SOURCE: “‘Determined to prove a villain’: Theatricality in Richard III,” in Critical Survey 3, No. 2, 1991, pp. 149-56.

[In the essay below, Day examines Richard III's chosen and not always reliable professions as prologue, stage manager, and actor in the “morality-Vice manner” of the play.]

Richard III has a long association with theatricality. Colley Cibber's melodramatic attentions to the text in 1700 ensured its reputation as a piece of showmanship even into the 1950s when, some would say, Laurence Olivier's film confirmed the histrionic image. Both men, however, built on what already existed in the play. Richard III is self-consciously theatrical, inviting an audience both to perceive and to question its central metaphor of acting and illusion.¹

Richard's opening soliloquy is a self-presentation in the morality-Vice manner. At the same time its structural formality is a mirror of deliberative discourse wherein the character rejects the more virtuous futures which offer themselves and determines upon villainy. The simplicity of syntax pointed by monosyllables and the stress on ‘Now’ and ‘But I’ suggest a logic which the balance of such imagery as winter/summer, lover/villain reinforces. Indeed such modest simplicity and seeming logic infusing Richard's words create a distinctive style which appears itself sufficiently persuasive of the argument's integrity. But the logic is nonexistent, and while the form of the argument looks sound enough, its content is not.

So is it persuasive enough to fool the listener? Not entirely, since the apparent rationale is counterpointed by its other function, that of prologue to a play—one delivered unexpectedly by the protagonist, whose words with their insistent pointing of theatricality refuse to let us suspend our disbelief. The change from a war footing to the more dancing pleasures of Edward's court is conveyed in mocking images recalling stage enactments, ‘stern alarums’, ‘brows bound with victorious wreaths’. Even personified war itself performs to a lute like some masquer. To subvert this complete masquerade Richard has laid plots and inductions as would any villain of the piece, his part also ‘determined’ by prescript: and he invites us to watch him acting.

The third layer of artifice in this soliloquy reconciles Richard's performance with his discourse. ‘Determinations’ were specific exercises of scholastic disputation against an opponent by which a student proceeded from his baccalaureat to study for a master's degree. One's thesis was determined by proof in academic debate. Richard's thesis is ‘to prove a villain’. He plays the villain with a great sense of spectacle and theatre. He also proves a villain with an equal sense of judicial procedure, his argument betraying acute awareness of legal terms and process, and an astute perception of the law's capacity for ambiguity. I want to suggest that the play permits the playing to comment on the proof. In a sense Richard's thesis is determined by a show of reason and logic: but he consistently undermines this, and many in his audience would recognise this fact.

The two combine most particularly in the play's three wooing scenes—those with Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth (I.2. and III.7), and the central scene of Richard's presentation to the citizens at Baynard's Castle where, in silent audience, they are wooed to affirm him as their king (IV.4). Over the past century directors have consistently cut, removed, adapted or played around with these scenes which, ironically, are the most consciously theatrical in the play. Each is a play within the play wherein Richard stages proof to us, his audience, of his claim to the title villain. It forms a set piece, a performance in the court of love and of law, and relies for fullest effect on the staging and the hearing of the entire argument.

Every performance is preceded by a prologue, given twice by the star himself and once by Gloucester and Buckingham in double-act, announcing very clearly the artifice of what will follow. In the subsequent scene, Richard plays defendant and wooer (once the wooed), against quite a vocal adversary—Anne, Buckingham and Elizabeth (Buckingham, of course, is only pretending—illusion again). On each occasion the performance is given before a silent onstage audience—our representatives—an ever-present reminder of its artifice.

Facing Anne, ‘The bleeding witness of [his] hatred by’, Richard politely asks her leave to prove his innocence, ‘By circumstance but to acquit myself’ (I.2.233,77). The form of interchange, it seems, is to be judicial discourse. Yet twenty-three lines later he has admitted his guilt, confessed to at least two murders, and Anne's righteous indignation seems justified.

anne
Didst thou not kill this king?
richard
I grant ye—yea.

