SOURCE: “Thriftless Ambition: The Tyrants of Shakespeare and Jonson,” in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 118-26.

[In the following excerpt, Bushnell asserts that in his role as tyrant, Richard III discovers that lust and political ambition are interconnected, so that in order to exert power over people, he must also “abase” himself by playing the role of seducer or suppliant to Anne and Elizabeth.]

Shakespeare and Jonson portrary tyranny by showing how sexual and political desire both shapes an ambitious tyrant's image and undoes it. More specifically, Richard III and Sejanus (and in a different way, Macbeth) combine ambition with the tyrant's traditional attribute of lust when they rely on seduction in grasping for the crown. In doing so, however, they trap themselves in a web of dependency, for in the end they need to be desired themselves as much as they want the crown. In this confusion, where the seducer abases himself to achieve power, the traditional opposition between the masculine king and effeminate tyrant is both set up and deconstructed. By the time they achieve their purpose, these tyrants find that the power and self they built up through the process of gaining the crown are highly unstable.¹

In developing this link between ambition and sexual desire, Shakespeare's and Jonson's tyrant plays thus demonstrate an acute self-consciousness of how the traditional rhetoric of statecraft worked in forming the sovereign's as well as the tyrant's image. In these plays, both tyrants and kings manipulate the traditional images of tyrannical lust and effeminacy in seeking to consolidate their own power; in doing so, however, they expose the conventional nature of that imagery. Even as these plays support the earlier characterization of the tyrant as fragmented by desire and subjected to women, by focusing on how power is acquired and legitimized through use of that characterization, they reveal its ideological basis. The morality plays dismantle the prince's character when he gives into temptation and desire; Shakespeare's and Jonson's plays, however, more in the fashion of Buchanan's Baptistes, demonstrate how to create a political image in a tradition of rhetoric that defines authority by moral character and gender identity. This exposure of the political process extends beyond the uses of sexuality and gender to strip bare the complex strategies of using antithesis to paint a political character.

Shakespeare's Richard III is notorious for being, in Bacon's words, a “tyrant both in title and regiment.”² Throughout the play Richard is enveloped in the traditional imagery of beast and devil, or “hell's black intelligencer” (4.4.71), that brands the Renaissance tyrant both when he seeks the crown and when he possesses it.³ Yet what distinguishes Richard from his predecessors is his pleasure in this black image. Rather than boasting of his own bright splendor in Herodic fashion, he privately glories in his monstrosity. As much as he publicly dons the mask of the saint, Richard privately adopts rather than rejects his accusers' rhetoric to construct his own version of sovereignty.⁴

Richard's private acknowledgment of his wickedness and his public display of virtue are both part of his admitted role as “the formal Vice, Iniquity,” who moralizes “two meanings in one word” (3.1.82—83). Like Ambidexter's swearing by his honesty, his very profession of sincerity and admission of his own playing are characteristic of the Vice, and of what James I calls the tyrant's “counterfeiting the saint” (see, for example, 1.3.333-37).⁵ In fashioning the tyrant directly in terms of the Vice, the morality tyrant's double, Shakespeare thus departed from the tradition of the public exhibition of tyrannical rage and rant.⁶ As a Vice, Richard displays less Cambyses' or Herod's spectacular and boasting rhetoric than the Vice's rhetorical flexibility and obsequiousness: he can fit his terms and face to any situation and weeps as much as any Ambidexter does. Although Cambyses' histrionic nature is implied by his alliance with Ambidexter, Cambyses himself is not a hypocrite in the conventional sense of the word; further, as legitimate king, he is allowed his public and violent displays of power. Until he is king, however, Richard's power cannot be displayed in public but must work indirectly and secretly.

Richard's Vice-like character is thus largely a function of his usurpation as opposed to his reign; when king, he seems to have more and more difficulty sustaining his various roles. Once he is on the throne, Richard's self-control and mastery over others immediately begin to falter, and he first gives way to a kind of Herodic public rage. As the Vice does, Richard best holds power over others by covertly manipulating his equals or superiors. But he has little success in exercising public authority by ordering and subduing inferiors. In this identity as Vice-tyrant thus lie Richard's strength and his weakness: he is strong in his secrecy and ability to present a multitude of faces, yet he is weak insofar as he depends on his subordinate position, and thus on others, to construct his own power.⁷ In particular, like the Vice, Richard fashions power through strategies of seduction, making himself a powerful object of desire and thus reversing the image of tyrannical desire in which passion is expressed through sexual domination.

