SOURCE: “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III,” in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. 14, 1981, pp. 55-84.

[In the following essay, Burton examines Richard's language in the first act of Richard III, and asserts that the variations in Richard's rhetorical style help to emphasize the power he has over people and events.]

For sustained invention the first act of Richard III has no equal among those that follow in this play. Whereas strong hints from More and other historians inspire such later brilliant scenes as the death of Hastings and Buckingham's address to Gloucester at Bayard's Castle, the four scenes of this first act seem to be cut from whole cloth. In fact, it is not until the death of King Edward IV in the second act that Shakespeare follows the traditional sequence of events as he found it in his sources. The result is that each major incident in Act One—Gloucester's opening monologue, his wooing of Lady Anne, the confrontation with the Woodvilles and Queen Margaret, and the death of Clarence—emerges as a distinct dramatic unit, each exhibiting its own style. Given the careful patterning shown by later scenes of Richard III, it seems reasonable to seek some principle that explains the variety of incident and language in this act.

The variety of incident arises in part from the dramatic necessity of explaining Gloucester's amazing power over people and events. To dramatize that power, Shakespeare in the first three scenes depicts Gloucester as a master of all those forms of persuasive discourse recognized by classical rhetoric—deliberative, forensic, and epideictic. Thus the opening monologue shows the master of policy deliberating on the course of action that he will pursue. In Scene Two we see him against the backdrop of the courts of law, defending himself against Lady Anne's accusations. With all the powerful persons of the court as his audience in Scene Three, Gloucester shows a command of ceremonial discourse that in its irony foreshadows Antony's funeral oration. Gloucester's persuasive power is revealed systematically by the forms of discourse and in climactic order as the audience persuaded grows in size and rank with each scene.

But if the variety of incident is unified by the gradual revelation of Gloucester's mastery of persuasive discourse, the different styles that characterize each scene must still be explained by some principle, such as decorum. The usual view is that decorum requires the style of a speech to suit the speaker. Hence, each of Gloucester's speeches in these three scenes should have the same style. However, as Annabel Patterson has shown in her major study of this surprisingly neglected subject, Renaissance views of decorum were more complex and elaborate than the Horatian dictum that speech be suitable to the speaker or the Ciceronian view that style varied with genre. She points out that the influential Italian critic Minturno recognized seven kinds of decorum that allowed style to vary not only with the speaker and genre but also with the audience, the rhetorical topics, the emotions expressed, the parts of an oration, and, above all, with the “forms” of speech. The last of these, decorum according to the forms of speech, was a notion derived from Hermogenes of Tarsus that enjoyed widespread popularity in Renaissance rhetorics because it permitted and described a great variety of styles: “As Minturno says, there is a suitable form of speech for every different purpose, such as persuading, comforting, judging, attacking, disputing, or telling a tale.”¹ To assume that such a view of decorum is operating in Act One is to explain why Gloucester's language varies with each scene: Each type of persuasion is a different “form” of speech and requires a suitable expression.

Gloucester's opening speech takes its inspiration from deliberative discourse, a type of persuasion that looks toward the future, debates matters of public policy, weighs the alternatives of the worthy and the expedient, and, within the latter, considers the advantageous and the injurious.² The questions central to deliberative discourse are: What course is to be chosen? or What course is to be avoided? These questions Gloucester must ask himself now that the wars between Lancaster and York have ended. The greater part of the monologue is devoted to the second question; hence, the soliloquy is an exercise in dehortation. Gloucester justifies his villainy by talking himself out of more praiseworthy activities.

The first three lines of the monologue place the audience in a cheerful mood by referring to those periods of time that people enjoy most, times of summer and sunshine:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

(I.i.1-4)³

Gloucester next reminds the audience of his past glory, for even the most prejudiced must recall that Tudor historians give him grudging praise for his warlike deeds and disposition. We have no reason to doubt that Gloucester deserves a wreath of victory or that his armor hangs among the trophies on the castle walls. This retrospective glance at his martial disposition prepares the audience for his key argument, that warriors make poor lovers. A certain nostalgia for the trappings of war insinuates itself into the cadence of

Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

(I.i.7-8)

and this nostalgia renders the audience receptive to a later argument that Gloucester's warlike talents should not go to waste.

With the audience receptive and convinced of the speaker's good character as a loyal soldier, Gloucester should now deliberate the courses of action open to a warrior once his country has made its peace and should exhort himself to adopt one of the worthier ones. Using the common topic of division, he would be expected to enumerate the possibilities: counsellor, statesman, scholar. Using comparison he might balance the active life of the courtier and the retired life of the scholar, or, using contrast, he might show the difference between a good courtier that gives his king wise counsel and the fop given to flattery and dalliance. Such arguments would easily occur to his audience because they arise both from the forms of argument with which they were familiar and from the common stock of premises about the way in which men of Gloucester's rank spend their time. Having formulated these arguments, Gloucester would then consider the means of embracing some worthy course of action.

Instead, by the technique of evasion, Gloucester passes over all consideration of appropriate roles like counsellor and statesman in order to argue that in Edward's court the only option open to him is that of lover. He then proceeds, by dehortation, to dissuade himself from this course of action using the special topic of inexpediency. Among the proofs that a course of action is inexpedient are arguments that it is impractical, impossible, or injurious.

He shows that being a lover is impractical because it has made even a handsome stalwart warrior like Edward IV look ridiculous. To prove the point he uses a rhetorical figure, diasrymus, “whereby an opponent's argument is … made to look ridiculous through base similitude”:⁴

Grim-visag'd War hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, in stead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

(I.i.9-13)

Grim-visag'd War not only personifies an abstraction but refers to Edward IV, once a heroic young fighter, whose impetuous marriage to Elizabeth Woodville has made him a pawn to her contemptible relatives and who now compounds his folly by doting on Jane Shore. It would be impractical for a man of Gloucester's disposition to offer good advice to such a man; it would be even more impractical for him to turn to love when a man like Edward has already been destroyed by it.

Moreover, to pursue the course of lover would be impossible. To confirm arguments by the topics of the possible and the impossible, examples are useful. Thus Gloucester turns to a detailed recital of his physical shortcomings:

But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—

(I.i.14-23)

The aposiopesis is, of course, intentional: Stopping short the sentence imitates the work of nature who did not complete her work in forming Gloucester. But if the sentence is incomplete, the argument is not. The argument that becoming a lover is impossible reaches a decisive conclusion with the forceful hint (unfinish'd, half made up, lamely) that Gloucester's outward appearance is not the only factor that might inhibit love-making.

