sexual fixation. Richard's “genius” in this scene may be rhetorical; but its force issues from the way he both manipulates and sets in motion around himself the affective power of the object of sexual disgust.

As Jonathan Goldberg has recently argued about the “preposterous” (with its rhetorical origins in the classical figure of hysteron proteron), it etymologically and epistemologically reorganizes sexual economies by treating ends—anatomical as well as teleological—as beginnings.⁴ To understand the preposterous eroticism of this scene in particular (and its links to Richard's success in reorienting public perception in general), we must first consider how its identities are visually invoked and then discursively appropriated.

As I’ve already noted above, when Richard enters in Act 1, scene 2, Anne is performing a ritual lament over Henry's body and railing against Richard:

Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not;
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill’d it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.
O gentlemen! See, see dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh.
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity,
For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins where no blood dwells;
Thy deed inhuman and unnatural
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.

(50-61)

Richard's “foul deformity” is yoked to his “heinous deeds,” and both are connected to the political by their ability to draw forth blood from the dry wounds of the dead king. Anne's rhetoric verges here on the excessive; and Richard properly reads in its “excess of affect” her vulnerability to a fundamentally “perverse” courtship. Anne's hatred and public volubility provide Richard with a store of discursive materials already charged with appropriable affective energy. When she says “Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell!” he replies “Sweet saint, for charity be not so curst.” She calls him a “Foul devil,” and he returns: “Lady, you know no rules of charity, / Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.” Anne escalates her indictment: “Villain, thou know’st no law of God nor man, / No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.” Richard inverts her sense: “But I know none, and therefore an no beast.” Anne, recognizing his strategy, replies, “O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!”; and Richard counters with “more wonderful, when angels are so angry.” These flip-side tosses of the same rhetorical coinage continue, as Anne calls him a “diffus’d infection” and a “hedgehog,” and he calls her “Fairer than tongue can name thee” and “gentle Lady Anne.”

Drawing Anne into a libidinal economy that trades on the tensions and identities that link binaristic oppositions, Richard's inversions produce erotic effect even as they escalate antagonistic affect. In fact, they do so precisely by underscoring such antagonism. Speaking the language and gestures of courtly gentility, Richard provides a new epistemology for the revulsion Anne feels, taking an emotional intensity surrounding one kind of history and substituting for it another:

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

(125-128)

Here Richard claims that the desire for Anne's beauty motivated his violent actions, a claim that forges a link between her beauty and his “monstrosity.” In perhaps the scene's most “perverse” lines, Richard makes another remarkable juxtaposition:

Anne:
And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Richard:
Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne:
Some dungeon?
Richard:
Your bedchamber.

Assertions of personal desire are proffered to occlude those of providential history, as Richard realigns political with sexual ambition, murder with sexual desire, dungeons with bedchambers, and the erotic with violence, entrapment, and damnation. In the courtship scene, Richard is able to sustain a perfectly balanced inversion that works partly because, as David Holbrook has pointed out, “to substitute hate for love has what Polanyi calls ‘the logical appeal of the apparent stability of the total inversion of values.’”⁵ But its logic is stabilized not just by the structural homologies that support ideological inversions but also by the particular kind of metonymy inversion produces: one that renders radical opposites “alike.” Richard cunningly personalizes as sexual desire political actions and ambitions that are shared by most of the other figures in the play. For Richard, the political is the personal, as he fabricates sexual subjectivity as a usable fiction. By rhetorically substituting sexual for political desire, Richard insinuates an interactive ground on which he can compete with his fellow men as if he were no different from them.⁶ After claiming that he is not “shap’d for sportive tricks,” Richard nevertheless deploys them; and in doing so, counters others' view of him as prodigious object with a version of himself as a social subject—of desires, emotions, and physical drives. By courting Anne, he includes himself in the social.

But Richard's rhetorical skill is not the only influence at work in this scene. The success of the courtship is underwritten by the mise-enscène. Just as the play uses Richard's body to make its “point,” Richard requires a body through which to run his rhetorical legerdemain. Richard “woos” Anne not in some pleasant garden or lady's chamber, but over the dead Henry's corpse and its gaping, bleeding wounds. After Anne succumbs, Richard himself is stunned by his success:

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What, I that kill’d her husband and his father:
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me—
And I, no friends to back my suit at all;
But the plain devil and dissembling looks—
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
Ha!

(232-243)

That Richard is baffled signals not the absurdity of the scene but rather its deep logic: no matter how “perverse” Richard believes himself to be, there is something familiar about what has transpired. Something happens at the level of the visual that prompts Richard to imagine that he can transform the perception of physical evidence, can make it mean differently. The “bleeding witness of her hatred” underscores the scene's (and the play’s) violent scopophilia; but it is Anne who initiates the recoding of Henry's wounds by the very copia of her terminology. First she calls them “these wounds,” then “these windows,” then “these holes” (1.2.11-13), and finally, these “congeal’d mouths” (1.2.56). Henry's wounds, windows, holes, and congealed mouths, detached from the rest of his body by their obviousness as targets of the gaze (by what they “show” in the Lacanian sense, in which the object of the gaze shows itself showing itself), are assigned a kind of agency in which they literally express the excessive force of Richard's presence, the power the play gives him to mobilize that which should be congeal’d (whether blood or hatred or desire or line of succession). As multiple signifiers, however, they also provide materials for contesting the significance of this force—what it means in a particular representational lexicon. According to conventional Renaissance lore (which Anne enunciates), the wounds bleed in the proximity of the murderer, and thus are claimed as part of the play's arsenal of Tudor propagandistic devices which code Richard as political portent or monster.

