SOURCE: “Richard III and the Reformation,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 83, No. 4, October, 1984, pp. 509-21.

[In the following essay, Richmond analyzes the “massive” religious vocabulary of Richard III and reveals the ways in which the play explores contemporary religious tensions between Protestants and humanists.]

When Richard of Gloucester compares himself to “the formal Vice, Iniquity” (III.1.82)¹ and is repeatedly called “a Devil,” the play of Richard III explicitly recalls the archaic formulas of the miracle plays, mystery cycles, and the morality plays, which were dying out in Shakespeare's lifetime under the combined hostilities of the Reformers and the Humanists. Shakespeare, however, had excellent historical justification for putting such specific allusions to the religious drama into Richard's mouth. Ample evidence survives from the fifteenth century of the intense interest in drama in Northern England, which was Richard's primary power base—and particularly in the city of York, where the medieval cycle continues to be performed. In 1483 the Corpus Christi Guild of York revived a Creed Play (performed earlier in the century) for presentation before Richard.² Indeed, the play was so effective that it was still in circulation as a performable script as late as Shakespeare's lifetime. Moreover, there are records in which a professional troupe, “the Duke of Gloucester's players, can be traced between 1479 and 1480 in places as far apart as Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, and Canterbury and New Romney in Kent.”³ (Richard was made Duke of Gloucester as early as 1461.) By the mid-sixteenth century, however, the Reformers' hostility to this “papistical” drama had radically diminished its prestige: Protestants were “determined to turn such plays into vehicles of propaganda or to suppress them outright.” Unfortunately “the passion for public edification” of the Protestant playwrights “succeeded in boring their audiences rather than entertaining them, and drove them into the arms of the professional players.”⁴ This in turn helped foster the antipathy between the Puritans and the Public Theaters.

Nevertheless, as the massive religious vocabulary of the play Richard III confirms …, Shakespeare is not repudiating the genre of religious drama, but giving it fresh vitality in the light of the ecclesiastical and aesthetic controversies generated by the coming of the Reformation. He brings the verve of popular drama to bear on traditional themes and genres, undercutting them with mocking irony and the new sense of precise historical allusion generated by Puritans and Humanists alike. For example, an important element of the first English tetralogy lies in its elaborate mockery of the miracle plays' celebration of saints' lives, in a way calculated to appeal to nationalistic Protestants in England. Joan of Arc had long been rehabilitated in France, and thus appeared there in Shakespeare's time as “a holy prophetess” (1 Henry VI, I.iv.102), and as “France's saint” (1 Henry VI, I.vi.29), but sixteenth-century English Protestants would still be content to reaffirm her nature as a “damned sorceress” (1 Henry VI, III.i.38) illustrating the fraudulent, even diabolic, nature of Catholic saints.

Similarly, Henry VI's own sanctity is ridiculed by demonstration of his credulity over fraudulent “miracles” by the humanist rationalism of Duke Humphrey (2 Henry VI, II.i), who is in turn himself destroyed by the diabolism of his superstitious wife. Her viciousness is exploited by an unholy alliance of the vicious Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and the Termagant Queen, Margaret of Anjou. Both of these malevolent representatives of the established order in fifteenth-century Europe discredit traditional authority through Shakespeare's emphases: Beaufort dies “Blaspheming God and cursing men” (2 Henry VI, III.ii.372), and we are admonished that “So bad a death argues a monstrous life” (2 Henry VI, III.iii.30) by the naïve Henry himself. Queen Margaret mocks her own husband's traditional devotions:

                    all his mind is bent to holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads; …
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves
Are brazen images of canonized saints.
I would the college of the Cardinals
Would choose him Pope and carry him to Rome,
And set the triple crown upon his head—
That were a state fit for his holiness.

(2 Henry VI, I.iii.55 ff.)