The next four lines argue from the topic of the injurious—that a proposed course of action should be avoided because it will prove harmful:

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.

(I.i.24-27)

The phrases weak piping time of peace and descant on my own deformity, together with the line To entertain these fair well-spoken days which follows immediately, suggest that Gloucester briefly considers the option of becoming a poet. He rejects this role in terms that imply that poetry is a waste of time (no delight to pass away the time) and of talent—the phrase to see my shadow in the sun can mean not only that the sun calls attention to his physical deformity but that the sun of peace puts in the shade his one talent, waging war. If a man does not work at his vocation (war), if he wastes the time and talents given him (by writing poetry), he decreases his chances for eternal salvation. To spend time at poetry would thus prove injurious to Gloucester.

The entire monologue, then, justifies Gloucester's abstention from the arts of peace. By dissuading himself from a peaceful course of action on the grounds that to pursue it is impractical (love had made Edward look foolish; it would make Gloucester look even more foolish), impossible (his uncouth appearance), and injurious (a waste of time and talent), he need not make a case for the choice of villainy but can simply declare that it is the only course open to him:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(I.i.28-31)

Determined now carries not only the semantic weight of simple intention on Gloucester's part or of predestination on the part of divine providence but of inevitability on logical grounds. Because all other options are closed to him, Gloucester must turn his talents to villainy.

The argument proper concludes with line 31. Having persuaded his audience to accept villainy as his only course of action, Gloucester proceeds to win their enthusiastic applause. He does so by promising them special knowledge:

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up
About a prophecy, which says that G
Of Edward's heirs the murtherer shall be.

(I.i.32-40)

This knowledge is special in several ways: it is knowledge of future events, it is knowledge of the invisible motives that explain human behavior, and it is knowledge of good and evil. In sum, it is the knowledge normally vouchsafed by God to preternatural beings like devils and shared by them with those humans they wish to tempt. The audience thus plays Faust to Gloucester's Mephistopheles and, like Faust, receives an immediate sign of their new ally's powers as Clarence enters escorted by armed guards and by Brakenbury, Lieutenant of the Tower of London. With this appeal to the audience and this gesture toward a sign, Gloucester completes his deliberations and embarks on his course of villainy.

Gloucester's use of deliberative discourse in his opening monologue places him in the position of the classical orator whose persuasive power depends in large measure on ethical appeal, which Quintilian regarded as the mode of persuasion most necessary to deliberative discourse.⁵ Those Renaissance rhetoricians who held that style could vary with the forms of speech recognized an idea of style called the ethical style which they tended to associate with oratory rather than with poetry. The four characteristics of the ethical style—simplicity, sweetness, subtlety, and modesty—generally lend themselves to a description of the style of Gloucester's speech.⁶

Simplicity, the first characteristic, could be achieved by using normal diction, short periods, smooth rhythms, and a logical method of presenting ideas. With the careful exception of the five lines about grim-visag'd War, Gloucester's diction admits no words that the average person in his audience would find extraordinary. Only victorious, unfashionable, and deformity are multi-syllabic, and of these only deformity might qualify as Latinate. Although there is some inversion of normal word order in the syntax of the first two lines

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;

so that the temporal adverb now occupies initial sentence position and the verb phrase is made includes the passive subject the winter of our discontent, each phrase, whether nominal or verbal, is quite short. The sentence rhythm, even when suspended as it is in the sentences that begin with I, coincides with the verse rhythm because the interrupting element does not displace the metrical caesura:

I, that am rudely stamp'd,/ /and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph./ /

(I.i.16-17)

With respect to a clear method, an impression at least of ideas logically presented arises from words like now, but, and therefore that normally mark syllogistic form. This tripartite structure receives reinforcement from the fact that three lines begin with now, three with our, and three contain the phrase I, that am. Triplets occur elsewhere in phrases like drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams or subtle, false, and treacherous. Antithesis and parallelism, which appear toward the conclusion when Edward's probity is contrasted with Gloucester's treachery, combine with these triplets to create a sense of completeness that assures the listener that all facets of the argument have been explored.

Sweetness, an attempt to gratify the senses, appears chiefly in the descriptive passages about the winter of war yielding to the summer of peace and in the lines that describe the orderly marches of war changing to the more pleasant but equally ordered measures of the dance. Figures like anaphora and alliteration, which dominate these lines, contribute to this sense of order and gratify the sense of hearing.

Beginning with line 9, however, subtlety of style replaces sweetness. The subtle style varies to some extent from normal usage, allows tropes like irony among its figures, and relies on wit. Thus the tone of the passage on grimvisag'd war is harsher, its vocabulary (adversaries, lascivious, amorous, wanton ambling nymph) more reminiscent of classical diction, and, as noted in the discussion of the argument, there is a pointed reference to the king's foolish behavior which is ironically contrasted with his own earlier heroism and that of Gloucester himself.

Modesty, the last feature that characterizes the ethical style, addresses itself to the speaker's need to ingratiate himself with the audience. One technique involves interrupting the train of thought, a phenomenon that occurs with the line That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—, which marks the end of Gloucester's disparagement of his appearance. To belittle oneself and to enlarge another is another technique of modesty, which may explain the otherwise puzzling lines

And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,

(I.i.36-37)

These lines may seem surprising in view of the earlier attempt to establish a picture that flattered Gloucester while portraying Edward as a dotard. That attempt is, to be sure, subtle while this is overt. Perhaps the turn-around occurs because Richard, having finished the deliberation and reached his conclusion, must now act consistently. Modesty appears too in that he barely hints at his martial valor and never mentions the fact that he is the brother of the King and the youngest surviving son of Edward, the duke of York.

Patterson, who observes that these four characteristics of the ethical style—simplicity, sweetness, subtlety, and modesty—appear at first to have little to do with one another much less to form a distinctive style, concludes, convincingly, that they operate together to persuade the audience that the speaker is an agreeable person, someone not too complicated, considerate of their taste, witty, but with the right touch of self-deprecation.⁷ These qualities, which the audience might ascribe to themselves, make the speaker one of them and thus establish the ethical appeal. They certainly describe the Gloucester that we meet in this soliloquy.

However, given Gloucester's confessed villainy and Quintilian's definition of the orator as a good man speaking, the attribution of ethical appeal to this speech may seem wrongheaded. In the Aristotelian tradition, however, the ethical appeal revealed itself in the qualities of the speech and the authority of the speaker. Gloucester's speech establishes his authority to speak on matters pertaining to one's personal advantage or injury, for he has a highly developed sense of expediency and of the arguments that support this line of reasoning. In this more technical sense his monologue has ethical appeal.