But their very “detachability” also makes them available for Richard's use. Richard picks up the prurient threads which run through Anne's (and the audience’s) engagement with Henry's wounds by openly respeaking them as sites of fetishistic scopophilia: loci of sexual rage and jealousy, as well as substitutive objects/causes of desire, in a libidinal economy which Richard structures around penetration—the transgression of political, social, personal, and gender boundaries. As the agent of such “seduction,” Richard himself need not experience “sexual” desire. As Baudrillard has argued, “Seduction is not desire. It is that which plays with desire, which scoffs at desire. It is that which eclipses desire, making it appear and disappear … Such is the attraction of the dark body of seduction. Things seem to follow their linear truth, their line of truth, but they reach their peak elsewhere, in the cycle of appearances. Things aspire to be straight, like light in an orthogonal space, but they all have a secret curvature.”⁷ Richard transforms Henry's corpse and its wounds into this dark body of seduction. This “secret curvature,” this appearance and disappearance, describes the way Richard's language reorganizes the discursive habitus according to the signifying trajectory of his own misshapen body, with its less-than-secret curvature. Richard, too, aspires to be “straight” (considers himself cheated by dissembling Nature); but for him there is no movement—whether toward the sexual or toward the royal—that does not reach its peak elsewhere, in the cycle of appearances, that does not veer from its target.

When Richard appears at the beginning of the scene and Henry's wounds bleed afresh, Anne immediately claims them for the play's portentous version of Richard as historical monster. Richard advances his own version of the portentous by recoding the wounds as portents of desire—signs, in Bourdieu's terms, of his own “absolute subjecthood”—put forward to counter the absolute objecthood affixed to him by Tudor history. Henry's wounds will no longer testify for Henry against Richard: now they testify for Richard and his desire. The bleeding witness for the prosecution becomes a witness for the defense.

But this shift isn't libidinally effective with Anne until Richard offers his own breast and sword to her (or pretends to), proclaiming his willingness to take his “wounds” at her hand. In this move, Richard's body becomes identified with Henry's and Anne's with Richard’s; and even while Anne remains rhetorically unconvinced (“Arise dissembler,” she says in 1.2.189), there is something powerfully persuasive about this shifting of bodies and gender roles, as Richard gives Anne the same phallic instrument used to enter Henry's body, and offers up his breast to her. By giving Anne the opportunity (however disingenuously) to penetrate his body with the same “tool,” Richard positions her within the structure of his desire (however dissembled), mimetically doubling not only Henry but an “Anne” who now invites penetration. This shift of gendered subject positions enacts a process of mimetic triangulation in which Anne and Richard are identified in a variation of the “homosocial” in which Henry's body, with its cuts of “desire,” simultaneously provides a feminized medium for which these two opponents can compete (in terms of how it signifies) and through which they can meet.⁸

This kind of identification/triangulation has links, however, to an older theatrical tradition enacted in medieval Corpus Christi celebrations and play cycles: the practice of contemplating Christ's wounds. Throughout the first tetralogy, Henry is frequently aligned with the figure of Christ: loving, pacific, politically ineffectual but morally pure, helpless against the cunning manipulations of the more “worldly.” Anne clearly equates Henry's wounds with Christ's (as she equates Richard with Satan, who “has made this happy earth a hell”); and her lamentation over his body on the stage solicits what Peter Travis has called “ocular communion”: a joining in and with the spirit and meaning of Christ's Passion by contemplating representations of his mortified body, a ritual designed not only to foster religious desire but to reinforce communal bonds through the “magic” of sacred identification—with Christ, and, through him, with fellow observers.⁹ Such plays were meant to produce a kind of affective inhabitation of the figure of Christ, in which the mysteries of the Eucharist and transubstantiation were “realized” by gazing at graphic representations of his wounds—by entering, as it were, his body with one's eyes.