These elements in Henry VI invert traditional values in provocative and amusing ways which would appeal to popular audiences, but they also appeal skilfully to views and tastes of both Protestants and Humanists. Shakespeare builds on the historical success of Henry VI in the theater by strengthening such effects in Richard III. This play masses traditional religious motifs and vocabulary to an unusual degree, for the most part by reversing or parodying them in ways appealing to the Tudor synthesis of Protestant and Humanist views of fifteenth-century Catholic society. Lady Anne explicitly triggers Protestant repudiation of saints and their worship when she anticipates Henry VI's beatification: “Be it lawful that I invocate thy ghost” (Richard III, I.ii.8). Richard quickly reminds her and us of Henry's incompetence and mocks such pseudo-sanctity by elevating Anne herself to the rank of “sweet saint” (I.ii.48). At every level in the play Shakespeare deftly exploits the religious concerns of his time, mostly by inverting medieval conventions and attitudes. Yet the ultimate effect is not to discredit religion but to intensify an awareness of it in the subjective terms fostered by Reformation stress on the individual state of mind.

The play's religious concerns are more thoroughly demonstrated by my word-frequency comparisons than by critical assertions, and they certainly have not escaped scholarly observations such as those of Thomas Carter, who noted ninety Biblical references in the text, while Wolfgang Clemen has counted seventy-three invocations of God (without noting the further thirty-two uses of the word listed in Spevack's Harvard Concordance, or the numerous other religious terms listed in my frequency table, based on this source).⁵ If E. K. Chambers has used his underestimate of fifty-seven references to “blood” to revive Moulton's idea of the play as governed by a pagan Nemesis ruthlessly meting out vengeance to all, François Faure's reinterpretation of such data is more orthodox.⁶ He finds that “the abundance of religious vocabulary and allusions to the Scriptures emphatically gives the whole tragedy a religious tone” which “obliges the spectator to recognise religious tragedy” as its genre, giving fresh twists to classic motifs. For example, he asserts that despite its specious dependence on the historical circumstance of Richard's marriage to her, in the episode of Lady Anne's seduction “the Elizabethan spectators could not fail to make the connection with the biblical episode of Eve and the Serpent.” But Richard's pleas involve a more sophisticated method than any medieval demon's, as when he sardonically suggests of the naïvely inept Henry VI that his assassin merits thanks for sending him to heaven, because “he was fitter for that place than earth” (I.ii.108). Richard ridicules the whole idea of merit and confidence in salvation implicit in Dante's title for his Divine Comedy. Faure shows that Richard and his agents serve as “the representatives of Providence,” but in a far less optimistic way than messengers in medieval moralities, whose warnings are unambiguous. Catesby admonishes the complacent Hastings that it is “a vile thing to die, my gracious lord, / When men are unprepar'd and look not for it” (III.ii.62-63). Hastings' persistence in self-destruction after this warning lacks Christian humility, and approaches pagan hubris:

O monstrous, monstrous! and so falls it out
With Rivers, Vaughan, Grey; and so ’twill do
With some men else, that think themselves as safe
As thou and I.

(III.ii.64-67)

The distinctive cathartic effect of Shakespeare's play lies in this evocation of Christian truths in the most harshly ironic terms, which merely make human repudiation of Providence more powerfully plausible. Perhaps the most memorable of these paradoxical scenes, in which grotesque comedy reinforces religious awareness, lies in the setting of Clarence's murder, when his assassins cynically try to validate their crime as proper, and to see “conscience” as an aberration to be exorcised: “Take the devil in thy mind, and believe him not; he would insinuate with thee but to make thee sigh” (I.iv.147-49). Here it is Lutheran concerns that are evoked by parody, so that this grotesque episode becomes what Faure considers “an epiphenomenon of a much more important religious reality.” So intense does this reality become as the episode evolves, that the Folio edits out the religious terms as sacrilegious on the secular stage when Clarence exclaims:

I charge you, as you hope [to have redemption
By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins,]
That you depart, and lay no hands on me.

(I.iv.189-91)

Of course, his assassins reject the admonition, until after the crime has damned them:

How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands
Of this most grievous murther.