Richard's seductions draw on the convention of the tyrannical power of sexual desire even as they invert that convention. The tyrant's lust conventionally marks both his vulnerability and the essence of his power. Even though it drives him to rape and oppress others, lust unmans the tyrant when the object of his desire comes to control him. Richard, however, explicitly avoids being called lustful. He describes himself as lacking sexual desire (because, in fact, he is undesirable);⁸ instead, his “soul's desire” is sovereignty (3 Henry VI 3.2.128). At the same time, like the Vice he sees how to manipulate the desires of others in order to control them. Ultimately, however, Richard cannot escape the prison of both lust and ambition, in which his self-image becomes inextricable from his seductions of others.

When seeking sovereignty, the ambitious Richard first carefully manipulates the traditional association between lust and tyranny in order to undermine his enemies' claims, thus converting his own lack of sexual desire into a kingly and virtuous chastity.⁹ Practically, by representing Edward as lustful, Richard wants to “infer the bastardy of Edward's children” (Richard III 3.5.75) in order to bolster his own claim to the throne. But he goes further to suggest Edward's character as a tyrant, commanding Buckingham that in speaking against Edward he should

Moreover, urge his hateful luxury
And bestial appetite in change of lust,
Which stretch’d unto their servants, daughters, wives,
Even where his raging eye or savage heart
Without control, lusted to make a prey.

[3.5.80-84]

Richard also paints a picture of Edward as uxorious:¹⁰ in response to Clarence's complaining that such a “toy” as a prophecy should send him to the Tower, Richard carps, “Why, this it is, when men are rul’d by women” (1.1.62). In the earlier trilogy, Henry VI is explicitly condemned as an effeminate prince (1 Henry VI 1.1.35), not because of any addiction to pleasure but because of his willingness to give in to others, and especially to the virago Margaret.¹¹ In Richard's accusations Edward's effeminate tyranny combines seeking after pleasure with such subjection to the rule of women.

At Baynard's castle, Richard's appearance dramatizes the contrast he wishes to create between his own chaste and manly character and that of the effeminate and lustful Edward. Buckingham has already circulated public pronouncements that not only touch upon the bastardy of Edward's children but also stress “th’ unsatiate greediness of [Edward’s] desire, / And his enforcement of the city wives, / His tyranny for trifles, his own bastardy,” as opposed to Richard's warlike manner, “wisdom in peace,” his “bounty, virtue, fair humility” (3.7.7-17).¹² Buckingham then displays Richard as a holy man who does not know the body's pleasures:

Ah ha, my lord, this prince is not an Edward!
He is not lulling on a lewd love-bed,
But on his knees at meditation;
Not dallying with a brace of courtezans,
But meditating with two deep divines;
Not sleeping, to engross his idle body,
But praying, to enrich his watchful soul.
Happy were England, would this virtuous prince
Take on his Grace the sovereignty thereof.

[3.7.71-79]

Richard's manipulation of statecraft's description of tyranny thus converts his own exclusion from sexual pleasure into a virtue, legitimizing his claim to sovereignty on “natural” terms in contrast to Edward's “unnatural” desire.

Even though Richard condemns Edward's desire, at Baynard's castle Richard himself is figured as eminently desirable in both erotic and political terms. Buckingham sets up a scene of seduction in which Richard, not the Lord Mayor, is the one to be seduced. He instructs Richard: “And be not easily won to our requests: / Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take it” (3.7.50-51). They scheme thus to paint an image of a passive, womanish Richard, one filled with “tenderness of heart / And a gentle, kind effeminate remorse” (3.7.210-211). He is now the object of desire; the others court him, Buckingham beseeching, “Refuse not, mighty lord, this proffer’d love,” while Catesby echoes, “O make them joyful; grant their lawful suit” (3.7.202-3). The very desirability of this “sweet Prince” is wrapped up in his passivity. He submits unwillingly: “For God doth know, and you may partly see / How far I am from the desire of this” (3.7.235-36). As Heilman puts it (from a man's point of view), Richard's language is such as “might be used by a woman coyly yielding to seduction.”¹³ The amorous rhetoric of the scene is familiar from the erotic politics of Elizabeth's court, but here the “virgin Queen” is the chaste Protector, Richard. Thus, even when he is at his most “manly” in his invulnerability to women, Richard is “effeminate” in his passivity and power to excite desire.