But such representations became increasingly lurid in the late Middle Ages and focused more and more on the graphic physical humiliations imagined to have been inflicted by the “tortores,” especially in the Chester cycles, in which there is also much fascination with the exchange of bodily fluids—“spittle and mucus” (Travis, “Social Body,” p. 28, quoting Rosemary Woolf). The intensity of physical language, image, and display in these performances is part of a larger set of representations that has generated much work on the fascination the body and its apertures were provoking apart from explicitly theological concerns.¹⁰ As Travis says, “Scholars have told us about late medieval affective piety, the increasing realism and sensationalism of the religious arts, and the attendant psychology, rather like violence in pornography, of heightened shock to envigorate desensitized feelings” (p. 29). Shakespeare's Richard III draws upon and “perverts” this tradition, as Anne's exhortation to “behold” Henry's wounds recalls the convention of “ocular communion,” here evoked to ratify political and social homogeneity (through a sacralized object) against a common enemy. In this invocation, Henry's wounds are sanctified like Christ’s. But unlike Christ's body in the medieval cycles, Henry's sexual status as a male body, a body with a penis, is drastically effeced. Travis points out the “unwavering attention given to Christ's penis during two centuries of Renaissance art” (“Social Body,” p. 19), noting how concerned church authorities were to assign him his “full manhood,” concerns “generated by the horror of lack” (p. 20). In the late medieval plays, the attention paid to Christ's wounds, to his physical subjection, was always accompanied by “attention”—arguments, gestures, or images—designed to dispel anxieties that he might be “nonsexed” (as those without a particular kind of representation of the phallus have, until very recently, always been designated) and therefore “less than perfect.”

But as Sarah Stanbury has also argued, part of the controversy around Christ's masculinity in these representations of the Passion had to do with who was doing the gazing, whose eyes were palpating the limp and punctured male body. Anxiety over potential emasculation is initially engendered by the fact that it is women, and Mary in particular, who tend to direct the gaze of the viewers, both within the representations (in a painting or among a group on the stage) and outside it as well. The viewer’s/audience's gaze is circuited through a female gaze, one that is disallowed in virtually every other cultural arena. Women do look in medieval narratives and poems; but when they do, it is almost always coded as erotic transgression, insofar as looking repositions women within subjectivity, and frequently (and more threateningly) in authority.¹¹

Such transgression and the erotic aspect that I would argue is always present in the gaze are even more directly provoked in drama than they are in painting or lyric, since the viewer confronts the materiality of bodies on a stage. In Richard III (as in other scenes of sacralized violence in Renaissance drama), the transgressive erotic potential of the medieval paradigm makes its way into the semisecular tableau of Anne's lament, as she boldly exhorts others to “behold,” “behold.” Her speech seems less grief-laden (although she sheds tears into Henry's wounds, a literal ocular communion in which her tears enter his body) than warrior-like. Positioned in rhetorical equilibrium with Richard, her language is powerful, confrontative, and aggressive, like her ocular decorum. Her visual assertiveness, however “socially legitimized as a gesture of grief” (Stanbury, “Virgin's Gaze,” p. 1087), as well as her position as designated mourner, appropriates Henry's body, arrogates it to herself, and consequently, by way of exactly the kind of imaginative empathy and identification such ritualistic mourning is designed to foster, reconstitutes it as an extension of herself. Anne's sensationalistic attention to Henry's “holes,” and lack of corresponding attention to his more “manly” parts, pre-pares (if one might be forgiven the pun), Henry's body for what will be Richard's transsexual repairing which, rather like the violence in pornography, achieves its “heightened shock” by gendering all wounds as female (and conversely, by regarding all females as wounded).

Rhetorically recoding Henry's dead body and its wounds as the “effect” (penetration) of “that cause” (sexual desire), Richard transforms political wounds into sexual ones: simulacra of the deflowered maidenhead. Accordingly, Henry's death is translated from a political-theological sacrifice into a sexual one. Henry's “Passion” becomes Richard’s. Like the sexuality pornography claims to “express,” Richard's penetrations of Henry's body are passed off as sexual, rather than political, in nature; and correspondingly, so is the bloody “deluge” that issues from the wounds. Thus, Henry's body becomes, pace Baudrillard, the “peak” that is “reached elsewhere”: the actual target of the secret curvature of Richard's political desire, dissembled by Richard as the deflectionary target of his sexual desire.

In this circuitry, then, “ocular communion” over Henry's body becomes a kind of staged communal voyeurism, in which a body that cannot look back (now visually and discursively coded as female) is “probed” by the gaze of others for its significance. Such activity has long been aligned (as Foucault has argued about the Inquisition, witchcraft interrogations, and the history of confession) with sadistic erotic pleasure, the pleasure afforded (by definition almost exclusively to men) within patriarchal Western culture by exercising scopic and discursive power over bodies with less or no power.¹² Despite their differences in this play as male and female figures, and however vitriolic Anne may seem in relation to Richard, they enact a shared voyeurism, a perverse ocular communion over and through a shared body that they have both “entered” and appropriated in their respective ways. In terms of the rhetorical symmetry of their verbal intercourse, as well as the symbolic symmetry of their intercourse with Henry's body, the courtship is staged, however temporarily, between equals; and it is partly this suspension of sheer phallic prerogative that allows for the kind of “friction” that in Shakespeare's courtships frequently constitutes the erotic.¹³