(I.iv.272-73)

Yet even this allusion is ironic, for Clarence is no innocent victim, like Jesus, but as vicious and treasonable as his killers. Through such details this episode reinforces our horrified awareness that the play demonstrates mankind's consistent rejection of a universal potentiality for grace.

Structurally, as Spivack has noted,⁷ the play is built out of a sequence of such didactic episodes showing the fates of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, Lady Anne, Buckingham, and finally Richard himself. In this episodic structure the play nominally follows the models of Dante's Inferno, or Chaucer's Monk's Tale, or the Dances of Death so popular around 1500, not to mention The Mirror for Magistrates on which it draws so heavily. The play's word frequencies all seem to confirm its adherence to traditional values derived from Old Testament legalism: “prophet,” “curse,” “blood,” and “death” all lead to foreordained punishment on the appointed “day.” With perhaps the exception of The Mirror for Magistrates, however, which shares some of its introverted subjectivity, Richard III achieves a far more sophisticated level of irony, comparable to the self-destruction of Sophocles' Oedipus. Thus Buckingham discovers that he has foreordained his own destruction by his insincere oath: “This is the day … I wish'd might fall on me when I was found / False” (V.i.13-15). Similarly, Anne discovers that she has “proved the subject of mine own soul's curse” (IV.i.80). Such mathematical patterning may seem medieval enough, but it attains a fresh aesthetic and psychological interest because of the dawning of self-awareness and self-judgment in the victims, not present for example in those of Chaucer's Monk's Tale, though prefigured in The Mirror for Magistrates' remorseful ghosts. There has been a shift of emphasis from the medieval objective vision of a coherent universe to the inner world of sophisticated character, whose genesis is best studied in Shakespeare's development of the role of Richard himself.

Shakespeare elaborates religious allusions in his source, particularly More's account of Hastings' death.⁸ There Richard exclaims vehemently: “By Saint Paul, I will not to dinner til I see thy head off,” and so the wretched Hastings “made a short shrift for a longer would not be suffered, the Protector made so much haste to dinner: which he might not go to til this were done for saving of his oath.” This single reference in More to a Pauline oath becomes a unique Ricardian trait in the play, where Richard uses it compulsively. John Harcourt reminds us also of the disconcerting reverberations of the primary allusion, when it is linked to Acts, 23:12: “And when it was day, certain of the Jews banded together, and bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul.” In this case, either the original historical situation or More's sophisticated irony has provided the kind of complex counterpoint characteristic of this play as a whole. Hitherto, Spivack and others have mostly stressed that Richard's black humor derives from the traditionally malevolent roles of the Devils and Vices to which he himself alludes, but Shakespeare's Richard is far subtler, deriving from a new level of inter-relations between exact historical data favored by the new Humanist historians, and the intense study of the text of the Bible stressed by the Reformers. Curiously enough, Shakespeare seems to recognize in the historical Richard traits which have been restored to general awareness only by such modern historians as Paul Kendall, but which may well have lingered in the minds of Englishmen as late as Shakespeare's generation.

In his biography of Richard, Kendall stresses that to his contemporaries Richard seemed “a rudimentary Puritan, as were the townsmen to whom he felt himself so warmly bound. It was the vices particularly repugnant to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans from which he wished to turn men's habits—lechery and arrogance and dishonesty and blasphemy and ruthless greed. Hence … his insistence that Jane Shore do public penance for harlotry.” Richard himself proclaimed to an assembly of bishops that “our principal intent and fervent desire is to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced … and vices … provoking the high indignation and fearful displeasure of God be repressed.” Like many later Puritans, “Richard revealed a surprising sense of women as people in their own right,” showing an intense concern for the opinions of his mother, wife, and female friends.⁹ The stage-play Richard consistently displays this preoccupation with public decorum, the power of women, and the dangers of sexual indulgence of an extravagant kind. All seven allusions to Jane Shore in the play are Richard's, and worded in the ambivalent vein of hostility and morbid fascination with sexuality characteristic of such other affected Puritans as Malvolio and Angelo.

