SOURCE: “Richard III, Unhistorical Amplifications: The Women's Scenes and Seneca,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, October, 1980, pp. 721-37.

[In the essay that follows, Brooks investigates the influence of Seneca's Troades on Shakespeare's depiction of the four women in Richard III.]

In Richard III, Shakespeare owed little to his chronicle sources for the sensational wooing of Anne, the wailing royal women, and Clarence's dream. Yet though these passages are unhistorical, he had, as with the episode of the faithful groom in Richard II,¹ materials and inspiration for them. When investigated, Clarence's dream appears to be an imaginative fusion and re-creation from a range of reading outside the chronicles, with hints coming from Seneca, Golding's Ovid, The Mirror for Magistrates, probably from The Spanish Tragedy, and above all from the Cave of Mammon and the sea-episodes in the first three books of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590, the year before the date I would assign to Richard III. I have chosen, however, to consider the dream separately in another article,² and to devote this one to the elaboration, without historical warrant, of the women's scenes I have spoken of. The debt they owe to Seneca will lead me in conclusion to consider his part, among many other strands, in the weave of the play.³

Geoffrey Bullough, in his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, gives me the starting-point I want.⁴ He discusses the possibility that Shakespeare took from Legge's Richardus Tertius the idea of ‘increasing the importance of his women so as to provide links with the Henry VI plays and to serve as a substitute for the Senecan chorus’: a suggestion to which I have nothing to add. But naturally he observes that just as Legge drew upon Seneca, so also might Shakespeare; and he notes further that Shakespeare's ‘introduction of three generations’ of women, ‘each with its memories and griefs’, specifically ‘recalls Seneca's Troades’, while for Richard's courtship of Anne ‘it is possible that, having decided to include Senecan elements in his tragedy, Shakespeare went … to the Hercules Furens’: to Lycus's similar (but unsuccessful) attempt with Megara.⁵ These suggestions I shall develop, arguing that the debt to the Troades is not merely possible, but virtually certain, and that the scene between Richard and Anne is undoubtedly of Senecan inspiration, the main debt to the Hercules Furens being accompanied by lesser ones to other plays, notably the Hippolytus.

As I shall later show, each of the four women in Richard III corresponds to one of the four in the Troades. Would Shakespeare have had reason to include them in his play if he had been oblivious of their counterparts in Seneca's? It must be admitted that one need not invoke Seneca to account for the presence of Anne, Queen Elizabeth, or even Queen Margaret. That Elizabeth and Anne should figure was to be expected from the historical data, though the pre-Shakespearian True Tragedy of Richard III did without Anne.

As regards Queen Margaret, the argument is different. Her role, as everyone notes, is contrary to the historical facts (facts which in part Shakespeare could presume)⁶ and, if verisimilitude were in question, totally impossible. Yet without prompting from a source, Shakespeare would still have had strong motives for writing her part; it has dramatic functions of the greatest importance in the whole cycle of four plays, the lines of which were laid down in the three Henry VI plays, already written. She appears in all three, and knits Richard III with them. And just as in 1 Henry VI she steps into a role that continues Joan's with a difference, for she is potentially a new French scourge of the English, carrying the affliction from French to English soil, so in Richard III she vacates her role, leaving Richmond, with a difference, to step into it. The old type of vengeance, itself a new crime, perpetuating the Senecan chain of wrong and curse on royal houses, is embodied in her; it is superseded by vengeance which is God's, is just, and calls for no further vengeance, when Richmond is made the minister of chastisement. This passing of role from person to person is a characteristic Shakespearian technique, especially obvious later in Richard II where the political norm against which Richard and Bolingbroke offend is carried from Gaunt (and the half-hearted York) to the gardeners and then to Carlisle's prophetic protest. If The Troublesome Raigne of King John is later than Richard III, the author picked up from Shakespeare the device of introducing an unhistorical dramatis persona to embody a principle and a heritage, since the Bastard brilliantly solves the problem of dramatizing the spirit of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for contrast with John, in a play where Coeur-de-Lion is, and must be, already dead.⁷ The Bastard represents a step beyond the role of Margaret in Richard III: the step from introducing a major historical character unhistorically, to inventing, for a similar purpose, a major character who is unhistorical altogether.

Justice has perhaps now been done to the case against postulating, in the women characters of Richard III, the influence of the Troades. For Margaret, we are not compelled to look beyond Shakespeare's dramaturgy; for Elizabeth and Anne (with the important exception of the wooing scene) not beyond the chronicles, supplemented for Elizabeth by The Mirror for Magistrates and the True Tragedy, and for both, possibly by Legge. What, then, satisfies me that Shakespeare was, in fact, influenced by Seneca's play? My conviction comes from three considerations: the weight accorded to Richard's mother, the dowager Duchess of York; her place in the pattern of the four women; and that pattern itself.

To include the Duchess was by no means an inevitable or even a very obvious idea; it did not occur to Legge or to the author of the True Tragedy. From Hall and Holinshed, Shakespeare could learn that she outlived Richard;⁸ further than that, he would meet her in their accounts of two episodes only. He used (IV. 4. 162-67) what they reproduced from More about the Duchess's sufferings at Richard's birth: ‘It is reported, his mother the duches had much a dooe in her travail, that she could not be delivered of him uncut, and that he came into the world fete forward … and as the fame ran not untothed.’ He would read also how she condemned Edward IV's marriage plan, was ‘nothyng apeased’ with his ‘wordes’ justifying himself against her, and did her best to block the marriage.⁹ In Shakespeare she is twitted with having a temperament ‘which cannot bear the accent of reproof’ (IV. 4. 158). If he needed any encouragement to invent her interruption of Richard's march and her curse on his wickedness, he may have thought them in character with her recorded rebuke of another son's headstrong folly, and her interruption, as her ‘duty to God warde’ of the marriage plan. She temporarily halted Edward; in the play, she temporarily halts Richard. Passing from the chronicle sources to The Mirror for Magistrates, one finds only one relevant reference. It is in the monologue of ‘Shore's Wife’, among her maledictions upon ‘every cause whereof’ Richard's ‘body came’:

Woe worth the brestes that have the world begylde,
To norryshe thee that all the world dyd hate.

(p. 384)

At most, this could do no more than reinforce the chronicle-tale of Richard's ominous birth.