This is not, however, to say that it is only friction between antagonists that constitutes the erotic in this scene, nor is it to claim that the political—either in terms of royal politics or in terms of gender politics—has even for a moment been suspended. On the contrary. The scene critiques the very conditions of the eroticism it stages. No matter how much moral authority Anne is allowed to exercise in this scene (as the voice of Tudor providentialism and judgment), she is still finally reigned back into the confines of her female body. She has looked aggressively and spoken aggressively and therefore transgressed “proper” feminine decorum; but in doing so, she has also opened herself. A woman's look not only violates but renders her vulnerable to violation. A woman with open eyes, open mouth, and open ears is no longer the hortus conclusus, no longer the “body enclosed,” no longer safely contained, in terms of how she might either mislead or be mislead.¹⁴ That Anne's eyes and mouth are so very open in the courtship scene means that her ears will not be far behind. The woman who spits at Richard and says that he “infect[s] [her] eyes” (1.2.152) is signaling that he has already somehow gotten inside. It is through her ears that Richard will secure his success; and he rams his tidings fruitfully.

In revising the epistemology of Henry's death in terms of sexual desire, Richard draws upon a long tradition in which women's bodies and beauty are the putative cause of war, murder, and betrayal; and his success in this scene includes him within this conventional tradition. But it also demonstrates his awareness of it as a form of preposterous displacement, in which the outcome of aggression between men is proleptically installed in the bodies of women as originary cause. Anne, like many other female figures, is simultaneously positioned as the object/cause of violence and as the recipient of that violence as a sacrificial tribute. Richard reinfuses the cold relic of Henry's corpse with the hot life of the sacred gift:

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

Proclaiming his willingness to pay everything, Richard's declaration of prodigality of expenditure (to undertake the death of all the world for an hour in Anne's “sweet bosom”), like Satan’s, inverts Christ's (who undertook to save the life of all the world) and matches in its profligacy the vehemence of Anne's language. This is no offer of sonnets, undying love, or eternal worship. Here is a dead king (along with a dead husband and promise of even more murderous tributes) served up on the trencher of sexual desire. Reading in Anne's will to sight and speech a will to a certain kind of knowledge (like Eve listening to the serpent), Richard insinuates a desire for her that matches her own in its excessive vehemence and renders its bearer perversely appealing.

That Anne, near the scene's end, goes, within twenty-one lines, from wishing Richard's death (188) to wearing his ring signals the erotic force of the scene's visual and discursive choreography. But this has, I suggest, more to do with the structural operations of transgression than it does either with Richard's “genius” or with Anne's sudden credulity. Rather than attributing it to “characteristics” of Richard or Anne, one might better approach the eroticism of this scene by looking at how the play maps the homologies between excesses of violent ambition and sexual desire. The distinction Bataille has drawn between the “homogeneous” and the “heterogeneous” worlds is illuminating here. The “homogeneous” is that which works conservatively to affiliate social and economic elements with a predictable, reproducible, and conventionally recognizable mode of social production: it is that which excludes contradiction in the social formation. The “heterogeneous,” however, “concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate,” including notions of the sacred and the taboo.¹⁵ According to Bataille, “the heterogeneous thing is assumed to be charged with an unknown and dangerous force”; and “the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred things themselves form a part of this whole). This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value” (Visions of Excess, p. 142, italics added). Including cadavers, human bodily waste, body parts, and “persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value,” Bataille establishes an identity between “waste” and “superior transcendent value.” To posit them as general equivalences is to describe the ideological structure that constitutes the play's overarching structure of desire. For the play sets up an opposition between the ideology of “divine right,” transcendently bestowed by God on the Tudor monarchy, and the “waste” that it must make, under such overdetermined historiography, of Richard. Coded as waste from the very beginning of the play, by himself as much as by others, and belonging to the realm of the “heterogeneous” because of his withered arm, crook-back, deformed, abortive, and lumpish person, Richard is nevertheless a vitally productive element in the Tudor politics of providential transcendence. For while both waste and superior transcendent value may seem to exist outside productive expenditure, it is precisely this appearance that is socially productive. More important, both are capable of generating the same kind of affective response: “Heterogeneous elements will provoke affective reactions of varying intensity, and it is possible to assume that the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous (if not generally, at least with regard to the subject). There is sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion, and in certain circumstances, any object of repulsion can become an object of attraction, and vice versa” (Visions of Excess, p. 142). Richard's courtship of Anne, as well as the rest of the play, generates those “certain circumstances” Bataille describes by foregrounding the constitutive identities between waste and transcendent values, between curses and blessings, devils and saints, “proper” and improper men, loathing and attraction—all the identities Richard extracts from Anne's language. And her response unarguably demonstrates the intensity of her affective reaction to the play's most heterogeneous object.