(I.2.101)

Has she won? The ten-syllable interchange contrasts markedly with the eighteen-line accusatory tirade which greeted Richard's earlier interruption of the cortège and, despite its content, establishes Richard's domination of the scene. As in his opening soliloquy, Richard plays content against form, subtly moving the debate away from justice to charity (on which grounds judicial logic no longer applies) while his economy of style draws the discussion of guilt down to the monosyllabic mundane.

Quite rightly he loses the legal argument—after all, Anne has an eye-witness account of one murder, and evidence of the other lies between them, bleeding—but he gains the verbal advantage. The rapid wit-play of their stichomythic interchange robs her argument of force. The accumulated evidence and emotion of Anne's opening attack is prevented by Richard's disruption of the expected pattern. The seeming simplicity of his style proves quite alien to her rhetorical mode. When she hears his words, takes Richard's lead and adopts what she thinks is the pattern—he halts. ‘I grant ye—yea.’ And she is thrown. The simple rhythm of the words hides their lack of reason, and ambiguity begins to cloud the clear-cut absolutes of retributive justice she was so sure of at the start. Richard has indeed ‘by circumstance’ acquitted himself, for he has circumstanced Anne, winding about her with the manner but not the matter of reason.

In the realm of fact Richard cannot defend himself for long, but if he transfers his ground to the emotions he can better do so. Seemingly as logical, albeit of a ‘slower method’, the next stage of Richard's proof divides the guilty act between the executioner and its initiator—Anne's beauty. She, the plaintiff, turns defendant as the procedures move from those of law to courtly love. The rhetoric of romance into which Richard has moved now ironically reflects the earlier extremes of Anne's passion, the bare-breasted lover suppliant before the sword of his cruel mistress mockingly granting her the revenge which earlier she sought. In both word and act the artifice of one points up the artificiality of the other. The courtly love game to which, traditionally, both parties willingly submit relies on extensive word-play, irony and wit, on the adoring lover and the coy beloved, on structured, decorous form and on the conscious masking of reality. When, as Anne takes up the sword, Richard bluntly reminds her of his crimes (though blaming them on her), he undermines past truth with present circumstance.

It is the latter which Anne chooses, for she cannot in reality enact her curse and match word with action. As Richard makes her accessory to his crimes, so she accedes to his equivocation. Her words betray it. Calling him dissembler, she questions his integrity while yet adopting the equivocatory figures he employs. Her acceptance of the ring, disguising truth in ambiguity, and her refusal of a kiss enact exactly the role of courtly mistress, ‘To take it not to give’ (I.2.202).

The scene theatrically undermines absolutes. The informality of Richard's mundane though stylish wit, followed by the elaborate falsehood of the courtly wooing, subverts the opening rhetoric, exposing it through words and emblematic action while preserving the utmost decorum.

The second wooing scene takes place at Baynard's Castle where Richard himself, now the ‘belovèd’, coyly rejects the advances of his ‘lovers’, the petitioners. The auditorium audience has again been well primed for the show, Richard and Buckingham having discussed acting style and set and improvised the costumes just a few moments before. It commences in accusation—that of Richard's neglected duty to the state, to which he responds with careful rationale, ‘definitively thus I answer you’ (III.7.152). But this is all a prologue to the wooing as Buckingham, the Mayor and Catesby ‘proffer love’ and sue for his acceptance. As scripted, and as reticent as any gentle mistress, Richard submits—but unexpectedly qualifies his acceptance with one condition:

But if black scandal or foul-faced reproach
Attend the sequel of your imposition,
Your mere enforcement shall acquittance me
From all the impure blots and stains thereof.

(III.7.230-3)

The terminology is legal: the intention corrupt—yet the detail, as we, beyond the stage, observe, is truth. God and we do know, but those on stage may only partly see ‘How far [he] is from the desire of this’ (III.7.235). A condition of his kingship is total absolution from all sins. The law must now legitimise equivocation. Significantly silent are the onstage onlookers, for even if they do see the truth of this charade they will say nothing—the Scrivener has assured us of that.