In Scene Two, Gloucester strengthens the effect of this tour de force of deliberative oratory by an excursion into forensic or judicial discourse as he woos Lady Anne. Because this oratory of the courtroom attempts to defend or to blame a person's behavior, it looks back to the past, develops arguments from the special topics of justice and injustice, and employs as its means accusation and defense.⁸ The procedure for ascertaining the status of a case follows three steps: to ask whether something happened, to establish what it was that happened, and to determine why it happened. Each step addresses a distinct issue which thus becomes a subtopic of that stage in the proceedings. Evidence is an argument or subtopic crucial to determining whether something happened, definition to deciding what it was that happened, and motives or causes to explaining why it happened.⁹ Any one of these topics might become the major issue in a given case.

It is not difficult to discern each step of the judicial inquiry in the encounter between Gloucester and Lady Anne, which is to a great extent a debate over whether Gloucester murdered King Henry and Prince Edward of Lancaster. In Shakespeare's version of the events, Prince Edward has been killed in the battle of Tewkesbury three months earlier and his father, King Henry VI, who has been imprisoned in the Tower of London, has now died. His daughter-in-law, Lady Anne, the only mourner, follows his coffin from Saint Paul's Cathedral to the monastery of Chertsey where Henry will be buried.

In the rhetoric of disputation no less than in military strategy, the best defense consists of engaging the enemy before he has a chance to attack. Gloucester sets a tone of bold offense by interrupting the funeral procession and accusing Anne's attendants of discourtesy when they try to defend her:

Gentleman. My lord, stand back, and let the coffin pass.
Glou. Unmanner'd dog, [stand] thou when I command.
Advance thy halberd higher than my breast,
Or by Saint Paul I'll strike thee to my foot,
And spurn upon thee, beggar, for thy boldness.

(I.ii.38-42)

Her support eroded, Anne must now defend herself, a burden she most willingly assumes by bringing against Gloucester the specific charge that Gloucester has murdered King Henry VI:

If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.

(I.ii.53-54)

Since the first step in judicial procedure takes place with an inquiry as to whether some crime occurred, the question here is whether King Henry was killed or died from natural causes. While Lady Anne does not pose that question, a doubt might well have arisen in the minds of Shakespeare's audience who could read in the official chronicle that Henry's death resulted from “pure displeasure and melancholy” over the Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury. Lady Anne, however, adduces evidence of foul play that her contemporaries at least might have found incontrovertible:

O gentlemen, see, see dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity;
For 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins where no blood dwells.

(I.ii.55-59)

Warkworth, less sympathetic to the House of York than the official chronicler, recorded the superstitious belief that King Henry's wounds bled as his coffin was carried through the streets of London, and to this record Shakespeare adds the detail that Gloucester's presence induced the bleeding.¹⁰ The point is, of course, that the wounds of murdered men bleed in the presence of their murderer.

Anne next calls on God to avenge King Henry's murder by striking Gloucester dead. Her language makes clear that she seeks condign punishment, that Gloucester should receive the same treatment he has accorded King Henry:

Either heav'n with lightning strike the murth'rer dead;
Or earth gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good king's blood,
Which his hell-govern'd arm hath butchered!

(I.ii.64-67)

Anne's quest for vengeance introduces one special topic of judicial discourse, justice. Gloucester, however, changes the topic from justice to charity:

Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.

(I.ii.68-69)

In the Christian scale of values, justice belongs among the moral virtues, ranking as the highest of the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. While these moral virtues can be incorporated into the supernatural realm through grace, they remain inferior to the theological virtues. Faith, hope, and charity exist only in the supernatural order, and, as justice is the highest of the moral virtues, charity is the highest of the theological virtues. By shifting the argument from justice to charity, Gloucester declares the standards by which judicial questions are settled to be irrelevant and inoperative. This declaration will prove useful when the inquiry moves to the second question: What kind of crime was committed? To be sure, Gloucester has not yet granted that any crime has been committed, but he wishes to discuss the matter more systematically:

Vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman,
Of these supposed crimes, to give me leave
By circumstance but to acquit myself.

(I.ii.75-77)

While the phrase t' accuse in Anne's reply occurs as a result of editorial conjecture, the emendation is certainly apt since accusation and defense are the means of argument peculiar to forensic discourse.

Anne's initial recital of the charges against Gloucester is vague (unworthy slaughter upon others), but Gloucester, adhering to his strategy of the bold offense, brings before the court the charge that he killed Edward of Lancaster, denying it in the process:

Glou. I did not kill your husband.
Anne. Why then he is alive.
Glou. Nay, he is dead, and slain by Edward's hands.

(I.ii.91-92)

Accusing another of the crime of which one stands accused would normally require that other to answer the accusation, but since that other is King Edward himself, Gloucester can remain confident that the issue will never come to trial and the question of who killed Edward of Lancaster must remain moot. Still, Anne does not give up easily; she gives Gloucester the lie, citing Queen Margaret's eyewitness account of the event:

In thy foul throat thou li'st! Queen Margaret saw
Thy murd'rous falchion smoking in his blood.

(I.ii.93-94)

This testimony could be damaging, but Gloucester shrugs it off, replying that Margaret has slandered him.

It is clear by now that Lady Anne, despite her ability to match Gloucester's language word for word and phrase for phrase, is no match for his logic. She has prejudged the issue by declaring Gloucester guilty at the outset of the debate (known evils, l. 79) and by telling him to hang himself (l. 84). When she does enter the debate, her recital of charges is vague, and she illogically jumps from the premise that Henry and Edward are dead to the conclusion that Gloucester murdered them (ll. 89-90). Now, when Gloucester defames her witness, instead of requiring him to prove his point, she drops the whole issue of Prince Edward's death and reverts to her earlier charge that Gloucester has murdered King Henry. This behavior seems tantamount to acknowledging that she has lost her case as far as the murder of Prince Edward is concerned.

Nevertheless, if Gloucester has a strategy of bold offense, Lady Anne does not lack resources:

Anne. Didst thou not kill this king?
Glou. I grant ye.

(I.ii.101)

Since Gloucester has admitted that he killed King Henry, the question of whether something happened has been answered. The judicial inquiry now moves from the question Did something happen? to the question What kind of thing happened? The issue thus becomes a matter of definition: Was killing King Henry an act of murder? Once again Anne prejudges the issues and is consequently unprepared for the line of defense that Gloucester will pursue:

Dost grant me, hedgehog? Then God grant me too
Thou mayst be damned for that wicked deed!
O, he was gentle, mild, and virtuous!