Shakespeare had made Richard glory in the omens, after Henry had begun to reproach him with them in the penultimate scene of 3 Henry VI (V. 6. 44-56, 69-77). Perhaps the most celebrated ominous birth in classical legend was that of Paris, destructive of Troy and the Trojan royal line: his mother, Hecuba, dreamed she brought forth a firebrand. The story, a commonplace in Shakespeare's time, is recalled in Troilus and Cressida (II. 2. 110): ‘Our firebrand brother, Paris, burns us all.’ Richard's ominous birth forms an easy link between the Duchess and Hecuba in the Troades. In her first speech, Hecuba alludes to her dream: ‘meus ignis iste est, facibus ardetis meis’ (l. 40). Jasper Heywood, in his translation, makes the allusion more explicit: ‘My fyre it is wherwith ye burne, and Paris is the brand.’¹⁰ From the prophetic dream, Hecuba claims that even before Cassandra she foretold the disasters to ensue:

… quidquid adversi accidit …
prior Hecuba vidi gravida nec tacui metus.

(ll. 33, 36)

‘Hecuba … gravida’ is perhaps reflected in Margaret's phrase for Richard: ‘Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb’ (I. 2. 231). Shakespeare repeatedly emphasizes the fatal consequences that, through Richard, have their origin in the womb of the Duchess. Margaret says of him to the Duchess:

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death:
The dog that had his teeth before his eyes
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.

(IV. 4. 47)

The Duchess herself apostrophizes her womb:

O my accursed womb the bed of death
A cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world

(IV. 1. 53)

In the Octavia, which Shakespeare would accept as Seneca's, Nero's mother apostrophizes her womb, ‘monstrum qui tale tulit’ (l. 372); and Alcmena in the Hercules Oetaeus declares ‘fecit hic natus mihi / uterum timendum’ (l. 1795). These phrases may have added their influence to that of the Hecuba legend.

In the scene where news is brought of Edward IV's death, the Duchess elaborates upon the shares of grief belonging to his widow Elizabeth, and to Clarence's children: each a half-share compared with her own, which embraces both theirs. Here Shakespeare seems clearly to recollect Hecuba's lines:

Quoscumque luctus fleveris, flebis meos;
sua quemque tantum, me omnium clades premit
mihi cuncta pereunt, quisquis est Hecubae est miser.

(l. 1060)

(Jasper Heywood's version is, I think, a little less pregnant:

Wherever man's calamityes ye wayle for mine it is.
I beare the smarte of all their woes, each other feeles but his.
Who ever he, I am the wretch, all happes to me at last.)

The Duchess spells out what is in fact an application of the second line in the Senecan passage:

Alas, I am the mother of these griefs.
Their woes are parcell'd, mine is general.
She for an Edward weeps, and so do I;
I for a Clarence weep, so doth not she.
These babes for Clarence weep and so do I:
I for an Edward weep, so do not they.

(II. 2. 80)

Antiphonal balance is of course a Senecan feature. The parallel here carries our argument further. In relation to the ominous birth, the Duchess's role has behind it a chronicle-passage of which Shakespeare had already made emphatic use;¹¹ that aspect of the role is significant for the postulated connexion with Hecuba's as offering to his imagination a strong associative link, but though the striking parallel exists, it is not exclusive of prior chronicle influence. The present parallel is exclusive to Hecuba's speech and the Duchess's, which owes nothing to another source.

Among the royal Yorkist women the Duchess, like Hecuba among the royal Troades, is the ancestral figure. As we have seen, Bullough observes that the three generations in Shakespeare recall the Troades. In fact, each of Shakespeare's four women has her counterpart in that play. Like Hecuba, the Duchess of York has been widowed in the war, and (if the repetition may be forgiven) by an ominous birth has brought forth a son who has inflicted disaster upon her house and nation. Elizabeth, like Andromache, is a younger widow; the husband she has lost was the Duchess's son, as Hector, Andromache's husband, was son to Hecuba. Elizabeth's son, the boy Edward, royal heir and the hope of England, corresponds to the boy Astyanax, Andromache's son and the hope of Troy. Both lads are murdered for political motives by the ruling power: Edward because he has succeeded to the throne, Astyanax lest he grow up to succeed his father. Anne corresponds to Polyxena; each is mocked by a marriage which means her death.¹² Anne, moreover, is summoned to the ritual of coronation when her death, which she foresees, is already decided on; Polyxena accepts the ritual preparation for a ‘bridal’ which, she has now learnt, is to ‘marry’ her, as a human sacrifice, to the dead Achilles. The parallel with Iphigenia, lured to her similar death by a false promise of marriage (to that same Achilles, then alive), is indicated in Seneca's play (ll. 247-49, 360 ff.).

Finally Margaret, like Helen, is the odd woman out, the alien, the Lancastrian among Yorkists as Helen is the Greek among Trojans. Like Helen, she has wrought the others great harm; she is hostile, hated, and yet she is a victim with them. Most probably the Senecan prototype helped Shakespeare to his inspired bringing-in of Margaret as the answer to the dramaturgical needs which, as we have pointed out, she serves.

This large pattern of correspondence between the women of Richard III and of the Troades, is (I believe) both more cogent evidence of Shakespeare's indebtedness, and a more interesting kind of debt, than any parallels of detail. Yet a few further details are worth looking at.

In the presence of the Trojans, Helen begins with speech aside; so, in the presence of her foes, does Margaret. Like Helen, she compares her woes with those of the other women, and counters their accusations against her.¹³ Concerning the Queen's kin and their enemies, Margaret exclaims:

… were you snarling all before I came
And turn you now your hatred all on me?

(I. 3. 187)

Similarly, speaking of the Greeks and Trojans, Helen exclaims: ‘in me victor et victus furit’ (l. 914).¹⁴ The antiphonal use of the names of the dead, found in the Duchess's lament for Clarence and Edward IV (quoted earlier) is repeated with even greater elaboration in the lines beginning ‘I had an Edward till a Richard kill'd him’ (IV. 4. 36) and ‘Thy Edward he is dead that kill'd my Edward’ (IV. 4. 63). One may make comparison with Helen's speech (ll. 905 ff.) where, like the Duchess, she is claiming that her loss is worse than those of the other mourners:

… causam tamen
possum tueri iudice infesto meam,
graviora passa. luget Andromacha Hectorem
et Hecuba Priamum; solus occulte Paris
lugendus Helenae est.