Another prefiguration of such sixteenth-century concerns by the historical Richard appears in the survival of his personally annotated copy of Wycliffe's translation of the New Testament, so that the preoccupation of Shakespeare's Richard with Saint Paul is plausible and apt. Harcourt detects a “curiously Pauline atmosphere” in the whole play, for it echoes the puritanical tone of The Epistles to the Corinthians with their relentless stress on female decorum and sexual restraint. Paul shows an aversion to sexual intercourse shared by Shakespeare's Richard, who also unexpectedly shares with the historical apostle some kind of physical disability, not to mention their shared deep sense of guilt from direct involvement in the assassination of innocent Christian victims.

So far I have implied that Richard's Puritanism in the play, while possibly suggested by surviving knowledge of his historical personality, is only an ironic affectation, as More's life of Richard III insists so strenuously. Shakespeare's achievement in creating the character involves, however, a deep synthesis of history and stage characterisation rather than a facile duplication of the traditional, crudely insincere Vice figure, in which psychological plausibility is never seriously attempted. T. S. Eliot detects in this later type of character “a kind of self-consciousness which is new,” and he defines it as the dawn of modern subjectivity: “identifying the Universe with oneself.”¹⁰ In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, Barbara Lewalski shows that this blend of historical biography with an intimate subjective outlook transformed traditional religious formulas in the lyric, and she asserts that such literature displays “the Reformation emphasis upon application of all scripture to the self.”¹¹ One can apply these ideas to dramatic psychologies such as Richard's. Indeed, Richard affects a cynical bravado exceeding anything in Donne's lyrics, religious or amatory—yet like Donne, in that such effects derive from the biography of his historical prototype. Kendall describes these psychological complications: “he betrayed a feeling of insecurity, a mounting strain which gave him sleepless nights, a careworn look, and an uneasy mind” (p. 358). Shakespeare makes Lady Anne recall such “timorous dreams” as disturbing the marriage bed he shared with her (IV.i.84). Thus the stage Richard is no abstract Vice, but a realistic, psychologically complex character, as distressed by his conscience as his victims are.

Shakespeare's Richard derives his own merciless insight into the weakness of others from his acute sense of his own defects, as we see in his frequent bitter soliloquies and asides, which reflect a self-censure and repudiation as harsh as any Puritan could desire. It is Richard's role which ensures the overpowering frequencies of such terms as “soul-s” (exceeding even Hamlet), coupled with such ominous words as “fall,” “guilt,” despair,” “Hell-,” “remorse-,” all of which reflect Richard's intense awareness of the total depravity of fallen human nature. This despairing insight is what gives him psychological ascendancy in any dialogue, since his interlocutors (initially, at least) share a naïve faith in conventional humane values and good intentions. By contrast, Richard consistently thinks and acts on Saint Paul's assumption of universal wickedness, as in Romans, 3:10: “There is none righteous, no not one. … They have all gone out of the way: … there is none that doeth good.” Significantly anticipating Hamlet's pessimism (“Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?” [II.ii.529-30]), Richard can disorient the hysterically revengeful Lady Anne by reinforcing his mastery of conventional Petrarchan flattery with plausible Christian admonitions: “Lady, you know no rules of charity, / Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses” (I.ii.68-69). As Spivack says: “Richard gets from Christian homiletics a prescriptive victory over her astonished heart.”¹² We in turn are forced to a deeper sense of the meaning of Original Sin, which should reduce our susceptibility to the unpredictable emotionalism exploited in Richard's seduction of Lady Anne in the guise of a sentimental Petrarchan lover, as Faure shows.

In such scenes, the traditional allegorical precedents and melodramatic reversals should not blind us to the Reformation assumptions involved in the characterizations. Protestantism stressed the instability of the human mind, the proneness of even the best to temptation, and the unpredictable nature of grace. Under such a system, anxious and persistent self-scrutiny is intensified, and Richard strikingly epitomizes this Reformation focus: the play exceeds all others of Shakespeare in its use of the words “self” and “myself.” Richard uses “I” 256 times, and the play leads all others in the two English tetralogies in the use of that pronoun. The surfacing of the deeper structure of this private personality provides the climax of Shakespeare's play, when Richard reveals how far this damning self-awareness extends, on the night before Bosworth Field:

Have mercy, Jesu! …
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I [am] I.
Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself. …
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, …
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty! guilty!”

