SOURCE: “Kings Games”: Stage Imagery and Political Symbolism in “Richard III,” in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts XX, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 17-30.

[In the essay below, Lyons suggests that, like actual monarchs such as Elizabeth I, Shakespeare's Richard III and Richmond resort to elaborate symbolism and theatrical performances to manipulate or to communicate with their subjects.]

“We Princes,” Queen Elizabeth said in 1586 to a deputation of her Lords and Commons, “are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed.” She was speaking of the need to observe all the proprieties in dealing with Mary Queen of Scots, and of the blame that she herself would incur if she made a false step. Two years earlier, an ambassador to her court had offered a somewhat more cynical appreciation of her acting talents: “She is a Princess who can act any part she pleases.” The two quotations can be taken to illustrate diverging views of royal theatricality.¹ According to Elizabeth, it was not by their own will that princess were “set on stages,” constrained to play a part that was largely prescribed for them, to a “duly” observing public. But the French ambassador suggested another possibility about her theatricality when he hinted that the Queen's grief over the death of one of her suitors may not have been entirely sincere. He suggested that the Queen's acting talent made her flexible, and that it could be put in the service of her pleasure or her will.

While a degree of tension between the two kinds of performance was evidently felt by some observers of Elizabeth's reign, her ability to combine them effortlessly was even more apparent.² Her enjoyment of pageantry, lavish costumes, and allegorical shows that extolled her mythical virtues also managed to express, with astute political sense, her love for her people and her feeling of kinship with them. In particular, as Frances Yates has shown, Elizabeth was adept at using the symbolism and ceremony of the past, chivalric and religious, for new ends. The iconography formerly associated with the cult of the Virgin Mary was used with some daring to promote her own cult as the “state Virgo,”³ and portraits of Elizabeth drew on every kind of symbolism that the Renaissance had to offer—Neoplatonic, Petrarchan, Catholic, Imperial—to portray her as the head of the reformed empire.⁴

The public management of royal symbols, because it was so conspicuous a feature of Elizabethan political life, is central to an understanding of Shakespeare's history plays. Since sacramental and ceremonial spectacle has always had close affiliations with historical drama, symbolic ritual is an important feature in all of these plays, in which crowns and thrones, coronation pageants, enthronement scenes, formal trials and royal entrances into cities, as well as other examples of spectacle, can be found. But while the sanctity of public ceremony is one of their subjects, the plays are not ceremonies for the audience. Their icons and stage images do indeed convey meanings—often conventionally and historically sanctioned ones, which iconographic scholarship can be helpful in recovering for the modern reader—but these meanings are inseparable from the dramatic situations of which they form a part. For this reason, critics who wish to interpret the history plays iconographically, concentrating on the traditional meanings of the stage images they present, must, like foreign legates at Elizabeth's court, see royal symbolism with its received meanings as interwoven with the willfulness of monarchs and the fluctuations of political situations.

When Shakespeare wrote Richard III, Machiavelli had already demonstrated the importance to a ruler of being able to manipulate appearances:

Men, on the whole, judge more by the eye than by the hand; because anyone can see, but it is permitted to few to touch. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few understand what you really are. … The herd is always taken in by appearances. …⁵

Richard associates himself with this aspect of Machiavellian theory, as well as with the villainous stereotype of the stage machiavel, when he declares himself in 3 Henry VI (III, ii, 182-92) to be like Proteus and other skillful deceivers. From the start of Richard III, he is proud of his ability to manage appearances. Stage imagery is therefore an extremely important feature of the play, not merely to convey abstract meanings about Richard's evil nature,⁶ but to express his skill, and later his failures, as a machiavellian manipulator of images. The iconography of the play functions differently during Richard's rise to power, when images of kingship and authority, however constant in their meanings, can be used by him for his own ends, than it does when he is king, and he is unable to project a real connection between himself and the signs of his office. In the latter part of the play, the symbols of kingship are shown with special emphasis to have the inviolable force that they would have in the commonplace books; they cannot be appropriated by a usurper without obvious dissonance and incongruity. If the use of royal symbolism at the end of the play seems simple and idealistic, it is no more so than the play's plot, in which the villainous king is punished and the man with sacred and unquestioned rights to the throne triumphs. The iconography of the play expresses its dramatic action.

