[In the following essay, Huffman challenges the common allegorical view of Richard as the “villain-king” scourged by God. Huffman maintains that the play offers an alternative to this perspective, one that allows Richard to be seen as a tragic individual rather than as an allegorical figure.]

Twentieth-century studies of Shakespeare's Richard III have shown the character of Richard to be that of a Machiavel, a figure closely related to the Vice of the Morality plays and to the Tyrant of Senecan tragedy.¹ The suggestion of the family resemblance to the Vice in turn suggests his association with the moral and even theological dimension which that figure never quite lost on the English Renaissance stage, and a number of critics have tended to supplement these character studies with a rather schematic view of the play's action. For R. B. Pierce, “What gives order to Richard III is the central conflict between the villain-king and the power of nemesis. This vengeful force has some effect on the consciousness of Richard himself; but it is primarily an external force, embodied in the curses, the wailing women, and the figure of Richmond as God's minister.”² If Richard III is viewed as the culmination of Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy, the historical and religious dimension is strengthened a priori, and the pattern of “Senecan” nemesis modified by “Christian” Providence becomes clear: through Richard God scourges England, ultimately for the deposition and murder of Richard II, and, at last, places on the throne the Earl of Richmond, who, wedded to Elizabeth of York, bequeaths to posterity the Tudor house and, most notably, Queen Elizabeth.³

Concentration on this overall pattern tends to stress on the one hand the fascinating character of the villain-king and, on the other, the allegorical drama in which the villain is defeated by the force of God working through history, rendered, as Pierce observes, through such liturgical scenes as that in 4.4 in which old Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York lament. Such a view requires that we see in the final action of the play not so much that Richard has defeated himself but rather that he is destroyed by the ritual of history: he, the chosen vehicle for God's wrath, is cast off after he has served his function as scourge.⁴ The critic is thus caught awkwardly between two tendencies, each of which seems inescapable: this view accounts, on the one hand, for the endless fascination that Richard has exerted over audiences and readers as the witty and ironic evil ruler, and, on the other, for the play's ending, which imports Richmond into the action and stages a highly allegorical opposition between the two rivals on the eve of the battle of Bosworth field.

Act 5, scene 3 is the moment in the play that would seem to join the two levels, of character and of history, which students of the play have discerned, and it warrants a few preliminary comments. It marks the highest degree of fascination with Richard, for when he awakens from his dream, tormented by the ghosts of his victims, he expresses his fear, and ends, drowned by this irrefutable record of his villainy, in despair of God's mercy. His dream has shown that “conscience,” although perhaps cowardly, is nevertheless a fact of life, and this conscience causes him to turn upon himself and to express the painful paradox that his own love for himself, a love that has taken the form of an exclusive self-concern, is indistinguishable from hatred of himself: it has made him both a king and a murderer. Richard confronts this paradox for the first time consciously and expresses it in a series of propositions immediately contradicted:

Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.

[ll. 188-93]⁵

Richard resolves the dilemma by coming to rest with acceptance of his guilt and, with that acceptance, with despair; and surely Doebler is right in insisting that that despair, so much like that in Dr. Faustus and in the “despair canto” of The Faerie Queene, would have functioned for Elizabethans as an implication of spiritual damnation consequent upon failure to trust in God's infinite mercy.⁶

Whatever external role history, or God operating through it, may have in the play, at this moment it is merged with the dramatic character: by seeing only himself in his past actions, Richard's speech internalizes an otherwise allegorical representation of a soul succumbing to despair, and his actions on the battlefield are evidence both of heroism and foolhardiness. The humanization of the allegorical scourge of God is successful, and part of the audience's response must be a contrary tugging of feelings: yes, Richard is guilty and one wants him punished; but no, one cringes at the prospect of eternal damnation, one cringes at the ending of a play in which a character given such heroic stature is merely ground out in an unequal contest with superhuman forces. In this pull and counterpull the reader, like the theatergoer, feels an urge to break into the play's action by reminding the character of a piece of commonplace knowledge he has lost sight of and that could save him: Richard, locked in his personal predicament, fails to perceive that which another, with a different perspective, can see clearly—God's mercy.