(I.ii.102-04)

Anne's bottom-line argument that Gloucester is guilty and that God must punish him proves not only ineffective but disastrous, for Gloucester turns this argument against her. If God's justice is what really matters to Anne, then she ought logically to be glad of Henry's death, for it brings him the just reward of his virtue:

Anne. He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Glou. Let him thank me that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.

(I.ii.106-08)

Anne's persistence in regarding murder as a sin punishable by God rather than as a crime punishable by man makes Gloucester's defense of himself unassailable.

The defense addresses itself by implication to several questions that arise in the process of defining what kind of deed was committed. Gloucester, the master of evasion, passes over the damaging question of what law has been violated, for he would have to acknowledge that his action is against both the natural law that Anne invokes and the written law in whose terms he seeks to defend himself. He dwells instead on the victim: Who was harmed? the individual? the community? Clearly, King Henry, a saintly man, could not be said to suffer harm if killing him resulted in his admission to heaven. Moreover, even the heavenly kingdom (the community) has benefited from this deed—Henry's gentle, mild, and virtuous character makes it better for the King of Heaven that hath him. Did the victim suffer harm against his will? Neither King Henry, nor Anne on his behalf, can object to a deed that improves his condition. But neither this question nor the next one—what was the extent of the harm—arises. The act of killing King Henry, to which Gloucester has confessed, has been at last defined as an act of charity, not the crime of murder.

The case against Gloucester could easily rest here, but to close it would not accomplish his aim of winning Anne's hand in marriage. Moreover, the matter of Prince Edward's death has been left open. Turning to the last subtopic in judicial inquiry, the issue of causes and motives, Gloucester reopens the entire question of his role in the deaths of Henry and Edward:

Is not the causer of the timeless deaths
Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward,
As blameful as the executioner?

(I.ii.117-19)

By reopening the case Gloucester continues his strategy of attacking first, but strengthens it with the classic ploy of reversing the charges against him:

Your beauty was the cause of that effect—
Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.

(I.ii.121-24)

Lady Anne must now play a defensive role leaving Gloucester free to direct the inquiry. Because his argument will depend heavily on revealing his inner dispositions, a confession that Anne has no desire to elicit and that only he can divulge, this freedom of inquiry is absolutely necessary to his defense.

Drawing on the language of the sonnets whose roots lie in the courtly love tradition, Gloucester acknowledges that his behavior was intentional, but he explains the cause of his behavior in terms that everyone will grasp and that most will regard as extenuating circumstances. A man in the grip of such passion, often described as a type of madness, can scarcely be called responsible for his actions. He only carries out, executes, the dictates of his appetite.

Anne, surprised, and, no doubt, flattered, tries to keep to the issue:

It is a quarrel just and reasonable,
To be reveng'd on him that kill'd my husband.

(I.ii.136-37)

Her appeal to rationality provides Gloucester with his cue for addressing the next question, the motive for his behavior:

He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband,
Did it to help thee to a better husband.

(I.ii.138-39)

These words should lead to the next line of questioning, for, after cause and motives have been examined, it is customary to inquire into the character of the accused and the character of the victim. Gloucester, avoiding “odorous” comparisons, lays claim to a better nature than young Edward but offers no substantiation. That he entertains the question seems clear, however, from the soliloquy that follows the successful wooing:

A sweeter and a lovelier gentleman,
Fram'd in the prodigality of nature—
Young, valiant, wise, and (no doubt) right royal—
The spacious world cannot again afford.
And will she yet abase her eyes on me,
That cropp'd the golden prime of this sweet prince
And made her widow to a woeful bed?
On me, whose all not equals Edward's moi'ty?

(I.ii.242-49)

Instead, however, he passes indirectly to the question of extenuating circumstances—that the Lancastrians had, after all, killed his brother Rutland and their father, the duke of York. Finally, using the narrative of their deaths, he offers her a sign, the first of several, that his declaration of love proceeds from a sincere heart:

                                        —in that sad time
My manly eyes did scorn an humble tear;
And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,
Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.

(I.ii.163-66)

This inquiry, technically an inquiry into Gloucester's motives for killing Prince Edward, has been conducted in part by Gloucester as if it were Anne's suit for vengeance. Her refusal to execute him or even to pass the sentence of death upon him indicates that the suit for vengeance has been dropped. Furthermore, the hypothetical syntax of Gloucester's plea for the verdict of death—if you cannot forgive me, kill me—allows him to infer that since she has not killed him, she has forgiven him for the crimes of which he stood accused.

Thus encouraged he can press his own suit for her hand in marriage. The second plea for the death penalty, Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it, initiates this new suit, forcing Anne to reveal that she sees no insurmountable impediment to their marriage. If she cannot cold-bloodedly tell him to kill himself, he cannot be an object of such great hatred. While her reluctant acceptance of his ring still strikes one as inadequately motivated, the argument that follows it is compelling. Gloucester expresses a desire to see King Henry buried and offers this solicitude as proof of his repentance for the murders he has committed:

                              (after I have solemnly interr'd
At Chertsey monast'ry this noble king,
And wet his grave with my repentant tears)
I will with all expedient duty see you.

(I.ii.213-16)

To a woman of Anne's religious temperament the idea that one might have brought a sinner to repentance would be far more flattering than praise of her beauty or an offer of marriage from a prince of the blood royal. Gloucester, of course, cannot appreciate these motives but attributes his success to the plain devil and dissembling looks. He takes no more credit for his powers of persuasion than he does for his royal blood; both come so naturally to him that to claim credit for them would be to have no credit at all.

While one can trace quite easily the three phases of inquiry that belong to judicial discourse, it is not so easy to discern a style typical of that mode of persuasion. Three distinct styles become manifest in the course of the encounter between Gloucester and Lady Anne. The first style appears in the tirade that Anne launches when Gloucester stops the funeral procession (ll.50-67). The features of this style correspond to those that Renaissance rhetoricians described under the rubric of vehemence. Its characteristics include words that are harsh in sound, in meaning, or in both, and figures of speech like apostrophe. One criterion that Renaissance rhetoricians used to judge a harsh sound was difficulty of pronunciation. By this criterion the consonant clusters of these lines might be considered harsh:

O gentlemen, see, see dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity.