(l. 905)¹⁵

Margaret, moreover, declaiming

Thy Edward he is dead, that kill'd my Edward,
The other Edward dead, to quit my Edward,
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Match'd not the high perfection of my loss

(IV. 4. 63)

and asking whether ‘Henry's death, my lovely Edward's death’ only counter-balanced the murder of Rutland (I. 3. 191, 193), is working proportion sums of vengeance like Medea, who exclaims: ‘… ut duos perimam, tamen / nimium est dolori numerus angustus meo’ (l. 1010) and ‘… est coniunx; in hanc / ferrum exigatur. hoc meis satis est malis?’ (l. 125).

Andromache, when she is within sight of being left a childless widow by Ulysses's demand for her son, declares that to terrify her he should threaten her with life, not death: ‘vitam minare: nam mori votum est mihi’ (l. 577).¹⁶ (Jasper Heywood's version does not avoid ambiguity: ‘Threaten my life for now to dye my chief desyre it were.’)¹⁷ Margaret's curse on Elizabeth (I. 3. 203) does threaten her with life-long and wretched life as a childless widow:

Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self!
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's death …
And, after many lengthen'd hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England's queen.

That she will die childless, and the curse be fulfilled, is Elizabeth's fear when she hears of her son Edward V's deposition, and anticipates what that will end in; she bids Dorset seek refuge with Richmond: ‘Thy mother's name is ominous to children’ (IV. 1. 41).¹⁸ She has learned of the deposition from the message summoning Anne to be crowned with Richard—at which she almost faints:

… cut my lace, …
Or else I swoon at this dead-killing news.

(IV. 1. 34, 36)

Hecuba swoons outright when she learns that Polyxena is to be sacrificed (Troades, ll. 949 f.). Her swoon and Elizabeth's near-swoon are from like causes: grief for a doomed and treasured child, and anticipation of childlessness—Polyxena's death will leave Hecuba childless (ll. 960 ff.). But what Elizabeth dreads, for Hecuba are certainties.

Anne herself, bidden to be enthroned along with Richard, wishes that the royal insignia, the crown and holy oil, would kill her. She would be glad, that is, if the coronation ritual brought death (and not the continuance of marriage with a loathed husband), as Polyxena rejoices that the ‘bridal’ ceremonies are going to bring death to her (and not marriage with Pyrrhus). It is when Polyxena learns her real fate that she allows Helen to plait her hair into the six strands befitting a bride. As Polyxena by this time knows her fate, so Anne foresees hers: Richard hates her, ‘And will, no doubt, shortly be rid of me’. She is ‘a woeful welcomer of glory’; the paradox of her coronation in the shadow of death is not unlike the paradox of Polyxena's wedding to the tomb.¹⁹

The hypnotizing of Anne by Richard's courtship, in the sensation-scene of Act I, is greatly indebted to Seneca. Though the debts are not to the Troades, they support the foregoing claims for the influence of that play by showing that Shakespeare, as he expands and supplements his historical materials, and perceives potentially dramatic patterns in them, has Seneca very much in mind. The chronicle-material on which the courtship-scene is founded is threefold. First, according to Hall and Holinshed, Anne had been wife to Prince Edward, son and heir of Henry VI. Richard had shared in the murder of her husband, and had himself then murdered Henry, her father-in-law. She married him, however. So, Shakespeare had every right to conclude, Richard must have had to get round her. In the second place, the chronicles related that after her death he did temporarily cajole Edward IV's widow, Elizabeth, into entertaining his suit for the hand of Elizabeth's daughter, Elizabeth of York, though she was sister of the Princes he had had murdered in the Tower. That brazen proposal would assure Shakespeare that the courtship of Anne in its breath-taking impudence was thoroughly in keeping with Richard's character as history recorded it. In his dramatic structure it would enable him to use a device he greatly favoured: the later scene which matches, with a difference, an earlier one. He had only to invent the when and how of the earlier scene. As to the when, more chronicle-data lent him aid. The corpse of Henry VI was taken to Chertsey, a journey fifteen miles out of London, for burial, and (according to Holinshed and Stow), while at rest at St Paul's and further on at Blackfriars, it bled, traditionally a sign of murder.²⁰ It was in the presence of the murderer that such corpses were ordinarily supposed to bleed afresh; so these incidents would readily suggest an encounter between Richard and the funeral procession.²¹ What more natural than that Anne should be with it as mourner? And what more sensational than that Richard should court and fascinate her in presence of his victim whom she is mourning as her second father, while his guilt is confirmed by the supernatural witness of that victim's blood?

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?

(I. 2. 227)

When Richard, true to character, gloats over his own virtuosity, Shakespeare is also advertising the actor's, and moreover the dramatist's; the scene goes beyond Seneca in a spirit which reminds me of Spenser's when he set out to overstep Ariosto.

For in something like this humour at first, Megara is wooed by Lycus the would-be usurper in Hercules Furens, and throughout the episode, in a situation outrageous in a similar way to Anne's: the mourner sought in marriage by the slayer of those she is mourning for. (The scene has been pointed out by Geoffrey Bullough as at least a possible source of Richard's with Anne.)²² Megara is not won. Richard outdoes Lycus; the historical outcome required it. It was a challenge one imagines attractive to Shakespeare. To show Lycus failing in so monstrous an enterprise was simple in comparison; to show Richard succeeding was a far harder task and a correspondingly greater opportunity. Shakespeare responds with a display on Richard's part of histrionic powers, Machiavellian dissimulation, and diabolic magnetism, beyond anything Lycus can deploy; he has no such resources.

The encounter in Richard III, as Shakespeare presents it, appears to combine the situation in Hercules Furens with another in Seneca's Hippolytus (a play Shakespeare draws on elsewhere in the canon).²³ This second Senecan situation implies a tableau resembling that of Richard at Anne's feet, encouraging her to use the sword she holds pointed at his breast. But in the spectacle on Shakespeare's stage, Richard corresponds to Phaedra, and Anne to Hippolytus.²⁴

The Shakespearian scene, and those in Seneca, including parallels already indicated in brief, will bear comparison in more detail. In Richard III and in Hercules Furens, the preparation for the entrances of Richard and Lycus correspond. Amphitryon laments the King and his sons whom Lycus has slain, execrates the slayer, and looks forward to the punishment he trusts Hercules will return to exact. Anne laments Henry and Prince Edward, and passes from execrating Richard to invoking divine vengeance upon him.²⁵ From the first approaches to the two women there is a sequence, not almost commonplace like the one just indicated, in which both plays correspond. Lycus makes his first appeal to Megara on general principle; if peace is ever to follow war, one must let bygones be bygones:

si aeterna semper odia mortales gerant
nec coeptus umquam cedat ex animis furor,
sed arma felix teneat infelix paret,
nihil relinquent bella …

(l. 362)²⁶

The Christian principle in face of wrongs goes further, and Richard, with his pose of piety, makes his first appeal to that:

Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst …
Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessing for curses.