This scene works by undermining the pretenses of distinction between high political, and therefore moralized, discourse (which Anne speaks)—the ideology of royal authority and its “universal” signification (also linked to “high” tragedy, which Anne attempts to make of this scene as she laments Henry's death in Senecan style); and Richard's equally ideological but more pragmatic discourse of personal desire and the body: lust, scopophilia (his actions the result of gazing at her beauty and wanting an hour in her sweet bosom). Henry's “corse” and its wounds become the site of articulation between two discursive strategies: one public, “official,” and “moral,” the other private, unsanctioned, and “base.” These narratives, propelled by Anne's and Richard's respective gazes, converge in Henry's bleeding wounds, which are translated from a political sacrifice (the iconology of high tragedy) into a transgressive erotic gift. To borrow from Lewis Hyde, who speaks of the transformative power of gifts, “It is this element of relationship which leads me to speak of gift exchange as an “erotic” commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular.”¹⁶ By insisting that Henry's death was the result of his desire for union with her, Richard underscores Anne's “involvement” with him in those wounds, one which binds them together; and in doing so, counterposes the principle of eros to Anne's logos, her rhetorical efforts to differentiate, in absolute terms, not only herself from Richard, but Richard from all humanity. Henry's body becomes this transformative gift, and the bleeding wounds become a sign not of accusation but rather of the plenitude of Richard's desire.

Whether Anne perceives herself to be repositioned by Richard's “gift” inside an erotic commerce or to be the recipient of a Maussian “prestation” is not clear.¹⁷ But the scene works in the way that prurience always works: by running ideological misrecognition through an object of affective fixation. Involving repeated exhortations of the gaze, the scene requires the audience's fetishistic scopophilia: its investment in a politics that constructs “that which shows” (the object of the gaze showing itself to the gaze) as that which wants to be seen showing itself, and consequently sees in the hysterical symptom the “will” of the “other.” What is actually most “perverse” about this scene is not Richard's love suit but rather its foregrounding of Henry's body, which becomes the obscene, the too-much-exposed, too visible, too ob-vious object. If, according to T. S. Eliot, the “problem” with Hamlet is the “excess of affect,” the problem in Richard III is the excess of objects.¹⁸ Richard's power in this scene derives from a knowledge he bears in his own body: an understanding of the way bodies can be made to mean more than they say. It is (to paraphrase Bourdieu) precisely because bodies do not, strictly speaking, speak for themselves that what they mean is always more than they say. And that meaning transposes the political and the libidinal through the power relations, whether conducted on the battlefield or in a lady's chamber, that organize both fields. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have pointed out about the symbolics of the sewer in nineteenth century Paris, “The melodramatic coercion of extreme opposites into close intimacy here becomes the ultimate truth of the social. For indeed the signs of the sewer could not be confined ‘under the surface.’ The sewer—the city's ‘conscience’—insisted, as Freud said of the hysterical symptom, in ‘joining in the conversation.’”¹⁹ Henry's body and its “sewage” “join in the conversation” that Richard's body has already set in motion; for Richard has turned Anne's hyperbolic monologue into dialogue, and has made the wounds speak, as it were, out of both sides of their mouths. Henry's body provides the material for two discursive trajectories—moral/political and sado-erotic—in which these apparently “extreme opposites” are coerced, melodramatically to be sure, “into close intimacy.” The question to be addressed now is: How does this “become the ultimate truth of the social”?

The “attraction of repulsion” arises from a confrontation with a pleasure that cannot be “legitimately” owned (Stallybrass and White, Transgression, p. 144). This pleasure, refracted through the ritual disavowals of prurience, may particularize an individual's history or may be general—the “ultimate truth of the social.” But the truth of the subject is also always a representation of the ultimate truth of the social. Henry's corpse functions in the courtship scene the way Richard's body functions in the rest of the play. For just as Henry's wounds “speak” him as portentous object without his “consent,” so is Richard's body made to enunciate a discourse that doesn't originate in his own utterance.

Richard's sense of what's at stake in bodies is foregrounded when, comparing himself to Edward, he says Anne will nevertheless “debase her eyes” on him. Anne exclaims earlier in this scene that Richard “infects” her eyes. But ocular “infection” is the demonic form of ocular communion: penetration that threatens rather than reinforces structural integrity. That Richard can sway a woman who begins by pleading for “proper” vision, a woman who at one point tells him to get “out of [her] sight,” does seem to enable Richard to creep into a new kind of favor with himself. And yet, it is unclear which side of his mouth he speaks out of when he says,

I do mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds—although I cannot—
Myself to be a marvellous proper man.
I’ll be at charges for a looking glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favour with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.

(252-259)

Richard realizes that he does have a kind of power to transform the way others regard him; he is clearly stunned by the success of his courtship. But we can also see a desire for a different kind of self-regard, as he says, “Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass.” These lines are no doubt ironic, and we can imagine Richard capering facetiously as he says them. But if we recall his earlier remarks which are echoed here, it is apparent that his successful courtship has given him a perspective in which he is willing to “descant” on his deformity. Richard begins to find more habitable an image partly of his own making, or at least to envision the possibility of eliding his monstrousness from public perception, demonstrating how rhetorical success reorganizes bodily subjectivity. Richard's achievement in the erotic signals the possibility that language can reconstruct his “person” in terms of how it shows itself showing itself; and that he might revise his status as the object of public gaze in other arenas. If he can translate ocular “infection” to ocular communion with Anne, perhaps he can do so elsewhere.