(I.ii.55-57, italics added)

A word like blush—whose sounds are heralded by the immediately preceding bleed and afresh and then repeated in quick succession—might be thought to heap audible, almost tangible, scorn upon the person addressed. Other patterns of harshness in these lines might include the afficate of gentlemen (picked up later in congeal'd), the fricative f (foul deformity) and the wide central vowels of blush and lump. All these sounds have a diffusiveness that suggests both the explosive quality of Anne's anger and the spluttering that will at length culminate in her actually spitting at him.

Among the figures of vehemence that open this speech is one, bdelygmia, which expresses hatred in a few words, often by telling the object of hatred to disappear (out, varlet; begone): “Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not” (I.ii.50). The entire speech seeks, of course, to exorcise Gloucester's malign presence. As anger at her inability to effect that exorcism builds, Anne's vehement language culminates in apostrophe:

O God! which this blood mad'st, revenge his death!
O earth! which this blood drink'st, revenge his death!

(I.ii.62-63)

This figure, in addition to calling on unseen or inanimate forces, implies a turning aside from one previously addressed. Gloucester has not responded to her words; perhaps God will. Apostrophe at this juncture is a measure of Anne's frustration and a sign of her failure. In the pattern observed in the analysis of the judicial inquiry, Anne moves from the human to the divine realm for aid and, in so doing, she loses. Her anger subsides and her situation grows rather poignant as we realize too that the disjunctive ultimatum—either heaven strike him dead or earth swallow him up—will not be carried out. Gloucester does not disappear, and Anne's vehemence, now exhausted, can carry her no further. Her words have proven ineffectual, her verbal trump cards have been played, but she has lost the trick and now must follow Gloucester's stylistic lead.

As long as Anne employed the language of vehemence, she enjoyed a real advantage over Gloucester. Vehemence is a style of reproof, used among other things to rebuke known criminals. Gloucester's silence before Anne's diatribe confesses his guilt to some extent. Moreover, the emotions Anne expresses have some moral force. Invocations of unseen powers elevate her discourse to a supra-human plane, but when she descends from that realm to the rational world of human justice and judicial inquiry, her language inevitably changes from apostrophe to invective, from curse to insult, from solemn to strident. As we hear this modulation of tone, our sympathy for her grief and awe at her indignation become amazement at her cleverness and amusement at her anger.

By using his syntax, his rhythms, his tone, Anne places herself in Gloucester's power. The hypnotic effect of using Gloucester's language explains as well as any other theory her ultimate capitulation to his suit. In seven imitations that occur between lines 70 and 90, Anne responds to patterns set by Gloucester on five occasions. The following is typical:

Glou. Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.
Anne. Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make
No excuse current but to hang thyself.

(I.ii.81-85)

We have clearly moved away from the vehement style, but we might well wonder which style characterizes these and other speeches in this phase of the judicial inquiry.

Patterson, while acknowledging the impossibility of demonstrating that “sixteenth and seventeenth century poets in England knew and practiced the Idea of Speed,” suggests that “they used deliberately a variety of speedy effects.”¹¹ Among these stand the omission of conjunctions through asyndeton, the compilation of short lists through brachylogia, and figures like anaphora and epistrophe that please the ear without being intellectually demanding. In addition, trochaic feet and enjambment would presumably create the impression of speed in verse rhythms. Diction may admit no harsh consonants, but critics differ over whether it should be monosyllabic or polysyllabic. Unfortunately, this contellation of stylistic features cannot really be discerned in the lines in question.

Anne's diction continues harsh in meaning and, to a lesser extent, in sound, especially if we observe the high frequency of -st endings on second person singular verbs. The question of rhythmic effects requires considerable expertise in metrics but some tentative points can be advanced: Trochaic inversions do occur in line-initial position in two sets of imitations:

Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Villain, thou know'st nor law of God nor man:

(I.ii.68,70)

Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make

(I.ii.81,83)

Initial trochaic feet do seem to create a “running” start to the blank verse line and lend smoothness to the rhythm, providing some evidence of an attempt at producing a “speedy” effect. There also appear to be some dactyllic and trochaic feet at the end of these lines:

Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity

(I.ii.69,71)

The second half of Anne's line is difficult. Assuming, however, that sense requires a strong accent on some, it is possible to scan some touch of pity exactly like blessings for curses, a dactyl followed by a trochee. Thus as Gloucester's speech grows irregular so does that of Lady Anne.

If speedy effects like trochaic feet do appear in these lines, the rhetorical figures explicitly associated with this style do not, except for a single “speedy” figure that dominates the entire dialogue, namely, syndrome. Johannes Sturm, whose well-known edition of Hermogenes' work on style received a quantity of praise in Ascham's Scholemaster, held that among the most telling figures in the “speedy” style was “syndrome, or the use of two brief contradictory sentences.”¹² The name syndrome came metaphorically from the clash of armies. In fact the “speedy” style itself was deemed most appropriate for description of battle and, in characteristically Renaissance attempts to align styles with planets, syndrome was governed by Mars.

Considering the number of antithetical statements that make every other line in this passage a contradiction of its predecessor, it is not too fanciful to view the parallel sentences as the equal forces of battle drawn up and the contradictions a clash between them. It is certainly not too fanciful to suggest that combat and speed could have been concepts that governed the composition of this passage considering the words which close the second phase of the judicial inquiry:

                              But, gentle Lady Anne,
To leave this keen encounter of our wits
And fall something into a slower method.

(I.ii.114-16)

Such wit combats appear so often between lovers in Shakespeare's early comedies, notably, of course, between Beatrice and Benedick, that the last shift in style, to the diction of the sonnets and of love lyrics, comes as no surprise. Indeed the wit combat has prepared both the audience and Lady Anne, at least unconsciously, for Gloucester's declaration of love, no more ridiculous, finally, than the sudden fallings in love that constitute the stuff of romantic comedies, no more repulsive, surely, than Titania's love for Bottom. Invoking all the clichés about haunting beauty, sleepless nights, and the power of the beloved over the lover's life, Gloucester presses his suit. That Gloucester, if not a prince turned into a frog, might yet be a toad with a precious jewel in his head, escapes neither the audience nor the auditor.

A major element in the diction of love, reference to the eyes, recurs through this phase of the dialogue:

Glou. These eyes could not endure that beauty's wrack.

(I.ii.127)

Anne. Out of my sight, thou dost infect mine eyes!

(I.ii.148)

Glou. Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears.

(I.ii.153)

These references to eyes, whose beams were thought to pass from one lover's gaze to another's heart and whose guidance Dan Cupid lacks, explain in the sonnet tradition both love at first sight and the blind folly of loving an unworthy object. Anne's eyes, infected by the man who will not leave her sight however vehemently she orders him to do so, now deceive her as she watches Gloucester washing his eyes with tears, fallible signs to confirm merely probable conclusions in the world of logic but an infallible sign of sincerity in the rhetoric of love. This key sonnet motif—the heavenly rhetoric of [the] eye—may explain why sight has received repeated emphasis in Scene Two, starting with Anne's first speech to Gloucester.