(I. 2. 49, 68)

Lycus introduced his appeal with the plea ‘facilis mea / parumper aure verba patienti excipe’ (l. 360).²⁷ Richard follows his with the like request: ‘let me have / Some patient leisure to excuse myself’ (I. 2. 81). Midway in the confrontation, after a passage of sharp repartee, he proposes a change of tone:

To leave this keen encounter of our wits
And fall something into a slower method.

(I. 2. 115)

Lycus, too, after the sustained bitterness of Megara's first reply, proposes a change, at least for her, which will mitigate the sharpness of their conflict: ‘Agedum effaratas rabida voces amove’ (l. 397).²⁸ Richard, earlier, asked leave ‘By circumstance but to acquit myself’ (I. 2. 77). Lycus now claims the right to speak further: ‘pauca pro causa loquar / nostra’ (l. 401).²⁹ Each man, after proposing the change of tone, proceeds to justify or excuse the slaughters he has committed. Megara's father and brothers, says Lycus, fell, after all, in war. If it be objected that he was an aggressor, whom they were rightly resisting, he will answer: ‘quaeritur belli exitus, / non causa’ (l. 407).³⁰ Of war, men ask the outcome, not the cause. Thus he raises, if only to brush it aside, the question of the cause of his slaughters. At the corresponding point of Shakespeare's scene, Richard also defends his murders, and his excuse is to allege a cause: ‘Your beauty was the cause of this effect’ (I. 2. 121). At Richard's corollary, that she shares the responsibility for his man-slayings, Anne expresses the self-disgust she would feel if she believed she had inspired such love as this:

If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide,
These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks.

(I. 2. 125)

To free herself from Richard's homicidal adoration, she would violently destroy her beauty; Megara, to escape Lycus's demands, would welcome the gift of violent death. When he bids her choose what royal wedding-gift she will have, she retorts: ‘Aut tuam mortem aut meam’ (l. 426).³¹ Her reaction and Anne's have something in common.

Because of the sequence just described, parallel in the two plays, I attach significance also to some other parallels, even though in Richard III the features concerned might be the result simply of elaborating the situation itself. The student of literary indebtedness is necessarily aware of the double standard which applies to parallels. As evidence that an antecedent work is indeed a source, they must meet the most stringent criteria: no commonplaces are evidential. But once we are satisfied that the work is a source no parallel is without a certain significance. If it is a commonplace, still this source is one place where the author met it; this may be one of the encounters with it which ended in his using it. And if it is closely linked with more striking parallels, the debtor may have taken it over along with them. To proceed, then, with parallels which are linked with the others in the Lycus episode, the audience receives a strong hint of Richard's motive in his courtship when, in soliloquy, he plans it

… not all so much for love,
As for another secret close intent
By marrying her which I must reach unto.

(I. 1. 157)

Richard, the audience is well aware, aims at the throne; so this marriage is to be a step towards it. Lycus, who is in the act of usurping the throne of Thebes, in monologue avows his similar motive more openly:

… alieno in loco
haut stabile regnum est: una sed nostras potest
fundare vires iuncta reguli face
thalamisque Megara.

(l. 344)³²

The same passage, it seems not unlikely, was remembered when Richard resolves on trying to repeat with Elizabeth of York his tour-de-force with Anne:

I must be married to my brother's daughter,
Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.

(IV. 2. 62)

It is the same self-admonition as Lycus's ‘haut stabile regnum est’; though ‘brittle glass’ is a commonplace, and in The Mirror for Magistrates is a comparison for what ambition attains.³³

In Richard's soliloquy about Anne, already quoted, he glories in having taken her ‘in her heart's extremest hate’. Lycus, too, regards hatred as no deterrent, though while Richard has triumphed over a woman's it is public hatred Lycus would defy:

invidia factum ac sermo popularis premet?
ars prima regni est posse invidiam pati.

(l. 352)³⁴

Richard, on his way to kingship, had certainly been capable of facing and enduring Anne's hate, and had not allowed it to restrain his action. Megara's stance, unpropitious, like Anne's, from her suitor's point of view, is described in Lycus's monologue before he addresses her. She is at the altar, close-veiled, in sacred mourning (ll. 355-57). Anne, following the bier, is a similar figure of mourning piety, but she needs no description; the spectacle, on Shakespeare's stage, was eloquent enough.

That the scene was written with Seneca much in mind is confirmed by Shakespeare's use of Senecan stichomythia in half-lines (six for Anne and five for Richard) in the exchange beginning: ‘“I would I knew thy heart”—“'Tis figur'd in my tongue”’; and even the Senecan quarter-line: ‘“Some dungeon”—“Your bed-chamber”’ (I. 2. 192-202, 111).³⁵

Nor is the Hercules Furens the only play by Seneca that it reflects. Richard declares that until Anne's eyes moved his to tears, and ‘sham'd their aspects’ with ‘childish drops’, he had never shed tears before. In the Hercules Oetaeus, the hero, dying in agony, exclaims:

invictus olim voltus et numquam malis
lacrimas suis praebere consuetus (pudet)
iam flere didicit. quis dies fletum Herculis,
quae terra vidit?

(l. 1266)³⁶

Richard's ‘sham'd’ eyes may recall Hercules's ‘(pudet)’; and Hercules's rhetorical question may have helped to prompt the enumeration of occasions when Richard did not weep.³⁷ Again, when Richard contends that Anne is no less guilty than himself of the deaths of King Henry and Prince Edward, since her beauty was the cause; and presses the question

Is not the causer of the timeless deaths
Of these Plantaganets …
As blameful as the executioner?

(I. 2. 117)

Shakespeare was surely recollecting Seneca's Medea, who attributes to her love of Jason the crimes she has so far committed, and argues that Jason, for whom she has sinned, is as much responsible as she is. She demands of him, ‘tibi innocens sit quisquis est pro te nocens’ (l. 504).³⁸ At the climax, Richard reiterates his murders, and his passion for Anne as the motive:

… I did kill King Henry
But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me.
… 'twas I that stabb'd young Edward—
But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on.

(I. 2. 179, 182)

His hypocritical protestation parallels Medea's sincere one; she enumerates her crimes, including the murders of Absyrtus and Pelias, and adds the reason—love:

… funestum impie
quam saepe fudi sanguinem!—et nullum scelus
irata feci; movit infelix amor.