(V.iii.178-99)

The vehement stress on “self” here does not hesitate to appropriate the Biblical affirmation of Jehovah, “I am that I am,” in the interest of private personality—a striking example of Barbara Lewalski's idea of the “application of all scripture to the self.”

Even more remarkable is the classic dissociation of the personality resulting from extreme application to one's experience of negative judgments in the Calvinist mode, here anachronistically back-dated to the fifteenth century. As Bullough has shown, Shakespeare characteristically antedates Reformation neuroses to much earlier periods, as when he ingeniously transposes to Macbeth the despair, hallucinations, and use of witchcraft of the guilt-ridden Catherine de' Medici, instigator of the Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre of Huguenots in 1572.¹³ Such a transposition was prefigured in Richard III, for Shakespeare seems to have lifted phrases about these events in France from the account of them by the Calvinist Agrippa d'Aubigné's neglected epic, Les Tragiques, which was widely known in draft form among Protestants by 1589, though printed much later. Whether or not Shakespeare knew the epic, Richard certainly displays the same dissociated personality that the disruptive power of the Reformation generated in Protestants and Catholics alike. For the French King Charles IX fell victim after the Massacre which he authorized in 1572 to the same kind of personality disorders afflicting his mother Catherine de' Medici:

                                                                                          le fier changea de face,
Oubliant le desdain de sa fier grimace,
Quand, apres la semaine, il sauta de son lict,
Esveilla tous les siens pour entendre à minuit
L'air abayant de voix, de tel esclat de plaintes
Que le tyran cuydant les fureurs non esteintes …
Il depescha par tout inutiles deffenses:
Il void que l'air seul est echo de ses offenses, …
Du Roy, jusqu'à la mort, la conscience immonde
Le ronge sur le soir, toute la nuit lui gronde,
Le jour siffle en serpent; sa propre ame lui nuit,
Elle mesme se craint, elle d'elle s'enfuit.

(Les Tragiques, V.1005-10, 1014-15, 1021-24 ff.)

(… the proud man changed his expression, forgetting the disdain of his haughty scowl, when after the week of massacres he leapt from his bed, waked all his servants to hear the air at midnight baying with voices in such an uproar of complaint that the tyrant thought rage to kill not extinct. … He set out futile defences everywhere: he sees that the air itself is the echo of his crimes. … The filthy conscience of the King, until his death, gnaws him at evening, scolds him all night; the day hisses like a serpent; his own soul harms him, it fears itself, it flees from itself.)¹⁴

Richard's self-indictment parallels such self-hatred characteristic of the Reformation period, but of course its ultimate precedent is again to be found in Saint Paul, as in Romans, 7:14: “My own behavior baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe.” In Paul, however, such self-censure is only the prelude to a confident affirmation of the paradox admitted by even the severest Calvinist: that redemptive grace transcends all human concepts of merit or defect, so that Saul, who dealt death to innocent Christians, can become himself one of the great Christian apostles. Richard's astonishing exclamation, “Have mercy, Jesu!” provocatively stresses that even such a monster may recognize to the end this deeply irrational potentiality for forgiveness of penitent sinners. In this Richard shares the awareness of another, more venial reprobate, for Falstaff regularly warns us “I'll repent, and that suddenly” (1 Henry IV, I.ii.89). If we accept the testimony of the Hostess in Henry V (II.iii) it appears he does just that, for on his deathbed he echoes the Twenty-Third Psalm, and calls repeatedly on God. Not for nothing is Falstaff derived from the career of the proto-Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle who figures so prominently in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Similarly, many of the death scenes of Richard III display this delayed and unpredictable redemptive element, as my remaining undiscussed word-frequencies amply confirm. If the play masses to a remarkable degree words establishing its characters' guilt, it also reiterates such corrective terms as “grace-,” “charity-,” “repent-,” as well as such possible reminders of the Nativity as “mother” and “child.” If we look closely at the Biblical allusions in the final moments of most of Richard's properly punished victims, we find them saturated with images of redemption via the Atonement. Clarence is most explicit, as we have seen, in his reference to “[redemption / by Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins]” (I.iv.189-90), but Grey also prays:

Be satisfied, dear God, with our true blood,
Which, as thou know'st, unjustly must be split.