From the start, as the second scene in the play with Lady Anne demonstrates, Richard seems able to wield others to his will by controlling their sense of what they are seeing, as well as what they are hearing. While language and visual image cannot, of course, be separated, it is not language alone that has won over Lady Anne; in Richard's retrospective triumph, it is “the plain devil and dissembling looks” (I, iii, 236). With a great deal of irony, he comments on how different Anne's image of him must now be from his own:

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. …

(I, ii, 253-57)

If Richard is able to surmont his physical appearance in people's minds, as he does in becoming a prospective husband for Lady Anne and in appearing like a straightforward, friendly person to Hastings (III, v, 50-55), he is able also to use his deformity when it suits his purposes, drawing from it meanings that further his plot. When Richard turns against Hastings, he accuses Mistress Shore (and, by association, Hastings) of witchcraft simply by displaying his deformed arm, and making the council dwell on the image of his deformity:

Then be your eyes the witness of their evil.
Look how I am bewitch’d; behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling wither’d up.
And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.

(III, iv, 69-74)

At this point in the play, Richard is sufficiently powerful politically that he can draw from the images he presents to others the meanings that are most useful to him. Other examples of Richard's command of appearances are evident in the tableaux that he stages in the earlier part of the play when he is rising to power. A striking instance is his and Buckingham's appearance in “rotten armor” when they convince the Lord Mayor that they have been defending London, and that their illegal acts are therefore justified by a state of emergency (III. v). An even more subtle example of state-management occurs when partly through Richard's doing, the Prince of Wales is deprived of the triumphant entry into London that a prospective king was entitled to.⁷ While there are some trumpets and attendants for the Prince (III, i), he “want[s]more uncles here to welcome” him, and he is melancholy from the “crosses on the way” (III, i, 4-6). The traditional welcome of a city to its king, associated with the joy of his subjects and the fertility of nature,⁸ is turned here into melancholy and impending death as the Prince, with justified forebodings, agrees to spend the time before his coronation in the Tower.

The most telling example, however, of Richard's ability to manipulate symbolic imagery—one that stands out because of the elaborateness of its preparation and the length of time it takes in performance—is the great scene (III, vii) where he pretends to refuse the crown that is being pressed upon him by Buckingham, the Lord Mayor, and a group of well-coached citizens. The scene has been orchestrated in advance by Buckingham with Richard, and their skill is demonstrated in its visual details and in the public significance that they make it communicate. Central to the scene is Richard's appearance with a prayer book, “aloft, between two Bishops” according to the stage direction, and Buckingham's gloss or “holy descant” (III, vii, 49) on how religious Richard is. Richard's appearance, however, does more than suggest his supposed piety. His strategically lofty eminence, as well as the bishops on either side of him, form a visual emblem of kingship, suggesting the coronation ceremony itself.

The sources of the image of the king flanked by bishops in the visual arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have been traced by Meyer Schapiro.⁹ According to his account, the image had its origin in the Biblical story of Moses' defeat of Amalek. In the 17th chapter of Exodus, Moses, accompanied by Aaron and Hur, is described as watching the battle of his troops from a hill, with the “rod of God” in his hand. When Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; when he dropped his hand, Amalek prevailed. So to ensure the victory of the Israelites, Aaron (the archetype of the priest) and his brother-in-law, Hur, held up Moses' hands while he sat on a stone. The story of Moses, supported on each side by Aaron and Hur, was transformed in the Middle Ages into a Christian image (Moses’ supported arms being thought to resemble a cross),¹⁰ and it was therefore incorporated into the iconography of theocratic kingship. The medieval king, like the Renaissance one, was anointed by the Church (a fact that Richard himself alludes to later in the play), and the visual representation of this relationship between the king and the Church was the image of the king flanked by bishops or by saints in episcopal dress.