(l. 134)

Finally, I have little doubt that the stage-climax of Shakespeare's scene derives from Seneca's Hippolytus. Until I recollected Hippolytus and Phaedra in Seneca, I was haunted by the near-certainty that I had met Shakespeare's tableau somewhere outside Shakespeare.

When Anne's beauty is cited by Richard as the cause of his murders, her first impulse (as we have seen) is self-disgust at the very idea:

If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide,
These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks.

(I. 2. 125)

She would consign to destruction a beauty that had inspired such love as Richard's. Hippolytus devotes himself to destruction for inspiring such love as Phaedra's, incestuous as well as adulterous; he, likewise, when Phaedra makes her avowal, is filled with self-disgust. Horrified, he marvels that the thunderbolt of divine retribution does not strike, a commonplace of rhetoric (ll. 671-81); what is not a commonplace is that he then calls for it to fall upon himself; ‘sum nocens, merui mori;³⁹ / placui novercae’ (l. 683). ‘My Stepdames Fancy I have fed’ is Studley's translation of that last phrase; Anne's initial revulsion could be expressed as ‘This murderer's fancy have I fed?’. The commonplace with which Hippolytus begins is one that Anne also uses in her curse on Richard: ‘heav'n with lightning strike the murd'rer dead’ (I. 2. 64), though Hippolytus's form of it is more closely paralleled by Elizabeth at IV. 4. 24 f., exclaiming upon the murder of the Princes in the Tower; compare with line 671:

                    Magne regnator deum
tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides?
et quando saeva fulmen emittes manu
si nunc serenum est?(40)

and with Elizabeth's ‘O God … / When didst thou sleep when such a deed was done?’ and Margaret's answer, aside: ‘When holy Harry died, and my sweet son’.

Between Richard's scene with Anne, and Phaedra's with Hippolytus, far the most important resemblance is that of the posed pair of figures and the situation which the pose embodies, held tense, then dissolved by a gesture. The posed figures are a high point in the stage spectacle for Shakespeare's audience, even if only in the mind's eye for Seneca's. The outraged Hippolytus draws sword against Phaedra. The criminal lover is at his feet; laying hold on the sword she directs it at her breast and encourages him to slay her. Richard, like Phaedra a self-confessed criminal lover, is at Anne's feet; his sword, which he has made her take, is at his breast, and he bids her use it upon him. The sword of Hippolytus, in its owner's eyes, is polluted by Phaedra's touch; he casts it away. Anne, says the stage-direction, ‘falls the sword’, lets it drop. Hippolytus's action is crucial in one way; the abandoned weapon is made evidence of his having attempted to force the Queen.⁴¹ Anne's is crucial in another; she cannot, having blenched, recover her resolute and mortal hate. When she ‘falls the sword’, what the stage-business is emphasizing is the turning-point of the scene.

Since it can hardly be denied that the Hippolytus is behind this episode, it may also have helped to suggest the schizophrenia of the guilty soul which is the leading principle of Richard's soliloquy after his dream on the eve of Bosworth. The tradition not only of his dreaming a terrible dream, but of the perturbation it caused him, came to Shakespeare from the chronicles; but not with any particulars of his ‘Manie busie and dreadfull imaginations’ on awaking.⁴² For these Shakespeare turned to the Senecan (if also Ovidian) concept of the personality split by its guilt, and terrified of itself.⁴³ He would be familiar with Kyd's adaptation of the motif in The Spanish Tragedy, where Bel-imperia fears Bel-imperia, and Lorenzo marvels: ‘Fear yourself?’ (III. 10. 96-98; compare the astonished questions Richard asks himself). But Bel-imperia is without the guilt which, in Richard and according to Seneca, causes the split and the impulse to flee from the self of which the guilty creature is terrified. In the Hippolytus, Phaedra's nurse speaks of the ‘animus’ ‘… culpa plenus et semet timens’ (l. 163).⁴⁴ ‘What do I fear?’ exclaims Richard:

… Myself? There's none else by …
Is there a murderer here? No—yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself!

(V. 3. 183)

His ‘fly … from myself’ echoes the polluted Œdipus in Seneca's Phoenissae:

Me fugio, fugio conscium scelerum omnium
pectus, manumque hanc fugio.

(l. 216)⁴⁵

Richard, too, finds himself conscious of all crimes (‘conscium scelerum omnium’):

All several sins, all us'd in each degree
Throng to the bar, crying all ‘Guilty! guilty!’

(V. 3. 197)

More than any other of Shakespeare's plays, Richard III is his contribution to that phase in the development of the Elizabethan drama in which the neo-classical and the popular native traditions were brought together. In this it belongs with The Spanish Tragedy, and the pre-Shakespearian Hamlet where, Nashe testifies, English Seneca was bled line by line to afford whole handfuls of tragical speeches.⁴⁶Richard III is Senecan in its royal houses under curse, and the chain that binds them, one generation after another. It is Senecan as a tragedy of blood, the bloodshed (but with two exceptions) not being exhibited on stage. Senecan, again, are the ghosts demanding revenge, and the prominence of the revenge motive. As a criminal hero, Richard resembles Atreus the Senecan tyrant, Thyestes the murderous hypocrite, and, in his intellectual force and absence of moral feeling, the protagonist of the Medea. In the play's form and expression, Senecan features are the prologue-like opening monologue; the choric function performed by Margaret; the forensic oratory; the gnomic sayings; and the stichomythia.

All this, however, is made to combine with the native dramatic heritage to constitute a play for the popular stage. Richard III is eventful, far beyond any classical or neo-classical tragedy. Again, though most of the bloodshed is ‘off’, Clarence is stabbed on stage, and the audience is gratified with the spectacle of Hastings's decapitated head. In so far as the play is a tragedy, it is tragedy of the medieval casus type. Primarily it is a drama of history, moralized according to the Tudor political idea of the providentially-ordered process that brought Richmond and his successors to the throne.⁴⁷ Sequel and climax to the Henry VI plays, it completes a cycle which may be seen as the successor (secularized, in so far as politics in Shakespeare and his age ever are secularized) of the medieval mystery cycles. Those dramatized the divine plan of religious salvation for mankind, Shakespeare's, the divine plan of salvation for England. In the Renaissance, I have heard it said, the New Messiah was the King, the New Monarch; and in Richard III, Richmond will be he. Plays of political controversy (chiefly in religious politics) had been developed in the sixteenth century out of the medieval morality-play, and these led up to the full-blown moralized historical drama with its political themes. The Vice in the Tudor moral and political interludes is at once a descendant of the Deadly Sins and the devils in medieval drama, and an ancestor of Shakespeare's Richard, who at one point compares himself to ‘the formal Vice, Iniquity’ (III. 1. 82).⁴⁸ Like Aaron in Titus Andronicus, he derives from the Vice his comedian's delight in clever evil doing. For a time he makes the audience, too, enjoy his atrocities: it is because of this trait that Bernard Shaw compares him to Punch.⁴⁹Richard III may resemble Senecan drama, and differ from Henry IV Parts I and II later in having no comic sub-plot, but through Richard it includes comedy: it is not a neo-classical tragedy in one tone.