The artificiality of the scene is patent, the layering of truth mirroring the rank of the figures. Only those above and we beyond are fully in the picture. The rest form part of it, the play-in-play of a would-be king fooling with show his silent audience to confer their token voices on his coup d’état. Perhaps our presence as an extension of the silent crowd condemns our own collaboration in the fiction.

Only a few scenes previously, Prince Edward has opined that great men's fame needed no written record, for word of mouth should accurately relate the truth ‘from age to age … Even to the general all-ending day’ (III.1.76,78). Nothing, though, is said of that majority whose silence chronicles lies.

The inaccuracy and inefficacy of oral history is attested to by the women who, like Hamlet's players, offer their ‘brief abstract and record of tedious days’ (IV.4.28) as the action unfolds. Bereft of all other titles—wife, mother—by Richard's deeds, the Duchess of York sees herself as nought but living chronicle, a mere cipher to the great accompt, and play, of history,

Dead life, blind sight, poor mortal-living ghost,
Woe's scene, world's shame, grave's due by life usurped,
Brief abstract and record of tedious days,
Rest thy unrest on England's lawful earth

(IV.2.26-9).

Is it a legitimate account, however? Margaret's advice on cursing suggests not. She recommends enhancing memory and eking out the truth with lies, ‘Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse’ (IV.4.123). The fugue-like lamentations of the women's woes recording the eternal repetition of events betrays a selfish partiality. The trading of name for name and trouncing of woes remains ever a fragmentary chorus. Identifying individual Edwards and Richards has become as unimportant for them as it should be impossible for us—names which are interchangeable commodities traded in for status in misery's hierarchy.

The citizens' scene (II.3) almost parodies this lamentation, the empty comfort of wise saws and aphorisms echoing the reinforcement of inaction which rehearsing past woes provides. Both choric groups find the meaning of the words serves less purpose than the speaking of them—an unthinking consolation which Richard trades upon.

When she catalogues the variability of language which the play presents, Elizabeth pinpoints the naïvety of the Prince's hope that chroniclers should chronicle the truth. Words are mere mercenary lawyers, ignorant of integrity, who disinterestedly legitimise any referent:

Windy attorneys to their clients' woes,
Airy succeeders of intestate joys,
Poor breathing orators of miseries.

(IV.4.127-9)

The legal imagery here is significant for such consistent subversion of structure, verbal and legal, as Elizabeth describes has until now been the villain's sole province. The indictment of Hastings, the execution of the Woodville brothers and the persuasion of the Mayor and citizens—sent for earlier to the justices (II.3)—all illustrate his appropriation of legal sanctions to his own ends. When Hastings refuses his support, Richard condemns him as a traitor upon an ‘if’—as much of evil as of virtue in an ‘if’ misused. Ambiguity, even untruth, becomes the law.

As the wooing scenes portray, Richard challenges and subverts the power of legal terms as much as he disrupts the force of ceremonial forms. His interruption of ceremony, progress and meeting, from questioning the noble pedigree of the Woodville jumped-up Jacks to his announcement of Clarence's death at Edward's family reunion, dramatically counteracts the ritual artifice of courtly form. His first five appearances in the play are interruptions of ceremonies, progresses or meetings. Not until arriving in London with the new king, Prince Edward, does Richard appear on stage with others at the opening of a scene. His previous entrances were a visual reminder of his separateness from the group already on stage, and an implication that, like the vice figures, he comes from another place.