The image of the Christian king flanked by bishops made its way into the English literary tradition; in the legendary history of King Arthur, for instance, Geoffrey of Monmouth described Arthur brought to his coronation by two bishops.¹¹ Accounts of actual coronations, furthermore, were popular in 16th-century England; for example, a detailed account (with no literary pretensions) of the coronation of Henry IV of France in the 1590's was translated into English; that account too describes the King brought into the coronation hall, “according to the custome,” by two bishops.¹² Or, to take a British example that preceded the writing of Shakespeare's play by some years, a picture attached to Stephen Hawes’ meditation on the coronation of Henry VIII shows Henry and Katharine of Aragon, crowns poised above their heads by the bishops that are flanking each of them, while above the royal couple are displayed their emblems: the rose of Henry, the pomegranate of Katharine.¹³ The most important example for Shakespeare's purposes occurred in a principal source for the play, Holinshed's Chronicles. Holinshed describes the procession of Richard III to his coronation at some length, and when he comes to the King himself he reports: “And on everie side of the king there went one bishop, that is to saie, the bishop of Bath, and the bishop of Durham.” Queen Anne is similarly accompanied in the procession: “Then followed queene Anne daughter to Richard earle of Warwike in robes like to the king, between two bishops. …”¹⁴

Shakespeare's transposition to the gallery scene of the conventional pictorial detail of the two bishops shows that his interest in iconography was primarily dramatic. He shifted this vivid detail from Holinshed's pageantry of coronation to the scene where Richard wishes to be perceived as the true king, and where the symbolism of coronation becomes an important part of his performance. There are no bishops present in the gallery scene as Holinshed describes it;¹⁵ it is Shakespeare who has amplified the scene iconographically, in accordance with his portrait of Richard as a master of deceptive stage management. And Buckingham, glossing the scene for the benefit of the crowd, gives the picture its motto and text, emphasizing not only Richard's piety but also his potential royalty in language that makes explicit the picture's traditional connections between king and clergy. The bishops, according to Buckingham, are “Two props of virtue for a Christian prince, / To stay him from the fall of vanity” (III, vii, 97-98). Insistently throughout the scene Buckingham explains the connection between religious principle and rulership, and when he draws Richard into the scene more actively as a participant, he addresses him by his familial, royal titles: “Famous Plantagenet, most gracious Prince” (III, vii, 100).

However sceptical his audience may be in accepting Richard's shameless presentation of himself and denigration of Edward and his heirs, he is, at this point in the play, in command of the tableaux which he presents and of their symbolic meanings. His language at the end of the scene, for example, seems to transform his deformity emblematically. He suggests that the “burden” of kingship which he is reluctantly agreeing to assume is a cross that he has to bear, like his hunchback, or that he is like the emblem representing religious Hope as a man with Fortune's wheel strapped to his back, who walks along, doubled over by his burden, yet supported by the staff of Hope:¹⁶

Whether or not a specific emblem was intended, Richard's method has affinities with the emblematic one; he is suggesting to the audience an image that is appropriate to his supposed reluctance and that is rich with moral meaning. His deformed figure is transformed by his language into an emblem of Christian patience and endurance, in line with the image of himself between two bishops as one associated with Christian kingship.

But while Shakespeare demonstrates, in Richard III, how traditional emblems and visual images can be misused, he does not (as he does in Richard II) call into question the meanings that such images convey. Richard himself depends on the stable meanings of symbols of kingship (including the coronation tableau whose history has just been considered), since he wants to attach them to himself. Rather, the last part of the play creates drama by revealing the distance between the false king and the emblems and ceremonies of royalty, showing that Richard, a usurper, cannot make the two fit together. The aural and visual symbols which he tries to appropriate to his own purpose exert a power that he cannot control once he actually becomes king.

A jarring note for any audience occurs in the pivotal scene right after his coronation (IV, ii), when with a great deal of pomp (Stage direction: “Sound a sennet. Enter Richard, in pomp, as King. …”) he ascends the throne, the seat of majesty, rich (as many commentators have shown) with symbolic significance as the source of theocratic power.¹⁷ But in the scene we are considering, the effect of the throne's importance is to underline the inappropriateness of Richard's presence and actions there. Mounted on the throne with great flourishes, presumably for the first time, he asks everyone but Buckingham to withdraw (“Stand all apart,” IV, ii, 1), thus dramatizing in visual terms that his eminence is not the summit of society's pyramid, but a lonely perch occupied by him alone in the temporary company of his accomplice in crime.¹⁸ The royal seat of England, separated in this way from the society to which it is meant to give order and coherence, becomes the private place where Richard plots the murder of the legitimate ruler, and where he is unable to assert his authority even over his accomplice (Buckingham hesitates to obey his wish to get rid of the two princes at this point).