Critics of the play would be quite justified in dismissing such a response, which violates the artistic integrity of a play; but, I should like to argue, it is supported by elements within the play, and responds to Shakespeare's overall success in merging the personal character and the religiohistorical aspects of this play, which are really mutually supportive. At the moment in which Richard awakens and speaks, two unequal points of view are juxtaposed: Richard's vision of despair and damnation is the more compelling, but it is limited, and from the religious point of view inadequate, quite evitable, and false. This moment means that the conclusions some critics have drawn are false, that the play's overall historical pattern is retributive, that human character is thereby diminished, that free will is abrogated, and that man is “no more than dead skulls on the slimy bottom of the deep.”⁷ Richard's speech, limited, inadequate, and false as it is, is nevertheless crucial to his tragedy, but a full account of this must proceed by following the play's clear stress on conflicting and unequal perspectives on human actions and their ultimate consequences.

The most obvious link between the world of a character's decisions and actions and the larger-than-human world of history is sleep. Macbeth's “death of each day's life” and the dream are linked closely, at least in Hamlet's mind, with conscience:

                                                  To die—to sleep.
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
.....Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

[3.1.63-67, 83]

The first dreams we hear about in Richard III are the “drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams” invented by Richard to set his brothers Clarence and Edward IV at odds. The prophecies and dreams, always difficult of interpretation, say that “G of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.” George, Duke of Clarence, is incarcerated and killed, but Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is at least indirectly responsible for the King's death.⁸ The association so established with the words prophecy and dream is not one of falsehood, but, rather, of temporary uncertainty and ultimate truth.

Prophecies and dreams relate moments in time otherwise separated by great distances and the effects of chance. The former term has an important role in the play in foreshadowing future actions, and this role imposes a structure on the play: the important prophecies of Margaret and Anne come true.⁹ They stress both the consequences of action and the inevitability of universal justice of an ironic sort, glimpsed by Macbeth when he refers to the “even-handed justice / [that] Commends th' ingredience of our poison'd chalice / To our own lips” (1.7.10-12). The prophecies and dreams, then, are distinct from and opposed to any character's personal intentions, which are based on an assessment of a given situation. The dreams are the most obvious example of a second perspective, and make the audience aware of its ironic effect upon man's exclusive concern with his own perceptions and plans.

Richard III provides quite early instances of Shakespeare's deliberate use of this ironic opposition of perspectives. In his famous opening soliloquy, Richard introduces his villainy by developing the idea of the new peace in England, with its joy, plenty, and luxury, and its unsuitability to his character. To this vision he opposes himself, with a series of disjunctive clauses, “But I, that am not …,” “I …,” “I …,” “Why, I …,” culminating with, “since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain” (ll. 14-30). Yet the first major action of the play is the justly famous seduction scene in which, before the dead body of the late King Henry VI, Richard woos and wins the Lady Anne. The scene's rhetoric, technical virtuosity, theatrical magnificence, and its ultimate psychological realism have all been duly noted.¹⁰ Yet for the audience and reader, what these elements demonstrate is that Richard is wrong about himself; the brilliance of his political success with Anne shows the extent to which he has erred.¹¹ Nor does he err once only: for the moment of success with Anne eclipses—for a moment for his audience, but permanently for himself—the first characteristic of his soliloquy, the forthright personal honesty and accuracy of self-appraisal and its consequence, his aggression. The aggression is based on error, and its success causes error to be mistaken for truth.

The error and its consequences make Richard a villain and a fascinating character, but Shakespeare places a variety of reminders in the play to correct audience sympathy with him, to remind it of the inadequacy of the personal perspective, and, thereby, to remind it of the coexistence of and distinction between the two perspectives. These reminders are formulated in human terms and are articulated by characters in discourse with others. Even the lamentation scene in 4.4 is less an instance of the direct intervention of God in history than it is a reminder, like the silent presence of Henry VI in 1.2, of tradition: Margaret (purified by contrast to her existence in the Henry VI cycle) reminds the audience of human opposition to Richard, and of the normality of acceptance of adversity through suffering, a standard of behavior that everything in Richard contradicts.