If all ritual is but hollow artifice, Buckingham suggests, better avoid ceremony and tradition altogether and, weighing all by present standards ‘but with the grossness of this age’ (III.1.46), rewrite the rules, as Richard does. If however the law and government, and the recorded past on which both rest, no longer prove consistent and integral, the present state which they support disintegrates. It balances on ‘brittle glass’—a fragility Richard recognises in the final wooing scene (IV.4) when, grasping at nonexistent absolutes, his oaths of honour relate to nothing of substance in himself. Anticipating here a repetition of his scene with Anne, Richard goes to play again a ‘jolly thriving wooer’, but ‘his train … with drums and trumpets’ silently witness a performance disintegrating into improvisation. Elizabeth's unexpectedly perceptive interpolations refuse to let him play the script, for it is she who now prosecutes the duplicity of words: ‘Be not so hasty to confound my meaning’ (IV.4.262). Asked by Richard to act as his attorney in the court of love, she relocates the trial in that of justice. When he vows to repay her with ‘interest’ through the ‘advantages’ his ‘issue’ will ‘beget’ in her ‘entitlement’, she adopts the same legalistic imagery and advises him to press his case himself by citing past deeds as presentations and inducements to love—terms suggestive of illegal persuasion. While he desperately attaches words to a precise interpretation, she plays on their duality as once he did, reinterpreting the images to show him a more exact truth:

richard
Your reasons are too shallow and too quick.
elizabeth
O no, my reasons are too deep and dead—
Too deep and dead, poor infants, in their graves.

(IV.4.361-3)

The scene inverts the pattern of Act I, scene 2, by turning courtship to self-defence. Elizabeth leaves, equivocating her decision as did Anne, but fooling Richard with an ambiguity which, for the first time, he misreads. His brief dismissal of Elizabeth, however, confirms that the actor is not entirely pleased with his performance since for once he is not sole director of the drama—as Elizabeth realises. Margaret has reminded us there is another play, that of historical events already chronicled to which the dramatic action is inevitably bound. There is a truth in her words which Richard cannot divert, try though he might. The audience knows its history. Margaret ushers it in as the mellowed time when, the ‘dire induction’ past, there follows but the ‘bitter, black and tragical’ consequence of this ‘frantic play’ (IV.4.5,7,68).

The terms here are significant, applying as they do both to dramatic and formal argument, the consequence of a proof following from the induction or presentation of the case. It is the same merging of theatre and disputation contained in Richard's opening soliloquy. There he was ‘determinèd to prove a villain’—which thesis he has cunningly confirmed. Yet there also he was made both presenter and subject of his own debate, ‘I am determinèd’. As the passive voice implies, the latter role is subject to the exercise, to pre-set rules of argument and an ordained conclusion.

Both Richard and Margaret therefore retain a unique objectivity about the drama they are in, she a Cassandra-like anachronism cursing her prediction of what the outcome will be, he side-stage of the chronicle frame, mocking its unreality and mocking his own. His frequent asides and ironies keep ever before us Richard's dramatic origins, particularly in Act III, scene 1:

I say, without characters fame lives long.

(III.1.81)

What follows pinpoints the pun on ‘characters’ while at the same time reinforcing Richard's metadramatic role:

Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.

(III.1.82-3)

Richard III's historical fame, or infamy, as Iniquity incarnate is but a persona relying as little on the reality of his character as that of the Vice does on the individuality of the actor. Hence ‘without characters fame lives long’.

It is no mere coincidence that this reference to the villain-figure Richard comes in the one scene where the Crookback's legend is most fully to the fore. The mysterious murder of the innocents, uniting Richard III with Herod, was as famous to Shakespeare's audiences as it is to audiences today. The scene plays much upon it. Several details associate Richard's behaviour at this point with that of the Devil figure in morality drama, as Alan Dessen has observed.² Satan was often shown to frighten victims with a dagger of lath, and Shakespeare's scene draws ironically on the parallel both in action and word, for the young Duke of York will shortly have Richard's dagger in another sense, as the audience well knows.³ The child's request to ride on Richard's shoulders again highlights the symbolism of the scene since traditionally the morality Vice departed for hell on the Devil's back, and the child's wit as well as his name associates him with Richard. It matters not whether the boy does leap onto his uncle's shoulders or is dissuaded from the attempt by horrified onlookers, the suggested image—a perversion of the Christ-child on the shoulders of the saint—remains. The irony here relies on our foreknowledge, providing rich possibilities for symbolic business underlining Richard's satanic associations.