Richard is now incapable of sustaining the ceremonial behavior that his crown and his position on the throne seem especially to call for. While he had been adept at using courtly language when he needed to earlier (for instance, in wooing Lady Anne), Buckingham's refusal to take his hints forces him to become brutally direct: “Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead” (IV, ii, 18). His murderous plotting is the opposite of kingly, and that point is soon enforced by the image of King Richard, descended from the throne which is still presumably within sight, brooding, soliloquizing, and entering into whispered private conversation with the assassin, Tyrrel.¹⁹ Visually, then, the scene is a highly effective one in which the throne, with its associations of legitimate authority, simply emphasizes by contrast Richard's crime and isolation, and his inability to sustain any kind of kingly language or gestures.

Richard's inability to project, except in a dissonant way, the meanings of the symbols with which he publicly associates himself is especially apparent in the significance that his own emblem or crest, the boar, acquires as the play progresses. The emblems that noblemen or noble families took for themselves in the Renaissance were public symbols of their honor and worth, displayed particularly on ceremonial occasions. Perhaps because such public emblems were artificial vestiges of the replicas of fierce animal forms that the leaders of primitive people took into battle to frighten the enemy,²⁰ the insignia of great noblemen tended to emphasize the aggressive aspects of animals: the lions of kings of Britain, the wolf that was an emblem of the Duke of Blois, or even the porcupine whose bristles warded off his enemies, the emblem of Louis XII of France.²¹ While occasionally a prince might associate himself with the gentler animals: the hen and its young, for example, signifying the ruler's motherly care for his people, or the domesticated ox, reaching its goal “step by step,” as the motto explained,²² the fiercer animals generally predominated, though it was a fierceness controlled by frozen, heraldic postures, or by the crown or other insignia of rule which were also present in the picture. Richard was therefore not unusual in taking as his emblem a fierce and unpleasant animal, whose aggressive qualities could be dramatized.

In Shakespeare's play, however, Richard's emblem loses its abstract, noble qualities, and becomes naturalized by the language of his victims and opponents. They are the ones who interpret it, and they stress only the ruthlessly destructive, sub-human qualities of the boar. Richard, in other words, is unable or unwilling to assert those qualities of the fierce animal—its courage or its strength²³—which would make it an appropriate symbol for him. It is entirely possible that the boar-crest itself, on banners or shields, was displayed to Elizabethan audiences of the play,²⁴ as it was to modern audiences of Laurence Olivier's film version. If so, the pictured emblem functioned as a commentary on those aspects of Richard's career which are least kingly in any positive sense. Here again, Shakespeare expands possibilities that were raised only very briefly in his source. In Shakespeare's play, the boar not only razes the head of Stanley in his dream, as it does in Holinshed's account, it is the terrifying animal that threatens the life of the hostage-son of Stanley, prisoner in the “sty of the most deadly boar” (IV, v, 2), and it becomes a rallying point, a negative image that Richmond can use to rouse Richard's enemies:

The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil’d your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowell’d bosoms—this foul swine
Is now even in the centre of this isle. …

(V, ii, 7-11)

The standard that is supposed to provide an abstract, unifying symbol for Richard's own forces is robbed of its symbolic qualities and elaborated in naturalistic and horrifying detail by his enemy.²⁵

Like all of the play's stage-spectacle, Richard's insignia, visually or verbally evoked, function dramatically, not merely as static symbol or decorative pagenatry catering to the audience's love of display. And in the last part of the play, as Richard loses control of the kingship, spectacle becomes especially important. One stage direction, as we have seen, reads “Enter Richard, in pomp, as King”; another reads “Enter Richmond, Oxford, Sir James Blunt, Sir Walter Herbert, and Others, with drum and colours” (V, ii)—an indication of the visual and aural ceremony with which the play abounds. But whereas Richard is able, earlier, to suggest the symbolism and ceremony of kingship by placing himself above his interlocutors between two bishops, it is precisely because he has used such images for his own advantage in his ascent to the throne that they lose, for him, their power to suggest publicly valuable qualities once he is king.