As a seduction scene, this scene parallels the two other scenes where Richard is the seducer, once of Anne and once of Elizabeth. Adopting Petrarchan conventions, Richard sets the terms of the earlier scene, so that Anne “plays the maid's part” to Richard's wooer.¹⁴ Yet by using these conventions, Richard describes the beloved's power as a kind of tyranny, making him her slave. Specifically, Richard makes Anne herself the cause of Henry's and Edward's deaths:

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

[1.2.121-24]

Whereas at Baynard's castle Richard uses the woman's image to make himself powerful, here he makes Anne into an image of the power he seeks, at the same time that he woos her as a means to it.¹⁵ On one level, this strategy inverts the model of tyrannical desire, whereby power is the means of gratifying lust, for here Richard imitates love as a means to gain power. On another level, like the scene at Baynard's castle, this scene suggests Richard's need to be the object of desire as well as the one who desires: he is both the man who possesses and the woman who submits.

The successful wooing of Anne pleases Richard, who finds himself to be desirable in playacting love:

I do mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds (although I cannot)
Myself to be a marv’llous 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.

[1.2.252-59]

As Marguerite Waller suggests, Anne “can allow him to see reflected in her a self that is not deformed but proper in the sense of physically complete and sexually eligible”¹⁶ (even if he does not quite believe it); that is, she legitimizes him as a “proper” self because she desires him. This scene of seduction is thus instrumental to Richard's drive to the throne, not only because of his practical need for the alliance with Anne; it is important because throughout the play that desirability, created through such histrionic seductions, constructs a “proper” and sovereign self. It is the same character he later creates in the scene with the Lord Mayor, where he must be desired in order to be granted the name of king.¹⁷

But constructed in this way, Richard's self and sovereignty are highly unstable. Once he becomes king, his plays of seduction begin to fail, and Richard falls out of love with himself. The seduction of Elizabeth differs significantly from that of Anne: first, in that it is indirect, the appeal being made to the mother rather than to the beloved; second, in that it ultimately fails. Richard uses the same rhetoric with which he ensnared Anne, saying to the mother that once he conquers the young Elizabeth, then she shall find herself “sole victoress, Caesar's Caesar” (4.4.336). He again transfers agency and responsibility to the beloved, insofar as he implies that the welfare of all England depends on Elizabeth's choosing him:

In her consists my happiness and thine;
Without her, follows to myself and thee,
Herself, the land, and many a Christian soul,
Death, desolation, ruin and decay.

[4.4.406-9]

Once again, Richard offers the women power over himself and all the realm while he seeks power through them. Yet the tone of the scene is different, insofar as Elizabeth, rather than Richard, seems in control of the rhetoric until the end. Further, although Richard believes that he has succeeded in changing her mind, he does not exult in his power over her, and the next few moments show him absentminded and weak rather than triumphant (and as we find out later, he has in fact not succeeded). Even after he calls Elizabeth a “relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman” (4.4.431), some twenty lines later he himself snaps out: “My mind is chang’d.” In this moment he becomes the woman he has just condemned as changeable. Whereas before the double role of seducer and the object of desire empowered him, here it weakens him.

Richard's lack of success with Elizabeth accompanies his change from seducer-usurper to sovereign, marking his inability to make the transition. While now he should not have to resort to the rhetoric of seduction but should only command, he fails. Not only does he miscarry with Elizabeth, but now he does not know how to keep the “love” of a man such as Buckingham. He removes the tie that binds them together as “two selves” when he refuses Buckingham the goods and title that the duke wants and for which he has loved Richard. As Richard's seductions falter, he loses both political control and the sovereignty of his self. His terrified soliloquy of act 5, scene 3, enacts the collapse of his self constructed through desire:

What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I [am] I.
Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.

[5.3.182-90]

Richard can imagine himself neither as a lover nor as the beloved. This soliloquy thus denies both the desire and desirability that earlier defined his histrionic constructions of sovereignty.

Notes

1. See Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), for an account of this process. One clear exception to this description of tyranny is the portrait of Claudius in Hamlet; since that play is concerned more with tyrannicide than with the tyrant, however, I have chosen not to consider it here. On the treatment of tyrants and tyrannicide in Hamlet, see Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 2.

2. Cited by W. A. Armstrong, “The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant,” Review of English Studies 22 (1946):166.