In pointing to Senecan features in Richard III, I am far from wishing to magnify them beyond their real extent and importance. Their effect in Shakespeare differs greatly from their effect in Seneca: what he does with what he takes, thereby transforming it, is something a critic or editor of the play would wish to explore. The play exemplifies, moreover, in an early form, the extraordinary synthesizing power of Shakespeare's creative gift. As historical drama, though it is so designed that it can stand alone, it completes the cycle of the three parts of Henry VI; by its Senecan features it recalls Titus Andronicus, which has Seneca as well as Ovid behind it. Its strands from Seneca are woven into a fabric which comes from the chronicles and The Mirror for Magistrates, from the original of the True Tragedy of Richard III, and possibly from Legge's Richardus Tertius,⁵⁰ with further colour from moral and Tudor interpretations of history and politics such as were embodied in some Interludes. Richard himself is modelled on Sir Thomas More's Richard, in the chronicle versions, who is a play-actor as well as a villain, on the Vice of the Interludes, and on the Senecan criminal hero. He has affinities, too, with the Machiavels, Kyd's Lorenzo, and Marlowe's Barabas. The play has Kyd's combination of the neo-classical and the popular, but with poetry beyond Kyd's range, and akin to Marlowe's. It is characteristic that a phrase so Marlovian in its reverberation as ‘fall / Into the blind cave of eternal night’ (V. 3. 62) is Senecan too: it combines (with ‘chaos’ as the associative link between them) ‘in caecum chaos casurus’ (Octavia, l. 391) and ‘noctis aeternae chaos’ (Hercules Furens, l. 610; Medea, l. 9; compare ‘noctis aeternae plagis’, Œdipus, l. 393). Richard's self-descriptive opening soliloquy resembles not only a Senecan prologue, but also the speeches in Marlowe that descend from the ‘gabs’ with which tyrants introduce themselves in medieval drama. Pithy sayings may be native proverbs: ‘I run before my horse to market’, ‘talkers are no good doers’. Or they may be from Senecan sententiae: ‘I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin’ (IV. 2. 65) evidently derives from ‘Res est profecto stulta nequitiae modus’, and ‘clausa iam melior via est … / per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter’ in the Agamemnon (ll. 150, 109, 115).⁵¹ Or they may partake both of the Senecan and the proverbial, as with ‘I do the wrong, and first began to brawl’ (I. 3. 324) which is reminiscent of Hippolytus, ‘tutissimum est inferre, cum timeas, gradum’ (l. 722)⁵² and a variant of the proverb which Tilley (C579) illustrates from Lyly's ‘curst wife, who deserving a check, beginneth first to scold’, and from King Leir:⁵³

He first begins for to complayne himselfe,
When as himselfe is in the greatest fault.

(l. 1154)

For a final instance of Shakespeare's eclecticism, turn again to Richard's schizophrenic monologue; the substance, as we have seen, is indebted to Seneca and Spenser, but the stiff convention in which it is couched derives from Lyly, who likewise dramatizes the mind in conflict by dialogue between the two attitudes, in question and answer, proposition and objection. The most extended and formal examples are in his prose fiction,⁵⁴ but he does use the method in drama, as when Eumenides, in Endimion, is torn between the claims of love and friendship:

What now Eumenides? Whither art thou drawne? … Hast thou forgotten … [c]are of Endimion? … Shall he die in a leaden sleepe, because thou sleepest in a golden dreame? I, let him sleepe ever, so I slumber but one minute with Semele … Tush, Semele doth possesse my love. I, but Endimion hath deserved it. I will helpe Endimion. I found Endimion unspotted in his trueth. I, but I shall finde Semele constant in her love.⁵⁵

Yet the range of its eclecticism is not the most remarkable feature of Richard III. More remarkable still is its harmonization of elements so variously derived. The further ripening of that power of harmonization is to be seen a few years later, in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Notes

1. See my ‘Shakespeare and The Governour’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (Summer 1963), 195-99.

2. See Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 145-50.

3. See … p. 722, n. 2 and p. 736, n. 1 [in Harold F. Brooks, “Richard III, Unhistorical Amplifications: The Women’s Scenes and Seneca,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, October, 1980] for discussion of (1) the relationship between Richard III and The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591); and (2) the comparative status, as witnesses to Shakespeare's source-material, of The True Tragedy of Richard III (1594) and The Mirror for Magistrates (edition of 1587).

4. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols, (London, 1957-75), III (1960), 221 (introduction and extracts 3 and 4 for Richard III). It may lend additional (hardly needed) weight to my identification of Seneca's Lycus episode and Trojan women as sources, or (for him) possible sources, to record that I made it independently.

5. Bullough, III, 236-37; compare 306-17.

6. That Margaret, ransomed (some four years after Tewkesbury), spent the remainder of her life in France would be apparent to him on the natural interpretation of Hall's account, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1543), edited by Henry Ellis (London, 1899), p. 301. None of his known sources would inform him that she died there in 1482, the year before Edward IV's death which he makes her survive.