Long before this crucial scene in which military and political reversals begin and continue to mount up against Richard until they culminate with the announcement of Richmond's arrival, the audience has been made aware of this other, anti-Ricardian perspective. After Richard's self-analytical opening speech and his victory over religious and social conventions as over personal scruples in the scene with the Lady Anne, and after the audience has been caught up in the heady freedom of Richard's independence, there occurs an isolated scene which, dominated by a character who has no further role in the play, contributes little of real importance to the plot: this is the “Clarence” scene in 1.4.

The murder of Clarence fulfills Richard's plan and the dream he describes has an obvious parallel in that of Richard on the eve of the Bosworth Field battle. The scene is ahistorical in that it is an addition to Shakespeare's sources; although the barrel of malmsey is mentioned in the Mirror for Magistrates, for instance, other elements, particularly the talk of conscience, probably derive from earlier dramatizations of the Richard story, but there they occur in connection with the pathetic murder of the young princes in the Tower.¹² Shakespeare's simple transposition of material to fit not children but a character with a high degree of articulateness and a considerable degree of personal involvement and guilt raises issues more complex than pathos. They are, I suggest, of the utmost significance for the understanding of Richard's tragedy.

Clarence's vivid language in describing his dream to the keeper has been remarked upon by several critics.¹³ It is unexpected, since his brief appearance earlier was unmarked by exceptional verbal dexterity. So unexpected is it that the keeper reacts with surprise: “Had you such leisure in the time of death / To gaze upon these secrets of the deep?” (ll.34-35). This response is one of several contrasts, implicit and explicit, in the scene, and is not necessarily a casting of the cold water of realism on Clarence's dream.¹⁴ The dream reminds the audience of Richard, who causes Clarence to fall into the sea, and certainly Clarence's later calls for mercy contrast with Richard's expressed contempt for it. In Aerol Arnold's formulation, where Clarence shows a Christian concern about divine punishment and conscience, Richard seems a saint while playing the devil and dismisses conscience (p. 53).

But the poetry of Clarence's speeches is more operative than such character contrasts suggest. One need not, for instance, allow total sympathy with Clarence, who is certainly guilty of murder and treason. The question for him is, Will there be forgiveness, whether in this life or the next? Implicit in the language of the scene is his answer: No. And that answer is, from the audience's point of view, an ironic one, because the language of the play has shown that it is false. A similar divergence of perspectives affects other elements of the scene. It is also ironic that Clarence, in dreaming of his escape from a confining prison, should find himself the more constricted by water, water that presses in so much that although “often did I strive / To yield the ghost,” it “stopp'd in my soul, and would not let it forth / To find the empty, vast, and wand'ring air, / But smother'd it” (1.4.35 ff.). The pain of the constriction is given further force by Shakespeare's use of the classical “journey to the underworld,” in which the souls who accuse Clarence call on Furies to “take him unto torment.” For Clemen it is Clarence's conscience that has caused this dream in which final judgment is rendered, and the use of death by water, with its mythological associations of disintegration and dismemberment, points to a judgment that is pitiless and hopeless (p. 69). On the other hand, the scene is filled with language that refers to God as the King of Kings, to expiation, to the afterlife and the Day of Judgment, and echoes the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.¹⁵ One wonders whether an audience sensitive to such language would not be painfully conscious of irony in seeing a character so limit himself to a classical, non-Christian perspective in a setting so clearly washed with a Christian tint; whether it would not, for instance, recognize that the waters of disintegration might also suggest waters of a potential regeneration. In any event, that Clarence and others are not aware of the possible implications of their words does not mean that these are inoperative in the total linguistic economy of the play.

For Clemen, among others, the description of the bottom of the sea, with its shipwrecks, skeletons, treasures, and gems come to rest in the eye sockets of skeletons, suggests the transitoriness of life and the falseness of worldly standards. On the other hand, M. Mahood provides an illuminating gloss on the passage that recognizes its use of differing perspectives: the jewels were once beyond price—“inestimable”—but are now “unvalued” because those who valued the jewels are dead.¹⁶ And who, we may then ask, are they? Are they the owners of the jewels, who would have been risking their lives for the possession? Are they, more likely, simply the mariners who risked and lost their lives merely to transport them? There is judgment here: the “gems” ironically, “as 'twere in scorn,” mock the dead bones of the men who so misvalued life that they risked it for earthly jewels—even for someone else's jewels. These men are punished for their error, an error that all men commit insofar as all have a metaphoric gem for which each would give his life. Clarence's rendering of his dream presents to the audience and reader a judgment of human action from the perspective of a time span as great as the life of a single human. Although still a limited perspective, it is larger and truer than the perspectives of those who have risked and lost; it is sufficient to judge and find wanting that action which has ended in death and meaninglessness.