Notes

1. Marjorie Garber's exploration, in Shakespeare's Ghost Writers, of the way Shakespeare uses the “historicity” of the figure of Richard pushes beyond the usual bounds of the Tudor-propaganda debate into the deconstructive politics of historiography. Garber argues that all history writing is essentially propagandistic insofar as it is “deformed” by the invested, “authorized” writing hand; and that the amplification of Richard's deformity over time signifies the inevitable deformations of history itself. Richard's character “marks the inevitability of deformation in the registers of the political and historiographical” (p. 33). Thus, the writing of history, like the writing of Richard, exemplifies “the dangers of re-membering, of history as an artifact of memory” (p. 44). Garber eloquently asserts that to remember is to re-member, to re-assemble, to assign new members to something; and that the figure of Richard is just such a “remembering”: “Richard is not only deformed, his deformity is itself a deformation. His twisted and misshapen body encodes the whole strategy of history as a necessary deforming and unforming—with the object of re-forming—the past” (p. 36). The suggestion here is that Richard is History: both are prodigious, both are untimely (in the sense of being constructed after the fact), both are misshapen by authorized and authorizing hands.

   In what I take to be the central point of her argument, Garber asserts that, like history, and “created by a similar process of ideological and polemical distortion, Richard's deformity is a figment of rhetoric, a figure of abuse, a catachresis masquerading as a metaphor. In a viciously circular manifestation of neo-Platonic determinism, Richard is made villainous in appearance to match the desired villainy of his reputation, and then is given a personality warped and bent to compensate for his physical shape” (p. 36). While I agree with Garber's characterization of the vicious circle of historiography Richard finds himself in, and finds in himself, her exposition seems haunted by what it leaves out, forecloses on something about Richard that, however anamorphically, demands to be seen. As Garber herself points out early in her argument, “no account of Shakespeare's literary or political motivations in foregrounding his protagonist's deformity is adequate to explain the power and seductiveness of Richard's presence in the plays. Indeed, the very fascination exerted by the historical Richard III seems to grow in direct proportion to an increase in emphasis on his deformity” (p. 31). But emphasizing his deformity as standing solely for the process of writing a history play also seems inadequate “to explain the power and seductiveness of Richard's presence in the play.” In her understandable concern not to essentialize “character,” Garber ends an otherwise convincing discussion almost where one wants it to begin. Accepting the play’s legerdemain by reinscribing the deformed figure of Richard as a “catachresis masquerading as metaphor,” her account misses the way that Shakespeare is representing a subjective identity between metaphor and catachresis: the fact that anyone who is made to “stand for” him or herself will feel “incorrect” or warped, like a bad facsimile of some more “authentic” “original”—that the identity coerced by metaphor is always itself a “masquerade,” always itself purchased by catachresis. In subsuming the figure of Richard under the larger conceptual carapace of “Shakespeare's ghost writers,” Garber's account doesn't explain the “power and seductiveness of Richard's presence in the play” because it leaves out the ghost in the machine.

2. The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 22.

3. That the history of criticism of this scene is largely one of incredulity is evident in the vehemence of the criticism that argues for its psychological verisimilitude. Donald Shupe, in “The Wooing of Lady Anne: A Psychological Inquiry,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 28-36, argues that Richard's Machiavellian skill at manipulation makes the scene psychologically believable; and Denzell Smith, in “The Credibility of the Wooing of Anne in Richard III,” Papers on Language and Literature 7 (1971): 199-202, argues for the psychological “realism” of the scene as well. However, for an interesting analysis of why the scene doesn't work for Richard precisely because he does accomplish his aim, see Marguerite Waller, “Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A ‘Deconstructive,’ ‘Feminist’ Rereading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare's Richard III,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 159-174. Dolores Burton, in “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III” (Shakespeare Studies 14 [1981]: 55-84), analyzes the wooing of Anne in terms of classical rhetoric, noting that Richard triumphs over Anne because of his skill with forensic or judicial oratory: “Because this oratory of the courtroom attempts to defend or to blame a person's behavior, it looks back to the past, develops arguments from the special topics of justice and injustice, and employs as its means accusation and defense” (p. 62). It is a rhetoric of disputation, and Richard wins because “despite [Anne’s] ability to match Gloucester's language word for word and phrase for phrase, [she] is no match for his logic” (p. 65). Although Burton's interpretation is splendid in its attention to the details and nuances of the language, I don't agree with her sense of what is at stake in the scene. For Burton, the many references to eyes and sight must be understood in the sonnet tradition, the language of which Richard deploys against Anne. She makes no connection between Anne's plea for proper vision in this scene and the larger politics of visual evidence in the play.

4. I refer here to a paper Goldberg read at the meeting of the English Institute at Harvard University, August 1991. Brilliantly linking the historical and legal construction of “sodomy laws” (in which the “crimes” are never uniformly defined in, as Goldberg puns, “fundamental” terms) with representations of Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war, Goldberg argued the way in which constructions of “sodomy” and homosexuality are grafted onto figures that a culture wishes to demonize by coding as “unnatural.” Focusing his discussion on an advertisement for a T-shirt that depicted Saddam's face on the rear end of a camel (“in place of” the animal's anus), Goldberg asserted that through such strategies Saddam's “monstrousness” was visually and discursively driven home, and that justification of the war synecdochized the moral imperatives of heterosexism with those of national sovereignty. The paper, entitled “Sodometries,” is now part of Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).