7. I believe that not only the Bad Quarto, dated 1591 in the imprints of its two parts, but also the original play of which it is a version, is later than Richard III. Memorial contamination by the actors, or reminiscence by the anonymous dramatist, are the likeliest explanation of the parallel phrases, of which the most striking is ‘Set downe, set downe, the load’ (II. 786; I cite Troublesome Raigne from Bullough, IV, 72 ff.) compare Richard III, II. 1. 1. Since, however, they do not produce symptoms of corruption in the text of Troublesome Raigne, the dramatist is more probably responsible for them than the actors. That the debt is his, not Shakespeare's, is suggested particularly by the parallel between ‘purveyer for hell’ (I. 1734) and ‘hell's black intelligencer / Only preserved their factor to buy souls’ (IV. 4. 71), where Shakespeare has a source in what he drew on for his play—Hastings in The Mirror for Magistrates calls Richard and his like ‘factours for all evils’; (p. 277 of Lily B. Campbell's edition (Cambridge, 1938); page-references throughout are to this edition) while Troublesome Raigne has no source unless Shakespeare is one. The fragmentary parallels in John's speech of despair, ‘hopeless of any good’ and ‘Who pities me? … a few will pity me’ (II. 788, 791), are surely echoes of Richard's soliloquy after his fearful dream: ‘I love myself. Wherefore? For any good … ?’ and ‘no soul will pity me’, rather than contributors to it; especially as John's speech is the one that begins ‘Set down, set down the load’. In the other parallels noted, the phrase comes as a rule from a more memorable context in Richard III than in Troublesome Raigne. These phrases are: ‘for his delivery’, ‘supposed crime’, ‘thy cursed self’, ‘split thy heart’, ‘league of perfect love’, ‘divine instinct’, and (with the rhyme-word ‘law’) ‘to keep the world in awe’ (I. 1572; I. 1740; I. 1055; II. 287; II. 577; I. 756; I. 518; I. 1396. Compare Richard III, I. 1. 75; I. 2. 76, 80; I. 3. 301; II. 1. 2, 16; II. 3. 42; V. 5. 310). Troublesome Raigne is odd man out among similar publications such as A Shrew and the True Tragedy of Richard III; if, like them, it belonged to 1594, one could argue that it is (as I conclude them to be) cobbled from the corresponding pre-Shakespearian and Shakespearian plays. But the 1591 imprints stand in the way.

8. W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare's Holinshed (London, 1896; 1907 reprint), p. 350, n. 3; Hall, Union of … Lancastre and Yorke, (1809 reprint), p. 472.

9. Bullough, III, 253, 270-71; Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande … The last volume … contayning the chronicles of Englande from William Conqueror until this present tyme, 3 vols (1577; edition of 1587).

10. Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, edited by Thomas Newton (1581), cited from the edition by Charles Whibley, Tudor Translations, Second Series, II, 2 vols (London, 1927), II, p. 10. Below, the translations by Thomas Newton, John Studley, and Jasper Heywood are cited by volume and page from this edition.

11. In 3 Henry VI, V. 6. 49-54, 70-77; for the chronicle-references, …, n. 2 above.

12. Polyxena is persona muta; but her part in the scene is depicted when Helen addresses and Andromache describes her (871-87, 945-54).

13. In her second and last scene she soliloquizes before they enter. Compare I. 3. 110-55 and passim; IV. 4. 1-8; Troades, ll. 861-71.

14. Troades, ll. 903-22; Richard III, I. 3. 155-62; IV. 4. 35-125; ‘On me both partes will vengeance take al lightes to me at last.’ Heywood (Whibley, II, 43).

15. Yet I before most hateful judge dare wel defend my part,
    That I of all your grevous cares susteyne the greatest smart.
    Andromache for Hector weepes, for Priam Hecuba,
    For onely Paris prively bewayleth Helena.

    Heywood (Whibley, II, 43)

16. Compare Medea, l. 19, ‘Mihi peius aliquid, quod precui sponso, mane / —vivat’.

17. There may be a more definite sign that Shakespeare is not dependent on the translation, if it was Hecuba's ‘sortem occupavi, praemium eripui tibi’ (l. 998), even though the meaning in Seneca is different, which suggested Margaret's reproach to Elizabeth: ‘dost thou not / Usurp the just proportion of my sorrow?’ (IV. 4. 109). Heywood has no equivalent.

18. It is often said that Margaret's curses are all fulfilled. But Elizabeth does not die childless. The exception is of the greatest significance: her daughter Elizabeth and son Dorset enter the circle of Richmond and are safe. Shakespeare marks this for us in her counsel to Dorset:

    If thou wilt outstrip death, go cross the seas
    And live with Richmond, from the reach of hell …
    Lest thou …
    … make me die the thrall of Margaret's curse,
    Nor mother, wife, nor England's counted queen.

    (IV. 2. 42-47)

19. IV. 1. 59-63, 87, 90; Troades, ll. 945-47; 876-78; 942-44.

20. Bullough, III, 191, 206-207, 249, 253, 286-87; Boswell-Stone, pp. 318, 340-41, 345-46, 399-400; The Mirror for Magistrates, pp. 266, 276.

21. The instance in Arden of Faversham (1592), V. 3, may be indebted to Richard III; it is not in the dramatist's narrative source. The subject was topical in 1591; at the trial of Arnold Crosby, 25 January, the Lord Chamberlain moralized upon the renewed bleeding of his victim's wounds when he passed behind the house where the body lay (G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals 1591-1603, 3 vols in 1 (London, 1938), 1, 6-7). Scott, who uses the belief in The Fair Maid of Perth, quotes (Note O) a trial which shows that in 1688 it was thought to have been long and widely accepted.

22. Bullough, III, 236, 313 ff.

23. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Macbeth.

24. Compare also Deianira and Hyllus, in Hercules Oetaeus: ‘dexteram intrepidam para. / patet ecce plenum pectus aerumnis: feri; / scelus remitto’ (l. 999). Richard ‘lays’ his ‘breast naked to the deadly stroke’ (I. 2. 175, 177). J. S. (viz., Studley) translates the Seneca: ‘And to it with unfeareful arme, far overchargde with woe, / My breast lies bare unto thy hand. Stryk, I thy gilt forgeve’ (Whibley, II, 228). Legge, in a scene where Richard courts Elizabeth of York, has him offer to requite his killing of her two brothers by killing himself, and continues, ‘paratis ensibus pectus dabo?’ but the swords are in the plural and there is no present tableau, though further on he draws to threaten her. (See Bullough, III, 307, 311).

25. Hercules Furens, ll. 254-58, 269-78; Richard III, I. 2. 3-28.

26. Heywood (Whibley, I, 20) translates:

    If alwayes men eternal hates should one to th'other beare,
    And rage be gone out of the hart should never fall away,
    But th'happy still should armour holde, the'unhappy stil obay,
    Then shall the battayles nothing leave …

27. ‘A litle whyle receive and heare my wordes with pacient eare.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 20).

28. ‘Goe to, these fierce and furious wordes thou woman mad refraine.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 21).

29. ‘A few wordes yet to thee now speake I shall / For this my cause.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 21).

30. ‘Yet the end of war is now complayned, loe, / And not the cause.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 21); ‘quaeritur’ should be translated ‘men ask’.

31. ‘Thine owne death els, or els the death of mee.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 22).