The dream, then, provides a perspective that evokes a response from the attentive reader or listener somewhat more complex than Clarence's, and one that succeeding moments in the play guide through further complexities. Clarence's dream causes the audience to call in question the values and intentions of the stage figure who articulates them, just as Richard's seduction of the Lady Anne called into question his self-analysis. In both cases the character's perceptions, understanding, and, consequently, intentions, are limited; and this situation is true of other characters as well. Clarence ends his interchange with the keeper on a pious note: he admits his ill deeds, performed for the sake of his brother, and begs God to be merciful to his own family. Clarence is not the only character to fail to see the contradiction of seeking to be loyal to human and divine standards. Like him, the uncomprehending keeper can be frightened of the dream and still wish his charge “good rest”; and Brakenbury can receive the murderers' “commission,” adhere to the human standard of loyalty to a superior, and yet discard another standard while drawing attention to it: “I will not reason what is meant thereby, / Because I will be guiltless from the meaning” (ll. 92-93). An attempt to adhere to divergent standards is, it would seem, a human problem in the play; it affects the lowliest servant and the greatest prince, for, as Brakenbury observes, “Between their titles and low name / There's nothing differs but the outward fame” (ll.82-83). The standards diverge because they are standards according to different perspectives on human life.

The extension of the dilemma universalizes it. The lowest level of humanity, the hired murderers, now enter, and, pace Whitaker, Shakespeare observes decorum by presenting them as the least conscious of the significance of their words—they are consequently very funny.¹⁷ Unlike Clarence, they murder not on a changed principle but on no principle at all: hence the propriety of their articulate and superficial bandying of words meaningless to them just prior to the extinction of life. The initial interchange between the murderers develops the twin themes of conscience and principle, or warrant, for action. The remorse that the second murderer feels at the word judgment has little immediate effect, since he has an adequate earthly warrant; yet no warrant at all can defend him from the ultimate consequences of his action, consequences brought home to the audience not by the perspective of human life, of “gems as 'twere in scorn of eyes,” but by that greater perspective which places even the end of the body in the still larger continuum that reaches fulfillment only on the “great Judgment Day” (1. 101), and that includes the inevitability of damnation—or of salvation. It is life seen in this theological context that the second murderer risks for “the Duke of Gloucester's purse.”

Only “conscience” can intervene, conscience that he, like Richard who later addresses “coward conscience,” scorns because it limits man's earthly pleasures, successes, and riches. Man were best, he says, again like Richard, to ignore it, “to trust to himself and live without it” (l. 135). But can he? At crucial moments Clarence and Richard are visited by conscience; and at a crucial moment the first murderer is visited by it and, after this amusing rhetorical moment of devil's advocacy, he succumbs—but only momentarily. The comedy is laden with irony: but for the murderers, the perspective on intended action and its ultimate consequences—conveyed by the theological cast of language—casts any concern with its practical consequences into a severely constricted spectrum. With perfect lack of comprehension they “reason” with the awakening Clarence, who quickly understands their purpose. His hysterical protestation of innocence is, for all the murderers know, quite true, and their answer justified in the limited terms of human loyalty: the warrant to murder one not convicted by a court of law is the warrant of an absolute monarch—a temporary warrant, as it turns out, already rescinded. The inadequacy of their response is thus made plain both on the practical level—hence the “dramatic irony” of the scene—and also on a higher one, for the “King of Kings” has ordained that there shall be no murder. The questioning here, like that by Dr. Faustus in Marlowe's tragedy, has led from the observable, immediate world to the First Cause, and from this standard the interlocutors shrink.¹⁸