   Patricia Parker, in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), also discusses the “preposterous” as a “rhetorical figure or trope—hysteron proteron, routinely Englished in the Renaissance as ‘The Preposterous.’ Puttenham and others described it as a form of verbal reversal, one which sets ‘that before which should be behind’ (Puttenham) or ‘that which ought to be in the first place … in the second’ (Angell Day)” (p. 67). Parker skillfully analyzes this figure in terms of the politics of gender and role reversals and the threat they pose to the ideological syntax of “proper order”—whether of history, inheritance laws, or gender relations.

   And Joel B. Altman, in “‘Preposterous Conclusions’: Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello” (Representations 18 [Spring 1987]: 129-157), uses the figure of hysteron proteron to argue that Shakespeare's characters in general, and in Othello in particular, deploy it in their attempts to construct “probability” out of what the playwright himself represented as “radical improbability” (p. 132). Arguing that the trope of the preposterous operates for characters when, “under the sway of passion, effects precede causes (rationally construed) and ends precede means” (p. 133), Altman persuasively demonstrates in his sophisticated rhetorical analysis that Shakespeare “would seem to have had considerable purchase upon a probabilism that was beginning to acquire the dangerous features of an ideology in his time” (p. 133).

5. David Holbrook, Sex and Dehumanization in Art, Thought and Life and Life in Our Time (London: Pitman Publishing, 1972), p. 24.

6. Richard's skill at the Latin rhetorical form insinuatio is manifest. In this one scene he fulfills seven out of the eight criteria of the form elaborated by Edward Corbett in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 310. Richard (1) denies the charges that have created prejudices against him, (2) admits the charges but denies their alleged magnitude, (3) cites a compensating virtue or action, (4) attributes the discrediting action to an inescapable compulsion, (5) cites others who were guilty of the same thing but were not charged, (6) substitutes a different motive or cause for the one alleged, (7) inveighs against calumny and malicious insinuation in general.

7. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), pp. 67, 69-70.

8. I borrow the term “homosocial” from Eve Sedgwick's powerful account of the representational strategies and structures of male bonding within a “heterosexual,” homophobic culture; see Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). In defining her use of the term, Sedgwick says that “‘homosocial’ is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homosexual,’ and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual.’ In fact, it is applied to such activities as ‘male bonding,’ which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality. To draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (p. 1). Relying heavily on the concept of triangulated desire developed by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Sedgwick articulates the structure relevant to my use of the term here: “What is most interesting … in his study is his insistence that, in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the two rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent” (p. 21).

9. See Peter Travis, “The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England,” Early Drama to 1600, Acta 13 (1985): 17-36.

10. Perhaps three of the most important and influential works on the shifting historical standards of what one might call orificial decorum are Elias, The History of Manners; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). For a brilliant critical synthesis and theoretical analysis of representations of and debates around the body and its apertures in early modern England, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 1-26.

11. Stanbury, “The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,” PMLA 106, no. 5 (October 1991): 1083-1093, esp. 1085. Women are supposed to be objects, not subjects, of the gaze; and as Stanbury puts it, the key question is “Why does Mary seem exempted in this setting from taboos against a woman's gaze, particularly one focused on the male body?” (p. 1086). She argues that “medieval passional lyrics present a drama of transgression,” but that “Mary is not prohibited from looking … because a nearly dead body is hardly an erotic spectacle; moreover, her gaze is maternal and compassionate, entitled by a mother's right. Yet, I would counter, these categories—what is maternal, what is erotic—are not that simply fixed … What we do not see when we look at a tableau as familiar as, for example, Giotto's Lamentation are its transgressions, its violations of ordinary boundaries through gestures that conflate Eros, Thanatos, and maternal power” (p. 1086).

    Stanbury is right that the categories above, as well as others, are not simply fixed and that they exceed their own boundaries as well as overlap the boundaries of other codes of “decorum” all the time. Such transgression is, I would add, precisely what gives these representations their power of fascination: they represent less fully their own subject matter than they do what's involved, evoked, and conjured in the act of “apprehending” it.

12. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); and idem, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). Dianne Hunter, editor of Seduction and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), argues in her introduction (pp. 1-10) that masculine subjectivity in patriarchal Western culture depends on its ability to dominate and subjugate others (most notably women) with and to the gaze. Norman Bryson, in Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), argues that the gaze enacts “a certain violence (penetrating, piercing, fixing)” and that it “actively seeks to confine what is always on the point of escaping or slipping out of bounds” (p. 93).