32.                                                   … in forrayne countrey set
    No stable kingdome is. But one my pompe and princely might
    May ratify once joynd to me with regall torche ful bright,
    And chambers Megara.

    (Heywood (Whibley, I, 19))

33. See The Mirror for Magistrates, p. 223 (on Clarence); Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1946), p. 256 (on ambition); compare M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs of England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1950), G 134.

34. ‘The hate of men will then my pryde, and peoples speach oppres. / Chief knacke of kingdome is to beare thy subjectes hates eche one.’ Heywood (Whibley, I, 19).

35. For stichomythia in half-lines, compare the Hippolytus, ll. 242 ff.; in quarter-lines, the Medea, ll. 168 ff.

36. The time hath bin no plunging pangues could cause our courage quaile,
    That never use with cristall teares our anguish to bewayle.
    Ah, fy, I am ashamde that I should learne these teares to shed:
    That Hercules in weeping wise his griefe hath languished:
    Who ever saw at any day in any time or place …

    (J. S., viz., Studley (Whibley, II, 236))

37. See I. 2. 153-64. Hypocritical tears were characteristic of the Vice in Tudor Interludes: see below, …, n. 2.

38. Lines 500-504: ‘If any man shall for thy sake polute his hand with ill, / To thee let him an innocent yet be accompted still’ (J. S., viz., Studley (Whibley, II, 77)).

39. ‘I guilty am, deserved death I have.’ Studley (Whibley, I, 161).

40. O soveraygne Sire of Gods, dost thou abide so long to heare
    This vile abhomination? so long dost thou forbeare
    To see this haynous villany? If now the skies be cleare,
    Wil thou henceforth at any time with furious raging hand
    Dart out thy cracking thunder dint, and dreadfull lightenings brand?

    (Studley (Whibley, I, 160))

41. Richard III, I. 2. 174-82; Hippolytus, ll. 706-14, 726-29.

42. Boswell-Stone, p. 413 (quoting Holinshed); compare Hall in Bullough, III, 291.

43. Professor G. K. Hunter refers me to Ovid (see for example Heroides, VII. 61: ‘Perdita ne perdam, timeo, noceam re, nocenti’) and further reminds me of Spenser's Cave of Despair (Faerie Queene, I. 9); that episode and the Senecan passages would be likely to reinforce one another in Shakespeare's mind. Spenser's Trevisan ‘of himselfe … seemd to be afraied’. His Terwin has killed himself from the sense of inexpugnable guilt which it is Despair's tactic to induce. Red Cross himself all but succumbs, with a divided mind to which his action bears witness (‘resolv'd to work his finall smart, / He lifted up his hand, that backe againe did start’); his mental conflict is reproved by Una as ‘this reproachfull strife’. Richard, in his split-mind soliloquy, is assailed by despair: ‘I shall despair’ he exclaims. But in him, as in Seneca's Œdipus, the guilt, split mind, and fear of himself all belong to one person; not so in Spenser.

44. ‘And conscience burdend sore with sinne that doth it selfe mistrust.’ Studley (Whibley, I, 142): ‘semet timens’ is more suggestive of Shakespeare's idea than ‘doth it selfe mistrust’.

45. Again the Latin impresses more strongly the ideas Shakespeare pursues: Newton has: ‘From whom, from what do you thus flee? OED. From none but from my selfe / Who have a breast full fraught with guilte: who wretched caitiff Else / Have all embrude my hands with blood.’ (Whibley I, 110).

46. That the author lacked Latin to ‘bleed’ the original may be simply Nashe's gratuitous insult.

47. On this first tetralogy, I see no reason to depart from E. M. W. Tillyard's invaluable account in Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944).

48. See Peter Happé on ‘Richard III as Vice’ in ‘The Vice: 1350-1605’, his doctoral thesis, 1966, in the University of London (pp. 454-84), He notes that the Vice-characteristics cease with his coronation, and that his courtship of Anne exemplifies the Vice in action, typical features being the crocodile tears, ‘business’ with a sword, logic-chopping debate, success with a woman, and contempt of the victim.

49. Our Theatres in the Nineties, Standard edition, revised, 3 vols (London, 1932), II, 285.

50. Bullough, III, 236-39. Dover Wilson, in his edition of Richard III, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1954), pp. xxvii-xxxi, and in an article in Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 (March 1952), 299-306, concluded that in the Mirror Shakespeare did not look beyond Sackville's ‘Buckingham’ and its ‘Induction’, and Baldwin's ‘Clarence’; whereas it is now clear that he was familiar with the whole of the 1587 Mirror, echoing in this play or that many widely separated passages. Dover Wilson concluded that where a parallel exists between Richard III and the True Tragedy, the pre-Shakespearian play is the source, and there is no need to take a parallel in the Mirror into account. But if, as I believe, the True Tragedy (which he agrees is a Bad Quarto) is contaminated from Richard III itself, its parallels are not above suspicion: there is no certainty that they all come from the pre-Shakespearian play; whereas a parallel in the Mirror is a work Shakespeare undoubtedly knew: the derivation may run from the Mirror to Richard III and thence by way of an actor's memory to the True Tragedy. For the relevant material it contains, the Mirror should be recognized (reversing Dover Wilson's conclusion) as more surely the source; though to the extent (and no doubt it is a large extent) that the True Tragedy represents the pre-Shakespearian play, it is a source also.

51. ‘It is a very folishnes to kepe a meane therein’ (viz., in Clytemnestra's ‘fault’, ‘crime’); ‘The fittest shift prevented is, the best path overgrowne’; ‘The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still’. Studley (Whibley, II, 108, 106).

52. ‘The best it is, thy foe first to invade.’ Studley (Whibley, I, 162).

53. The versions in Lyly and King Leir, especially the former, are no doubt the primary influences: compare the verbal echoing of ‘beginneth first to scold’ and of ‘first begins’.

54. Compare (with their reiteration of ‘Ay, but’) Lucilla's monologue of ‘contrarieties’ in Euphues, and Camilla's in Euphues and his England (The Complete Works of John Lyly, edited by R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols (Oxford, 1902), I, 205; II, 184). The dramatization of the mind in conflict as a disputation between two voices goes back in the classics to Ovid's Heroides (for example, VII. 31-36 or XV. 203-204), and in medieval literature at least as far as Chrétien de Troyes; compare, in Cligés, Soredamors's dialogue with herself, ll. 873-1046 (Eric and Enid, translated by W. W. Comfort (London, 1914), pp. 103-104).

55. Endimion (Works, III, 50).