Anne's rejection of Gloucester's love, though not inappropriate for the “cruel fair” of the sonnet tradition, reverts in its style to certain tactics of vehemence. Perhaps because words have long since proved ineffectual, she repels Gloucester's advances by gestures and other nonverbal signs of rejection. She first threatens, doubtless with a gesture toward her face, to mar her beauty. Some moments later she spits at Gloucester. Finally, she employs a specific figure of the vehement style that Puttenham called “mycterismus the fleering frumpe … a mock given with scornful countenance, as for example by drawing the lip awry:”¹³

Teach not thy lip such scorn; for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

(I.ii.171-72)

One can envision Gloucester trying to kiss away the scornful grimace on Anne's lips at this point, and one can view the lines that follow immediately as his hasty reinterpretation of the kiss as a gesture of forgiveness:

If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive,
Lo here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword.

(I.ii.173-74)

since Anne is decidedly not ready for gestures of affection.

Nevertheless, that kiss makes it easier for her to let the proffered sword fall to the ground and finally to accept the ring he offers her. Once again her rhetorical strategy, in this case a series of scornful actions from spitting to grimacing to handling the sword, becomes subverted and used against her by Gloucester who offers counter gestures—crying, kissing, kneeling—that finally merge in mutuality—lifting him up (Take up the sword again, or take up me), accepting his ring, and submission—resigning to him her place in the funeral procession. These gestures are as integral to the style of this scene as the diction of the sonnets. Both words and gestures combine as powerful seconds to the arguments that Gloucester advances to defend himself against Anne's accusations so that the discourse of forensic oratory exhibits a variety of styles while preserving the utmost decorum.

With fairly explicit examples of deliberative and judicial discourse appearing in the first two scenes, it seems logical that this carefully constructed play should offer us a glimpse of Gloucester's ability to use the third type of persuasion, the epideictic or ceremonial oration. Unfortunately, Scene Three contains no such clear instances of ceremonial discourse as Antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar or Cominius's praise of Caius Martius in Coriolanus. But the means employed by ceremonial discourse, praise and blame, together with its special topics, honor and dishonor, are quite apparent in the angry dialogue between Gloucester and the Woodvilles that opens Scene Three. Just as in his use of deliberative discourse Gloucester preferred the negative means of dissuasion to the positive means of exhortation, he here makes the technique of blame his overt concern though he aims ultimately at self-glorification.

In all likelihood Antony's funeral oration represents the perfection of a technique of epideictic discourse only outlined here: to mix praise and blame so that the praise (of Caesar) is overt—Antony's disclaimers notwithstanding—and the blame (of the conspirators) appears only through incremental irony—the references to the honorable men. The real topic of Antony's speech is therefore dishonor, a topic that he develops by employing the means of praise, usually associated with honor. This counterpointing of topic and means occurs also in Richard III, where the topic is ultimately praise of Gloucester but the means to achieve it is blame of the Woodvilles.

The logical probability that two scenes that feature deliberative and forensic discourse should be followed by a third that employs ceremonial discourse increases if we consider in addition the factor of the dramatic action. Despite the applause that must greet his cleverness in the wooing scene, Gloucester has openly acknowledged his killing of King Henry and Prince Edward of Lancaster. Moreover, he has betrayed a lady's trust by laughing at Anne's simplicity. All being fair in war and love the audience might forgive Gloucester his treatment of enemies and women, but as he is about to embark on fratricide he wisely takes occasion to build himself up in Scene Three by praising his brotherly loyalty to King Edward IV and by blaming on the Woodvilles the sentence of doom pronounced against Clarence by Edward.

As Queen Elizabeth, her brother Rivers, and her sons, Dorset and Grey, discuss with Buckingham and Derby the illness of King Edward and his desire to reconcile Gloucester and the Queen's relatives, Gloucester enters, complaining angrily that the Woodvilles have misrepresented him to the king:

They do me wrong, and I will not endure it!
Who is it that complains unto the King
That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not?

(I.iii.42-44)

Having been apparently discredited by rumors, he naturally seeks to discredit those who have circulated the rumors.

He begins with a disclaimer typical of the panegyrist. Antony protests that he is no orator, as Brutus is:

For I have neither [wit], nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood; I only speak right on.
I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

(JC, III.ii.221-24)

Similarly, but with much greater sincerity, Cominius, about to praise the heroism of Caius Marcius in his battle against the Volscians, begins

I shall lack voice: the deeds of Coriolanus
Should not be utter'd feebly.

(Cor, II.ii.82-83)

Gloucester, knowing the attack he is about to launch, introduces his scathing denunciation of the Woodvilles in terms that simultaneously establish his credibility and mitigate otherwise unpardonable insults:

Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abus'd
With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

(R3, I.iii.51-53)

This denial of duplicity addresses itself less to the speaker's manner of speaking than to the matter of his speech. It implies that plain words by definition carry a guarantee of truth. As a matter of fact, Gloucester's most damaging assertions against the Woodvilles prove to be those that are the most truthful.

As a second step in establishing his authority, Gloucester employs a technique of praise that declares the person lauded to be in some way unique. Thus Cominius says of Marcius

The man I speak of cannot in the world
Be singly counterpois'd.

(Cor, II.ii.86-87)

Gloucester takes his stand upon a blameless record when he demands of Grey and presumably of the Queen, Rivers, Dorset, and Stanley (the latter a representative of the “faction”):

When have I injur'd thee? When done thee wrong?
Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?

(I.iii.56-57)

The blameless record Gloucester cites has not quite the same argumentative force as conspicuous merit, but if people who cannot be quiet scarce a breathing while without bringing lewd complaints to the King have not previously managed to testify to any injury done them by Gloucester and if they do not now bring any charge against him when questioned openly, that silent testimony to his uprightness may well be considered a singular achievement.

These statements, however, are not so much part of Gloucester's self-praise as they are a preamble to his denunciation of the Woodvilles. He leads into that topic by deploring the decadent state of the world:

                    … the world is grown so bad
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.
Since every Jack became a gentleman,
There's many a gentle person made a Jack.