3. On the association with the devil, see Armstrong, p. 171.

4. In particular, Richard appropriates the bestial imagery that the other characters use to denounce him in order to paint a vision of his destiny of power. Queen Elizabeth calls him a tiger (2.4.50-52), and Margaret calls him a “bottled spider,” a “poisonous, bunched-back’d toad,” (1.3.241-45), a dog (288-90), and a “hell-hound” (4.4.48). The images of bestiality echo the form of Richard's own crippled body, “an indigested and deformed lump” (3 Henry VI, 5.6.51). Yet, in 3 Henry VI Richard himself interprets the prodigious form of his own body, born feet first and with teeth, as a sign that he was born into this world “to make haste” and to “snarl, and bite, and play the dog” (3 Henry VI 5.6.77). Rather than trying to counteract this rhetorical onslaught (except by turning it back on the originator), Richard seizes on the shape of his bestial body as his destiny. Richard further uses his ugliness to support his public image as a saint; contrasting himself to the fair, conniving and corrupt courtiers, he claims he is naturally incapable of deception, because “I cannot flatter and look fair” (1.3.47).

5. See Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 398. See also W. A. Armstrong, “The Influence of Seneca and Machiavelli on the Elizabethan Tyrant,” Review of English Studies 24 (1948): 19-35.

6. See Antony Hammond, in introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard III (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 99-100, who notes that in portraying Richard as Vice, Shakespeare followed up “the hints found in More.” Richard's suppression of rant in favor of hypocrisy corresponds with the play's remarkable lack of stage violence. Shakespeare's representation of Richard thus differs markedly from both Thomas Legge’s, in Richardus Tertius, and from that in The True Tragedie of Richard III. Legge's tyrant is Senecan: as Churchill says, “his one resource is the one resource of the Senecan tyrant—the sword: his cry is always ‘tollantur hostes ense’”; relying on his counselors, he shows little of the craft of More's Richard—or Shakespeare's (George B. Churchill, Richard III up to Shakespeare: Palaestra X [Berlin: Mayer and Mueller, 1900], p. 377). The Richard of The True Tragedie, too, is “direct and forceful. He has little use for hypocrisy” (Churchill, p. 472). In this sense, Richard's tyrannical strategies are different from, yet related, to what Shakespeare depicts of Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece: Tarquin is a rapist, but Richard is a seducer. On the links between rape and tyranny, see Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare rev. ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), pt. 1, and Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).

7. For a largely psychoanalytic analysis of this structure of dependency, see Michael Neill, “Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics and Psychology in Richard III,” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 99-129. For a feminist analysis, 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. 159-74.

8. The corollary of this argument is Richard's evident misogyny: to him, women are not worth desire, since they do not care for him. See Madonne M. Miner, “‘Neither mother, wife, nor England's queen’: The Roles of Women in Richard III,” in The Women's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 35-55, on Richard's misogyny.

9. In general, according to Richard, Edward is corrupted by all forms of pleasure: Richard complains that, “O, he hath kept an evil diet long, / And overmuch consum’d his royal person” (1.1.139-40).

10. This strategy is also apparent in Legge's Richardus Tertius, where not only is a great deal of emphasis put on the role of Elizabeth, but we also find Richard complaining that “now the honor of England succumbs to a woman!” (Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius: A Critical Edition with a Translation, ed. Robert J. Lordi [New York: Garland, 1979], p. 274).

11. See Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), pp. 37-57, on the role of effeminacy in the Henry VI plays.

12. Shakespeare has himself elided the period of peace and good government following Edward's accession to the throne that More emphasizes at the beginning of his History of King Richard III (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2, ed. Richard S. Sylvester [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963], pp. 3-4).

13. Robert B. Heilman, “Satiety and Conscience: Aspects of Richard III,” in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 142.

14. See Edward I. Berry, Pattern of Decay: Shakespeare's Early History Plays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 78, on Richard's use of Petrarchan conventions.

15. See Ann Rosalind Jones, Currency of Eros, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, on the function of Petrarchan convention in the construction of the male self.

16. Waller, pp. 169-70. See also Neill, p. 112.

17. For an Oedipal reading of this effect, see Watson, pp. 25-26. Also see Watson on Richard's effort to “establish a royal identity blessed with the stability and integrity of a self that is born and not made” (p. 19). Cf. Richard P. Wheeler, “History, Character and Conscience in Richard III,” Comparative Drama 5 (1971-72): 301-21, on theatricality itself as Richard's weakness.