His inability to profit from royal ceremony expresses Richard's progressive inability to command any kind of language—visual or verbal—that testifies to more than his ruthless aspirations to power. On the verbal level, Queen Elizabeth points out to him, when he tries to get her consent to his marriage with her daughter, that all of his oaths—whether by his honor, his crown, or his “self,” whether by God or country—are meaningless because they have been misused. On the level of pomp and pageantry, Richard's efforts become more and more discordantly inappropriate also. When he meets the royal women he has wronged (IV, iv), he invokes ceremonial grandeur in desperate gestures that become almost comic—no longer the kind of comedy, however, that testifies to his exuberant mastery. The stage direction reads “Enter King Richard and his Train, marching with drums and trumpets,” but the flourishes and trumpets he commands are used to drown out the complaints of the women he has bereaved, complaints that he wants to minimize as the sound of scolding women:

A flourish, trumpets! Strike alarums, drums!
Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women
Rail on the Lord's anointed. Strike, I say! [Flourish. Alarums.]
Either be patient and entreat me fair,
Or with the clamorous report of war
Thus will I drown your exclamations.

(IV, iv, 149-54)

The sound effects available to the leader of a nation's army are desperately called on to drown out the legitimate cries of the bereaved, and the King—the Lord's anointed as he grandly calls himself—who should stop in his progress to hear the pleas of the weak and helpless,²⁶ cannot do so because he has caused their miseries in the first place. When Queen Elizabeth says to him that his golden crown hides a forehead that should be branded (IV, iv, 140-41), the audience is once again made aware of the disparity between Richard and the most significant emblem of his office.

At the very end of the play, the signs and portents which Richard has previously managed to his own advantage (for example, when he deceives Edward regarding the identity of the “G” who is prophesied to murder his heirs) work against Richard, while he becomes increasingly convinced of their importance. He becomes superstitious, reading in nature omens that will possibly be destructive to him. The sun, which he commands to shine at the beginning so that he can cast a shadow on the ground with his deformed figure, “disdains,” as he puts it, to shine at the end: “A black day will it be to somebody” (V, iii, 280). The dramatically inevitable end of his powerlessness to identify himself, even with noise and show, with the officially acceptable meanings of his crown or of his personal emblem, the boar, occurs in the account of his death. At this point, he receives no honors of any kind but is referred to simply as an animal (“the bloody dog is dead” V, v, 2), and the crown, taken from his corpse, is given to its rightful owner, who is told to restore it to its dignity: “wear it, enjoy it, and make much of it” (V, v, 7).

Richard III, then, is an optimistic play in its treatment of kingship, and one that is of course flattering to the Tudor monarchy that came in with Henry Richmond. The power of royalty and its symbols is never seriously questioned for the legitimate ruler, as it is in Richard II. Nonetheless, we can see, even in the earlier play, Shakespeare's ability to create dramatic interest out of what was recognized in his time as a significant tension between public symbols and the political purposes for which they were inevitably used. Unless such symbols could be seen as potentially insecure—susceptible to misunderstanding, ambiguity, or personal appropriation—they could be viewed only sacramentally or ceremonially, and it would be difficult to imagine subjects like kingship dramatically at all. The spate of history plays on the English public stage at the time Richard III was presented, however, is evidence that it was now natural to regard kingship dramatically: that is, to see the man and his role as potentially separable, and to see the symbolic trappings of kingship as possible vehicles of deception and self-aggrandisement. Even Holinshed's chronicle-account of English history points to the dramatic aspects of public ritual when he discusses Richard's staged acceptance of the crown:

And in a stage plaie, all the people know right well, that one plaieng the Soldan, is percase a sowter [shoemaker]; yet if one should can so little good, to shew out of season what aquaintance he hath with him, and call him by his owne name while he standeth in his maiestie, one of his tormentors might hap to breake his head (and worthie) for marring of the plaie. And so they said, that these matters be kings games, as it were stage plaies, and for the more part plaied upon scaffolds, in which poore men be but the lookers on. And they that wise be will meddle no further.²⁷

Richard III provides a simple example of the theatricalization of public symbols which Holinshed seems to see as a general condition of political life, because in the play it is the villainous king who misuses them and the rightful one—courageous, pious, interested in the unity and prosperity of the country—who embodies the stable and heroic qualities the symbols express. Nonetheless, Richard and his dynamic theatrics give us the most memorable and often the most engaging moments of the play of which he is the center. In subsequent history plays by Shakespeare, the lines between heroes and villains will be even less clearly drawn, and no king will be so true that he does not have to play “kings games.”

Notes

1. J. E. Neal, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), p. 119, and J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I: A Biography (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 263. Both citations are used by Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 52, and p. 187, n. 39.

   In this paper, all references to Shakespeare's plays are to the Peter Alexander edition (London: Collins, 1958). In all quatations, u and v have been regularized.

2. See, for instance, Neale, Queen Elizabeth, pp. 59-63, for a description of the pageantry, allegorical shows, etc., that preceded Elizabeth's cornoation, and for some criticism (again, by foreign legates) of the personal stamp that she put on these proceedings, which she obviously enjoyed thoroughly.

3. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 76-80.

4. Ibid., pp. 112-20, esp. p. 116.

5. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and intro., A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1963), p. 96.

6. Soji Iwasaki's often illuminating iconographic study of the play emphasizes, for the most part, Richard's visual connections with such figures as Saturn, Time, and Death. The Sword and the Word: Shakespeare's Tragic Sense of Time (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1973), first section.

7. For the Prince's entrance as a “muted” version of the triumphal entry, with ominous associations, see Alice V. Griffin, Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage (New Haven: College and University Press, 1951), pp. 41-42, and Martha Hester Fleischer, The Iconography of the Elizabethan History Play (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1974), pp. 60-61.

8. The progresses of Queen Elizabeth I were often associated with a pastoral nature that was both enlivened and tamed by her; it was only at her departure that death and mourning were represented as taking over (Griffin, pp. 134-36). Traditionally the king's entry into a city was accompanied not only by the acclaiming shouts of the populace, but also with flower-strewing that symbolized his association with the fertility of nature. For a discussion of the iconography of royal entries, associated with Christ's entry into Jerusalem or with Solomon, the “Expected One,” entering Zion, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “The ‘King's Advent’ and the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” The Art Bulletin, XXVI, no. 4 (December 1944), 207-31.

9. Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973).

10. On the Christian significance commonly read by the Church Fathers into the image of Moses with his arms extended, see Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum Futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1950), pp. 145-46 and 195-96. This figure was well known in Renaissance iconography: see, for example, the second emblem in The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin (London, 1591), which explains the hieroglyphical significance of the large letter T on the basis of the Moses-Amalek story and the Cross.

11. Cited by Schapiro, n. 42.

12. The Order of the Ceremonie observed in the annointing and Coronation of the most Christian King of France and Navarre, Henry the IIII, of that name. … translated by E. A. (London, n. d.), B₂v.

13. Stephen Hawes, A Joyfull medytacyon to all Englonde of the coronacyon of our moost naturall soverayne lorde kynge henry eyght (London, n. d.).

14. Raphael Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (London, 1587), p. 733.

15. Neither Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III (Holinshed's source for Richard's early career) nor Holinshed (pp. 731-32) has the bishops in the gallery scene. Shakespeare seems to have incorporated and expanded this detail from Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (see the passage quoted in the Furness Variorum edition of Richard III, p. 484).

16. See Gilles Corrozet's emblem, “Esperance Conforte Lhomme,” in Hecatomgraphie (Paris, 1543), G_iiiv (reproduced in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts [Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1976], col. 1806). The text of this picture of a man trudging along with fortune's wheel strapped to his back, the first part of which is perhaps relevant to Richard's sense of having been played a bad trick by Nature (I, i, 18-22), reads:

    Si fortune soustiens, et porte,
    Qui m’a fait un tour inhumain:
    Ie tiens esperance en la main,
    Qui me conduict, et me conforte.