(I.iii.69-72)

One way to praise an individual is to praise the group to which that person belongs. Thus in a classic model of ceremonial discourse Pericles praises the Athenians' democratic way of life more than he praises the dead heroes whose eulogy he pronounces. When Gloucester here laments the dissolution of the social order under the pressure of democratic tendencies, he leaves the audience to infer that the Woodvilles, as commoners advanced to the highest ranks in the realm, must answer for the loss of traditional standards. Thus to deplore the sorry state of the world is to point the finger at those responsible for it.

In three specific charges that follow the innuendo, Gloucester makes statements against the Woodvilles that Shakespeare's sources would have corroborated:

Our brother is imprison'd by your means,
Myself disgrac'd, and the nobility
Held in contempt, while great promotions
Are daily given to ennoble those
That scarce some two days since were worth a noble.

(I.iii.77-81)

Holinshed makes it clear that upon hearing the prophesy about “G,” “the King and Queen were sore troubled and began to conceive a grievous grudge against the duke, and could not be in quiet till they had brought him to his end.”¹⁴ Shakespeare's audience would probably have believed Gloucester's charge that the Woodvilles shared some blame for Clarence's imprisonment. Gloucester's own sense of humiliation (Myself disgrac'd) might well have stemmed from the fact that he had not yet been officially named Lord Protector. Finally, the sense of dishonor felt by many of the old nobility appears in the sources where the Duchess of York protests her son's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, in the preferments offered Elizabeth's numerous male relatives, and by the forcible marriage of old nobility to members of the Woodville family: “But yet the Duchess of York his mother letted this match as much as in her lay [yet], in the next year after she was with great solemnity crowned queen at Westminster. Her father was also created Earl Rivers and made high constable of England; her brother Lord Anthony was married to the sole heir of Thomas Lord Scales; Sir Thomas Grey, son to Sir John Grey the Queen's first husband, was created Marquis Dorset” (italics added).¹⁵

In this scene Shakespeare has begun more obviously to quarry material from his sources in order to place arguments in Gloucester's mouth. The arguments are true; moreover, both Shakespeare and his audience would have been sympathetic to their substance. Hence they are a powerful means of blaming the Woodvilles for the unhappy state of the realm and of praising Gloucester, who is allied by birth to the oldest and noblest families of the land. Gloucester's repeated mention of the Woodvilles' upstart status becomes a refrain like Antony's insistence that all the conspirators are honorable men, although he does not intend the remark to be taken ironically. It is ultimately ironic that he is the greatest upstart of all, but at this point in the dramatic action the obvious truth of his statements about the Woodvilles dominates.

Having generally denounced the Woodvilles, Gloucester heaps particular scorn upon Lord Rivers, who is maternal uncle to the Prince of Wales, his tutor, and the governor of his household in Ludlow. Traditionally, Gloucester, as the King's younger brother, would have been entrusted with raising the heir to the throne. As uncles to the heir to the throne, both Gloucester and Rivers can expect to gain power if King Edward dies while that heir is a minor. Speaking to Rivers, Gloucester taxes him with achieving his present eminence solely through his sister's influence:

She may help you to many fair preferments,
And then deny her aiding hand therein
And lay those honors on your high desert.

(I.iii.94-96)

It was a technique of epideictic discourse to insist that a person's success was due solely to his own efforts. For this reason Cominius in Coriolanus stresses Martius' single-handed defeat of the Volscians:

                                        Alone he ent'red
The mortal gate of th' city, which he painted
With shunless destiny; aidless came off. …

(Cor, II.ii.110-12)

Because Rivers had a high reputation as a scholar and patron of the arts, Gloucester's attribution of his position to family rather than to personal merit belittles his reputation and converts a reason for praise into a reason for blame. Rivers, confronted by a Plantagenet prince and a warrior, has only the weight that attaches to his reputation as a man of the new learning and the Queen's brother. He is thus made to appear as the prototype of the new nobility with the shallowest of roots.

The most scathing attack, however, is reserved for the Queen herself. Referring to the Queen's marriage to Edward IV, when he was a lad of eighteen while she was a widow ten years older, Gloucester intimates that the Woodvilles are accustomed to take advantage of young men so that the Prince of Wales will scarcely be safe with his own mother:

What, marry, may she? Marry with a king,
A bachelor, and a handsome stripling too:
Iwis your grandam had a worser match.

(I.iii.99-101)

Having begun with a general warning against democratic tendencies in society (Since every Jack became a gentleman), continuing with the particular point that the Woodvilles have weakened the old order (the nobility / Held in contempt) and supporting that point by references to their treatment of Clarence, Gloucester lays the blame for the general decadence at court directly on Rivers and the Queen, hinting that a future controlled by them will bring even greater deterioration.

Gloucester has by no means finished placing blame, however. Clarence yet lives, though in disgrace, and offers a far greater threat to Gloucester than the Woodvilles. To Clarence he now turns, as he reaches the heart of his argument, and delivers a set speech whose length and structure lend further support to the view that this scene is dominated by ceremonial discourse:

'Tis time to speak, my pains are quite forgot.
.....Ere you were queen, ay, or your husband king,
I was a pack-horse in his great affairs:
A weeder-out of his proud adversaries,
A liberal rewarder of his friends;
To royalize his blood I spent mine own.
.....In all which time you and your husband Grey
Were factious for the house of Lancaster;
And, Rivers, so were you. Was not your husband
In Margaret's battle at Saint Albons slain?
Let me put in your minds, if you forget,
What you have been ere this, and what you are;
Withal, what I have been, and what I am.
.....Poor Clarence did forsake his father, Warwick,
Ay, and forswore himself—which Jesu pardon!—
.....To fight on Edward's party for the crown,
And for his meed, poor lord, he is mewed up.
I would to God my heart were flint, like Edward's,
Or Edward's soft and pitiful, like mine:
I am too childish-foolish for this world.

(I.iii.116ff.)

Four comments by Queen Margaret fail to diminish its singleness of effect, for it is clear from the speeches of Antony and Cominius in other plays that interruptions from hearers were characteristic of ceremonial orations. With respect to its structure, we find formal references to the act of speaking similar to those that mark the speeches of Antony and Cominius. The latter, having apologized for his inability to praise Caius Martius and having rehearsed the hero's career prior to Corioles, marks the transition from praise of past glory to eulogy of the latest act of valor by a second reference to the inadequacy of his words:

                              For this last,
Before and in Corioles, let me say,
I cannot speak him home.