(III.iii.22-23)

Hastings elucidates the recurrent pun in the play between the worldly salutation “your Grace” and the theological term:

O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!

(III.iv.96-97)

Richard's near repentance and theological awareness are thus carefully prefigured. Indeed, in the forgiveness of another failed puritan, Angelo of Measure for Measure, we can see the reprieve which admitted guilt may properly secure before Renaissance audiences. Less Calvinistic modern audiences find such reversals harder to accept than audiences in the Reformation.

Just how deeply Shakespeare has invested his own awareness in Richard's role appears in his duplication of it in Sonnet 121, which affirms Richard's characteristic posture of duplicity: “’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed.” In the face of “frailer spies” set on “my frailties” Shakespeare echoes Richard's existential assertion of self-sufficiency, “I am that I am,” and repudiates all human judgment except under the doctrine of Original Sin, with which he confronts his own over-complacent Puritan critics:

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,
Unless this general evil they maintain—
All men are bad and in their badness reign.

(ll. 12-14)

In the last plays of Shakespeare it is precisely such awareness of universal fallibility that exacts general forgiveness and reconciliation as proposed in the previous Sonnet 120:

… your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

(ll. 13-14)

As Cymbeline says, “Pardon's the word to all” (V.v.422) if they can accept, even to the diabolical Iachimo. Only the egotism of a Richard or a Faustus, confident of unforgivable crimes, dares to reject the offer. The frequency pattern of terms offering such universal grace to the repentant not only revealingly links Richard III to Measure for Measure, but confirms the verbal, structural, and metaphysical affinities it has with Henry VIII, which deals with a scarcely less murderous tyrant. Both plays exploit hindsight cleverly to prefigure the new order of the Tudors, whether under Elizabeth or Henry VII.

However, Richard III does not end in a mood of shallow confidence. Henry VII's hopes for the future are tempered with a diffidence about the ways of Providence, which fosters humility as well as the forgiveness of enemies (V.v.16):

And let their heirs (God, if thy will be so)
Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac'd peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord.

(V.v.32-35)

In such a context perhaps I also should end cautiously by pointing out the dangers of scholarly confidence in interpretation, even via statistics. The last term on my frequency list, the Biblical term “amen” is used less frequently in these two Reformation dramas than in a play supposedly set in a pagan, pre-Christian world: Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare's wit and irony are not readily confined by rigid theories. If the Reformation affirms the superiority of individual personality to rules and predictable outcomes, the works of Shakespeare are its finest flower.

Notes

1. All references are cued to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 115.

3. Wickham, p. 173.

4. Wickham, p. 188.

5. Thomas Carter, Shakespeare and Holy Scriptures (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1905), pp. 120-48; Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 78, n. 2.

6. E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 12-13; François Faure, “Langage religieux et langage Petrarchiste dans Richard III de Shakespeare,” Études anglaises, 23, No. 2 (1970), 23-37.

7. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 397.

8. See John B. Harcourt, “‘Odde Old Ends, Stolne …’: King Richard and Saint Paul,” Shakespeare Studies, 7 (1974), 87-100.

9. Paul M. Kendall, Richard III (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 352-63.

10. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 119.

11. Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 131.

12. Spivack, p. 405.

13. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), VII, 520-21.

14. See Agrippa D'Aubigné, Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 174-75. More detailed discussion of the impact of Les Tragiques appears in Hugh M. Richmond, Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 340-52.