    Barbara Freedman, in her fine study Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), has argued that the Renaissance stage in particular, and theatricality in general, are site and trope respectively for representations of the gaze that are best illuminated by Lacan's theory of subjectivity. Freedman points out the ways Shakespearean drama fetishizes the observed and the observing. And she asserts that its requirement that the audience identify with the performative acts, as well as physical outlines, of the figures on stage reproduces the conditions of subject formation charted in Lacanian psychoanalysis: “Méconnaissance is Lacan's term for the misrecognitions through which the ego is constructed and the illusory identifications, whether of gender or ideology, through which it is sustained. The term reminds us that Lacan's mirror stage has broader implications, especially because the mirror stage need not rely on a physical mirror per se … For Lacan, self-identification is based on a representation that alienates as it procures: ‘Man becomes aware of this reflection from the point of view of the other; he is an other for himself’ … Desire and aggressivity mark the distance between subject and its ideal image, termed ideal because it can never be fully assimilated” (p. 53). It is just such a “procurement” that the gaze establishes: one that constitutes the gazing observer as subject precisely by “alienating” as “Other” the object of the gaze.

13. Stephen Greenblatt argues that discrepancies between gender roles, conceptions of the male and female bodies, and the conditions of cross-dressing in Shakespearean comedy generate a “chafing” or “friction” that produces erotic “heat,” both within the play and for the audience as well. Using a masturbatory image as the central trope for an allegory of theater-as-foreplay, Greenblatt's “case” is more persuasive for courtship in the comedies than for courtship in the tragedies, where the “friction” of “foreplay” (which is where the comedies tend to end—with preconsummated nuptials) usually leads to an eroticism that inevitably invokes male sexual anxiety and violence. See “Fiction and Friction,” in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. pp. 88-93. Interestingly, I discovered after writing this chapter that Greenblatt amplifies his statement that “erotic chafing is the central means by which characters in [comedies] realize their identities and form loving unions” (p. 88) with a footnote in which he confesses, “I think Shakespeare first realized the erotic energy of chafing in the wooing scene in Richard III” (p. 183). If Richard and Anne Neville generate this kind of erotic “friction,” it is the result of a temporary suspension of their “proper” gender roles as they jockey for position and power over Henry's feminized corpse, a suspension that will quickly be canceled once Anne capitulates to the frictional eroticism that can be celebrated in the comedies only because it is always, ultimately, under male control.

14. See Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 123-142.

15. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 140.

16. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. xiv.

17. Marcel Mauss has described the way gift exchange binds all involved in the obligation to give, to receive, and to reciprocate and consequently weaves them into a fabric of social constraints that have little to do with the individual “wills” of the participants. The obligation is especially compelling for the recipient, who is “free” neither to refuse a gift nor to extricate herself from the “debt” incurred. See The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hall (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 39.

    One could object that what we are seeing between Anne and Richard is merely political strategy and sexual dissembling, and therefore that there is nothing “genuinely” erotic about the scene. And certainly one could argue that within the patriarchal relations that structure all relations in the play, we see only the hobbled kind of eroticism that a habitus structured around murderous phallic aggression is capable of producing. But these objections would be more interesting for what they tend to assume rather than point up about the erotic. To say that there could not be any genuine erotic attraction between Richard and Anne would be to assume (1) that eroticism is always based on a benevolent libidinal investment, and (2) that it is a fixed category that does not shift shape, target, and configuration. It would be to assume, mistakenly, that there is nothing erotic about dissembling itself. (Whatever we might think of them, figures such as Kierkegaard's “seducer” Johannes, Choderlos de Laclos' Valmont and Merteuil, Richardson's Lovelace, not to mention the more recent success of a cultural figure like Madonna, give the lie to this.) It is to repeat the mistake that medieval church censors made when they failed to see erotic transgression in the gaze of the Virgin: to assume that the matter being represented (the ostensible object of desire) is more “authentic” than the process involved in representing and apprehending it—more real than what gets set in motion around the object “itself.” Such an assumption posits an absolute division between forms of desire, such as ambition, lust, envy, competition, love—a division that is ideological rather than essential. In terms of the erotic effect of the scene, it little matters what Richard's “real” aims are or what his “darker purpose” is.

18. See Jacqueline Rose, “Hamlet: The Mona Lisa of Literature,” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 124-125.

19. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 141. Of course, Richard's body is not yet the “bourgeois body,” with its repression of the “lower bodily stratum”; there is not yet the full stratification and policing of acceptable/unacceptable bodily spheres as they make their way into discourse (and as discourse makes its way into bodily spheres).

    And yet Francis Barker, in The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), is wrong to assert that there were in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries no distinctions between the individual's physical person and the bodily stratum of the social, which he terms “the plenum.” Throughout the first tetralogy, particular bodies are very much in the way. They “obstruct” unauthorized political movement; and they do so because they belong to persons who stand in a “legitimate” or illegitimate relationship to accession to royal power by virtue of bloodlines. Richard's body is discreditable because it “reveals” Richard's “true” relation to the social and political, a relation which is designated monstrous and perverse. But it is no mere metaphor. The tension between the body as metaphor and as all-too-concrete is precisely what constitutes Richard's identity; others produce figurative material out of a body that has condensed around Richard like a shell, disqualifying him from utterances of metaphorical signification because of inevitable and literal self-implication.