All three men here stand convicted by that absolute standard, although there is in fact a hierarchy of standards in this scene: shrinking from the absolute one, Clarence invokes a lesser one of brotherly love—lesser, but informed at least by pity. But the murderers, whose standard (if it can be called one) is lesser still, fail to respond to it. Clarence observes that they “make war with God” in their insistence, and will reap no rewards for their act: hence from all points of view they stand to risk and to lose; and nevertheless they strike. The final movement of the scene brings the discrepant perspectives home with yet greater clarity: the second murderer wishes he were innocent, but his very wish for innocence is infected by the limitation of his understanding: “How fain (like Pilate),” he exclaims, “would I wash my hands / Of this most grievous guilty murder” (ll. 261-62). For Ribner (p. 115) these words are part of “a ritual gesture to underscore the horror of the act,” but the desire to be innocent is no clearer than its impossibility; the second murderer, like Pilate in the biblical account, is guilty, would be innocent but cannot be, and has, willy-nilly, to accept the consequences. That he thinks that Pilate was successful in washing his hands of Christ's murder and that he compares himself to the Roman so glibly is, from the point of view the play allows the audience to take, one of the most striking instances of incomprehension and misperception in the play.

The function in Richard III of the Clarence scene exceeds the sum of its connections with narrative and with thematic development. However, to say with Clemen (pp. 65-66) that Clarence here is the first victim in a string of Nemesis of which Richard is agent and ultimately victim, tends to minimize his importance by tying him to the supernatural, active war on Richard. The issues raised are not schematic, but vital to humans as humans, although the awareness of any individual character is less significant than that of the attentive reader or listener. The audience hears a character who perceives justice to be the action of Furies, yet also recognizes that references to the King of Kings imply mercy; and it hears another err in his reference to Pilate but, by obliquely implying the presence of Christ, underscore the presence of God's mercy. The divergence of perspectives is rendered with greater clarity by the allegorical means Shakespeare utilizes in presenting Richmond in 5.3, Margaret—who, according to Holinshed, had died—and the brief glimpse of the entombed Henry VI. These anachronistic presences, like Richard's moment of success with Anne, implicitly judge his march to power and an earthly crown according to standards that call it in question—the varying standards or perspectives of “inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,” of a guilty conscience, of judgment, of the rightful grounds of human action and of human moral blindness. No character is sensitive to these standards, for each chooses to act in what he takes to be his own interests; yet each is responsible to them.

An allegorical method of representation need not belittle free will or the possibility of human dignity, as some critics believe. It is because Richard has full freedom and is not constrained by historicist preconceptions that Shakespeare can present to the audience the larger perspectives obliquely, by means, for instance, of the common, gullible people in 2.3, who know only that, if Richard is evil, yet the “Queen's sons and brothers [are] haught and proud” (l. 28). In 3.1, when Richard counsels the young Prince Edward to sojourn at the Tower of London, the latter replies that he dislikes that place, and asks whether it is true that it was built by Julius Caesar. There ensues the following interchange:

Pr. Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
Buck. Upon record, my gracious Lord.
Pr. But say, my Lord, it were not regist'red
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retail'd to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
Rich. [aside] So wise so young, they say do never live long.
Pr. What say you, uncle?
Rich. I say, without characters fame lives long.
[aside] Thus, like the formal vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.
Pr. That Julius Caesar was a famous man.
With what his valour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live.
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

[3.1. 72-88]

The irony of the interchange is not limited to character. The “wise” young Prince's dislike of the Tower raises the negative Renaissance associations with the tyrannic Caesar;¹⁹ and Richard's self-assurance, which takes the form of the witty variation on the words live long—such wise youths do not live long, unwritten biographies may live long through oral communication—ignores that negative view. The physical record of Caesar's building recalls Caesar's evil greatness, a record of which will descend to “the general all-ending day,” at which moment records become true. The perspective of history has helped to define and find faulty another limited human perspective.