    It is interesting to note that at least one other emblem of Corrozet’s, that of a man with a bow and arrow aiming for a target, with the motto “Parler peu & venir au poinct,” (A_iiiiv-B; Henkel and Schöne, col. 1068), may have found its way into Shakespeare's work with Lear's injunction to Kent to break off a long sentence and get to the point: “The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft” (King Lear, I, i, 142).

17. There is a detailed treatment of this subject, with several illustrations of late-medieval thrones, in Percy E. Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae historica, no. 13 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1954-56), esp. vol. 3, ch. 42, and plates 134, 135, and 148.

18. This and the following point are made by Iwasaki, pp. 61-62. For a picture of King Henry VIII seated on his chair of state as the apex of two semi-circles formed by his courtiers, see the illustration from John Foxe's “Book of Martyrs” (Acts and Monuments, 1570), reproduced in Yates, Pl. 5b.

19. Many Shakespearean editors omit the interpolated stage direction at line 27, “Descends from throne.” Richard's behavior, however, appears just as incongruous—probably even more so—if he remains seated on the throne throughout the scene.

20. This idea is suggested in some Renaissance treatises on impresas and personal emblems. See for example The Worthy Tract of Paulus lovius, translated by Samuel Daniel (London, 1585). In the opening epistle to Daniel, the writer (“N.W.”) speculates on the functions of insignia: “Then what was the intent of these Ensignes and Devises? What cause can bee pretended for them? What did they import? Iamblicus saieth that they were conceiptes, by an externall forme representing an inward purpose: So Fergusus the first Scottish King did beare in his Standard a Lion geules, to bewray his courage testifie his stomacke, and dismaie his adversarie, which being well marshalled, is borne for the atchivement of Kinges ever since.”

21. See Paradin's Devises, p. 27, for the porcupine and the wolf.

22. Ibid., p. 350.

23. While most emblems in which boars figured did not glorify the animal, there were some, even among those that were not personal emblems, that did. An example can be found in Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Animalibus Quadrupedibus Centuria (Nuremberg, 1595), no. 48 (p. 56), where a heroic death for one's country is figured by a boar running into a hunter's spear, with the motto AUT MORS AUT VITA DECORA. (Reprinted in Henkel and Schöne, col. 478.) Richard's boar is described in Holinshed's somewhat moralized language as “The proud bragging white bore (which was his badge). …” p. 760.

24. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300-1600 (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Columbia University Press, 1957-1972), 2 vols. in 3, offers material on the use of heraldic devices in pageants and in court performances (though not necessarily in the public theatres). See especially I, 105, 244, and his section “Emblematic Devices and Stage-plays at Court,” II, 280-99. See also C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored (New York: Coward-McCann, 1954), pp. 78-81, on the recreation of a chivalric atmosphere in jousts and “barriers” through emblems and allegorical devices, and for comments on the shields in Henry V and Pericles.

25. Holinshed avoids stripping the boar-image itself of its heroic qualities, though the idea seems to have occurred to Richard's contemporaries. When Holinshed quotes the famous doggerel rhyme of the period, “The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog, / Rule all England under an hog” (p. 746), he immediately adds that the only reason “boar” became “hog” in the poem was to preserve the rhyme. It seems at least as likely that the denigrating word “hog” was the original inspiration for the distich.

26. The conscious use of this tradition by Queen Elizabeth I is described at various points in the Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, illustrated with historical notes by John Nichols (London: J. Nichols and son, 1823). In I, 39 (after Holinshed, p. 1172), for example, the theatrical metaphor is explicit as the Queen is described as stopping to hear the suit of any “baser personages,” or to accept their flowers: “So that if a man shoulde say well, he could not better tearme the Citie of London that time, than a stage wherein was shewed the wonderfull spectacle, of a noble hearted Princesse toward her most loving People, and the People's exceding comfort in beholding so worthy a Soveraigne. …”

27. J. C. Trewin, Going to Shakespeare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), p. 32.