(Cor, II.ii.101-03)

Gloucester in a similar fashion announces first that he will speak ('Tis time to speak), reviews the past (I was a pack-horse in his great affairs), and highlights his movement toward the real issue by words that point to and underscore the purpose of the speech:

Let me put in your minds, if you forget,
What you have been ere this, and what you are. …

(I.iii.130-31, italics added)

Before these lines, Gloucester had continued to heap blame upon the Woodvilles, but the issue has shifted from their ambition to their early Lancastrian loyalties. Moreover, Gloucester has introduced the note of praise for his own loyalty. But after the transitional words just cited, the argument from the subtopic difference, which stresses the contrast between Gloucester and the others, now focuses on the split within the Yorkist party. Having implied early in the speech that he, not Warwick, was the kingmaker (To royalize his blood I spent mine own), he now reminds the audience indirectly of Warwick's rebellion against Edward IV and, more pointedly, of Clarence's double desertion, first of the King and then of Warwick.

Clarence and even Edward are Gloucester's real targets in this speech. As the tone changes from anger to grief, we have an impression of three brothers—Edward, the beneficiary of Gloucester's labors, slighting him over the protectorship and turning against Clarence to please, in both cases, the Woodvilles; Clarence, vacillating and disloyal to family, to party, and to God; and Gloucester—liberal, hard-working, uncomplaining, and, above all, loyal. Of all the royal family, Gloucester has been unswervingly and uniquely loyal. This emphasis on unique virtue is among the most powerful means of praise in epideictic discourse, and, once again, Gloucester speaks the truth about the past. With only four or five lines of reference to himself, Gloucester has succeeded in setting forth his qualifications for the office of Protector.

To identify the style associated with the ceremonial discourse of this scene, one has only to return to Gloucester's opening words:

Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.

(I.iii.47-50)

Readers of Shakespeare have often encountered this language in the speeches of numerous blunt fellows like Hotspur or like Casca, whose

                    rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to disgest his words
With better appetite.

(JC, I.ii.300-02)

As these words suggest, such a style appears straightforward but employs artfully chosen linguistic means to achieve its ends. Whereas in the ethical style the speaker uses simple and modest language to convince his audience of his sincerity, authority, and good will, the speaker who adopts this “truthful” style seeks to communicate certain emotions to his audience and to produce in them a frame of mind favorable to his purpose.¹⁶ In other words, pathos, not ethos, is the speaker's concern.

The characteristics of this style include broken rhythms, irregular meter, short syntactic phrases, and plain words. Plain diction manifests itself in Gloucester's monosyllables (cog, meed, duck, plain, perch), terms from daily life (wrens, Jacks, bachelor, stripling, grandam), and temporary compounds and coinages (pack-horse, weeder-out, royalize, childish-foolish). The candid speaker often grows impatient and expresses his agitation by punctuating his speech with more or less mild oaths, as does Gloucester with forsooth, by holy Paul, a plague upon you all, marry, iwis. This angry tone also expresses itself in phrases whose substance, length, word order, and high frequency of pronouns and substitute verbs all suggest the unadorned speech of one who has no time for artifice:

They do me wrong, and I will not endure it!

(I.iii.42)

[Tell him, and spare not. …]

(I.iii.113)

What you have been ere this, and what you are;
Withal, what I have been, and what I am.

(I.iii.131-32)

Finally, the candid style adopts figures of speech that express the speaker's questions, doubts, and self-correction represented, respectively, by the italicized phrases cited below—all ways of expressing the spontaneous language of a man who has taken no previous care to modulate his tone, smooth his syntax, or choose his words (italics added):

She may, Lord Rivers! Why, who knows not so?

(I.iii.92)

I cannot tell, the world is grown so bad

(I.iii.69)

Ere you were queen, ay, or your husband king. …

(I.iii.120)

Such language has an abiding charm, despite its irritated tone, that convinces us of the speaker's naturalness and veracity.

By casting his discourse in this forthright style, Gloucester succeeds in his purpose of intimidating the Woodvilles. Although they never assume he is sincere and Gloucester himself does not believe he has changed their minds about him, he has achieved his goal, which is to gain ascendancy in the power play between him and Rivers. As Gloucester's angry tone dissolves into grief (more tears?), Rivers picks up the cue and delivers the expected response:

My Lord of Gloucester, in those busy days,
Which here you urge to prove us enemies,
We follow'd then our lord, our sovereign king.
So should we you, if you should be our king.

(I.iii.144-47)

By this speech Rivers recognizes the bid for power and acknowledges that Gloucester has won the round. Hence, the Yorkist party has closed ranks even before Queen Margaret accuses them of forming an uneasy alliance against her. Her presence during Gloucester's final display of persuasive power in this act provides a corrective and counter to his arguments.

Indeed a desire on Shakespeare's part to affirm the legitimate use of persuasion may explain the confessional soliloquies that follow each of Gloucester's major speeches. Having used deliberative discourse to prove that he must be a villain, Gloucester confesses that he is subtle, false, and treacherous; after deceiving Anne through his abuse of forensic discourse, he admits that he has won her with the aid of the plain devil and dissembling looks; after praising his own worth through epideictic discourse, he explains that he seems a saint, when most I play the devil. These confessions warn us that the lion is not a lion. By making Gloucester admit that he has perverted the legitimate use of persuasive arts, Shakespeare affirms their legitimacy. It would be wrong-headed to see in Gloucester's association with persuasion a condemnation of reason, of classical oratory, or of rhetoric.

Assigning different forms of speech to Gloucester and associating with each form an individual style accounts for the dramatic and linguistic diversity of the opening scenes of Richard III. Annabel Patterson has shown that influential Renaissance critics like Minturno, Sturm, and Scaliger, whose works were well known in Shakespeare's England, espoused the view that there were not simply three styles, high, middle, and low, but a great variety of styles each with its appropriate diction, syntax, organization, phonology, and ornamentation. Such descriptions of style prove quite useful for understanding the principles that might have guided Shakespeare's decisions about appropriate language in the opening act of Richard III.

Notes

1. Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 14-15.

2. Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 146-55. Throughout this paper remarks about the classical theory of persuasive discourse will be taken from these pages.

3. All citations of Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1974).

4. Sr. Miriam Joseph Rauh, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Hafner, 1966), p. 218.

5. Corbett, p. 53.

6. Patterson, p. 58.

7. Patterson, p. 64.

8. Corbett, p. 40.

9. Corbett, pp. 149-52.

10. James Gairdner, History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1898) pp. 16-18.

11. Patterson, p. 156.

12. Patterson, p. 160.

13. Rauh, p. 391.

14. Raphael Holinshed, Selections from Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in Richard III, ed. Mark Eccles (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 190.

15. Holinshed, p. 188.

16. Patterson, p. 64; Rauh, p. 242.