The adjustment, the reorientation in point of view that this interchange imposes on the audience, carries a choric effect more inclusive than Hastings's oft-quoted lament beginning “Woe, woe for England” (3.4.79-92); Hastings's nationalist perspective is less comprehensive than the cosmic one the play reminds one of so often. A similar contrast of perspectives occurs in 3.7. Despite Buckingham's stage management, the people have remained “like dumb statuës or breathing stones” (l. 25). Hence Richard and Buckingham prepare a scene in which the former appears before the Lord Mayor and the citizens, between two bishops, intent, in his devotions, on the salvation of his soul. “I cannot tell if to depart in silence,” he says at the beginning of a long speech, “Or bitterly to speak in your reproof, / Best fitteth my degree or your condition” (ll. 141-43). Richard's consummate hypocrisy at this moment has often been observed, and its perfection is clearly dependent on his lack of concern with the sentiments he utters. But those sentiments are nevertheless present, are embodied in the bishops, even in a scene that belittles and holds them up to scorn. They are present not as an alternative to Richard—the play does not preach such a political lesson—but as a differing standard, a responsibility imposed by a perspective on action that differs from Richard's but to which he is at last to be held.

Following the liturgical scene of lamentation, Richard suffers military and personal reversals. They begin with his dialogue with Queen Elizabeth about the possibility of marrying Elizabeth of York. Although critics have differed on whether or not he convinces her, the very lack of absolute certainty in the matter is a significant variation on the patent success in the parallel scene with the Lady Anne. He believes he has won: “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman,” he says. But the audience would certainly have known that historically Elizabeth married not Richard but Richmond, bore the Tudor line and their own Queen Elizabeth; such knowledge would impose a sense of failure on the dialogue and the language of the scene permits at least a degree of uncertainty. The military reversals now announced continue the uncertainty of truth and dramatize Richard's difficulties in assessing it in any but a wholly personal, and therefore inadequate and erroneous way. “'Tis thought” that a navy is on the western coast, with Richmond the admiral; English armies are in arms against Richard; but now the army is reported to be “dispers'd and scatter'd”; and an English army is in arms; the navy is scattered; last, the army is defeated and Buckingham taken prisoner, but the navy has landed (ll. 432-534). Each report is apparently true according to its point of view, and Richard responds to each with his own; no longer calculating, aggressive, and self-advancing, he forgets Catesby's message (ll. 445-48), and then strikes and rewards a messenger (ll. 507ff).²⁰ This moment in Richard's career is comic rather than tragic because its scope is limited to the moment, is so without reference even to the practical outcome of the issues.

The play, then, is at pains to present different perspectives on the same moments: Richard's self-analysis and seduction of the Lady Anne, Clarence's dream, the conversation with the murderers, the reference to Julius Caesar, Richard and the bishops, Richard and Queen Elizabeth and with the messengers; and, at last, Richard with himself. In each case more than one point of view on the situation and a main character's response to it is made clear, and in each case the inaccuracy, the inadequacy of the main character's response is underlined. In each case it is the language in which the scene is conveyed that prompts the reader or the listener to act out the desire to reach into the artistic world to alter a decision taken by a character. This active sense of an alternative perspective is a vital part of the tragedy of character.

Thus it is that Richard's dream on the eve of his last battle, a dream so reminiscent of Clarence's earlier in the play, is not that of a man crushed by the righteous sweep of history or by God's inexorable retribution on England, in which He also casts away the scourge that had served him in punishing the nation. Richard's dream—the ghosts calling for vengeance—is the symbol of his human freedom in the sense that he was chosen and acted freely and has not been bound by scruple or convention. That he makes of his experience what Clarence had made of his, and sees only the prospect of merciless punishment while at the same time mouthing “Jesu,” is not the result of an autonomous Nemesis or Necessity, but of the limitation of his perspective. The very pity with which the audience or reader responds is itself the refutation of that perspective, since it contradicts the nothingness that Richard believes he faces. If Richard's death may be termed tragic, as I believe it can, it is because he has consistently and deliberately ignored a host of alternative, larger, and more accurate views of the human condition, views that could have saved his soul, and that have been held up clearly to the audience from the beginning. In his career Richard has not ironically activated impersonal forces that destroy him: rather, he has realized in fullness a character that, in the ripeness of time, can see in life only the justice of revenge, a justice that Shakespeare formulates here (as in Titus Andronicus) as insufficient and as inadequate to the fundamental value and significance of human life.