The tragi-comic ironies of word and image are so openly played upon at this point, in the manner of theatrical ‘performances’ elsewhere in the play, that something of the same self-consciousness suggests itself. In a sense the scene becomes another play-in-play relying, like the rest, on the audience's perception of dramatic and historical irony while simultaneously hinting at that history's surrounding fiction.

Richard as historical character and Richard as dramatic figure confront each other in his final soliloquy, the opposing voices mimicking earlier courtly confrontations. This trial however is a self-examination, with Richard, simultaneously the prosecution and defence, no longer capable of any witty self-deception. Basic terms now reflect basic truth, ‘Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.’ (V.3.193). Nor is there a determined conclusion. The conflict is real, not played, and it forces him to face the unreality of his dramatic role. Richard describes the ghosts as witnesses at his arraignment where, significantly:

… every tale condemns me for a villain.
…
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all ‘Guilty! Guilty!’

(V.3.196,199-200)

Each testimony condemns his villainy—and, triumphantly, concludes his case. Ironically their evidence proves his determination—‘I am a villain’. The dramatic persona has succeeded in the role, and the thesis is complete. No longer need he summon a defence. No longer can he do so, for the other voice, the new-found voice of conscience creating him a moral character, regards it all as failure. Realistically such villainy is unacceptable,

O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.

(V.3.190-1)

The speech resonates with self-reference as Richard's self-searching recognises not only a divided mind torn by guilt but also a divided figure torn by the dramatic requirements of the history and its form. The integrity and nobility which it has been his role to mock throughout the play is denied him. The player gives his judgment on the man:

There is no creature loves me;
…
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(V.3.201,203-4)

for how can a fiction have feeling? In this we glimpse the paradox of the play, for if this Richard is a fiction then his story is so too—and what if history is so too? The ambivalence of legitimate word and image which the play reflects encourages our doubt.

The inversion in Richard's words to Ratcliffe, ‘Will our friends prove all true?’ (V.3.214), assumes an interesting ambiguity, for if his men now prove disloyal, shrinking from him to swell the ranks of Richmond's troops, they will ensure his death, fulfil history's determination, confirm the legend and indeed prove all is true—won’t they?

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.

(V.4.9-10)

Richard's final cry supplies a comment on this—the warrior's determination to make a noble death even in the face of damnation, if the game of chance will have it so. The terms ‘die’ and ‘cast’, however, also retain an association with stamping or minting, for the die was an engraved stamp used to impress a figure or design on softer material, the cast being that which was so moulded. Must deformed, unfinished Richard therefore die as he was cast, stamped or determinèd to do—and strike himself proof villain?

Notes

1. Elizabethan playgoers came to hear and judge a play, to participate in its debate—the morality tradition bequeathed this and the physical structure of the playhouse could hardly have allowed it to be avoided. History plays in particular questioned the nature of authority, even if unconsciously, by subjecting kings to the judgment of an audience—an argument which is explored more widely in the following monographs, to which I am indebted: Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley, 1978); Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975).

2. Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln and London, 1976), pp. 38-54.

3. Holinshed's Chronicle twice associates Richard with the weapon, possibly intending to imply his evil origins (Shakespeare's Holinshed, ed. Richard Hosley, New York, 1968, pp. 248, 270), and The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1594) mentions that:

   For if he heare one stirre he riseth up.
   And claps his hand upon his dagger straight
   Readie to stab him, what so ere he be.

   (Malone Society Reprint, Oxford, 1929, lines 1778-80)

All references to Shakespeare's Richard III are to the New Penguin edition edited by E. A. J. Honigmann (Harmondsworth, 1968).