Notes

1. On Richard as an Elizabethan “Machiavel,” the aspiring will that threatens to destroy order, see A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), pp. 15 ff. S. Thomas, The Antic Hamlet and Richard III (New York: King's Crown Press, 1943) and Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 386-407, both discuss Richard's relation to the Vice figure. On Shakespeare's Senecanism, see the still influential essay by T. S. Eliot, “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” Selected Essays (1932; reprint ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 51-88.

2. Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 89-90. The autonomous power of Nemesis is discussed by Tom F. Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). Driver warns against an uncritical use of the idea, but his caveat has not always been observed; it is in part dismissed by Pierce, p. 122. Rossiter argues that the play presents “two things: on the one hand, a rigid Tudor schema of retributive justice … and, on the other, a huge triumphant stage-personality” (p. 2).

3. The fullest articulation of the providential scheme in Richard III is E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944); Irving Ribner argues that the play is correctly viewed as a morality play, the last chapter, as it were, of the Henry VI tetralogy, written to “emphasize the role of providence in history, and to show how God's grace enabled England to rise out of the chaos of the Wars of the Roses.” The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 116. Shakespeare's adherence to the Tudor myth is stressed by H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 295. However, John Dover Wilson disagrees; see his edition of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), p. xlv.

4. John R. Elliott, “The History Play as Drama,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 2 (1968): 21-28. Rossiter argues that the historical and personal aspects of the play form an ultimate paradoxical unity; see pp. 20-22. His stress on the “repulsiveness” of the retributive justice receives extension by Nicholas Brooke (see n. 7).

5. Quotations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner (Waltham, Mass.: Xerox, 1971).

6. B. A. Doebler, “‘Dispaire and Dye’: The Ultimate Temptation of Richard III,” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 75-85. For studies interested primarily in the character of Richard, this scene is a bit hard to handle: see, for instance R. B. Heilman, “Satiety and Conscience: Aspects of Richard III,” Antioch Review 24 (1964): 53-73, reprinted in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. J. L. Calderwood and H. E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 137-51; see pp. 146-47. References to Heilman are to this reprint.

7. Nicholas Brooke, “Reflecting Gems and Dead Bones: Tragedy vs. History in Richard III,” Critical Quarterly 7 (1965): 134.

8. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 3:241-42, argues that Edward appears to die of remorse because no one had tried to save Clarence. On the other hand, he observes in part, “Clarence removed, Edward must die next” (p. 241).

9. W. Clemen, “Anticipation and Foreboding in Shakespeare's Early Histories,” Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953): 25-35.

10. For two opposing views, compare Ribner, for whom the wooing of Anne is a ritual act, “designed to repeat the theme of Edward IV's earlier wooing of Lady Grey, rather than … a depiction of historical fact” (pp. 114-15), with S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare's Historical Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 91-92, for whom it is an alteration of history designed to help delineate character. For the ultimate extension of the personal view, see Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 39.

11. Heilman discusses the political nature of this success, pp. 144-45.

12. Bullough discusses the relevance of Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius and the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III and Hall's account on pp. 233-41; cf. J. Spargo, “Clarence in the Malmsey-Butt,” Modern Language Notes 51 (1936): 166-73.

13. Howard Baker, Induction to Tragedy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), pp. 60-62; F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 123; Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 9-12; Aerol Arnold, “The Recapitulation Dream in Richard III and Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 51-62.

14. W. Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III, trans J. Bonheim (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 74. Clemen identifies the “keeper” as Brakenbury from the beginning of the scene, following Q, although in his edition Ribner, following F, distinguishes between them.

15. R. S. H. Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1935), pp. 133-35. On the religious dimension of the association of dreams and Bosworth Field, see Emrys Jones, “Bosworth Eve,” Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 38-54.

16. Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 44-45.

17. Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953), p. 62.

18. 2. 2. 18-75 in the edition of Irving Ribner (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963).

19. On the differing attitudes toward Julius Caesar in the Renaissance, see Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 10-23 and notes; and T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27-38.

20. For another view on this important scene, see Heilman, “Satiety and Conscience,” esp. pp. 143-44.