SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III,” in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. 8, 1975, pp. 99-129.

[In the following essay, Neill examines the psychological complexity of Richard's character.]

Here the King is, in the first half of the tragedy, the mastermind of the Grand Mechanism, a demiurge of history.(1)
God in love with His own beauty frames a glass, to view it by reflection.(2)

Richard III is the most stridently theatrical of all of Shakespeare's plays. The superb histrionic insolence of Richard, his stagy relish in confidential soliloquy and aside, is matched by a self-conscious patterning of plot, spectacle, and language, as if Shakespeare's artistry were being flaunted like Richard's own. And the connection is insistently underlined by the use of stage metaphors: poet, actor, and protagonist unite in a Marlovian pageant of self-display.³ This ostentatious theatricality, while it has a lot to do with the play's continuing success on the stage, has presented critics with problems almost as intractable as those faced by Sir Laurence Olivier when he attempted to translate Richard into the alien conventions of cinema. E. A. J. Honigmann, prefacing his recent edition of the play, shows a characteristic unease about its Senecan melodrama and the rhetorical rigidities which embody a “primitive” psychological technique working “at a level not much superior to that of The Spanish Tragedy.”⁴ Criticisms of this sort may seem inevitable if Richard III is placed beside Macbeth, the mature tragedy which it most obviously anticipates, and no one would contest the fact that the style of the early histories is incapable of “the intellectual and emotional insights of the tragic period.”⁵ Nevertheless, what is impressive about Richard III is the dramatic intelligence with which Shakespeare makes his limitations work for him, and this is an aspect of the play which can be brought out if one thinks of Richard III less as an immature version of the pathological horrors of Macbeth and more as a preliminary investigation of ontological problems like those explored in Hamlet.

At first sight the connection between Hamlet and Richard III may seem tenuous. It does, however, occur to Honigmann himself, who writes of Richard's “curious, inverted affinity to the Prince of Denmark, the other Shakespearean hero with a connoisseur's sense of theatre” (p. 39). Anne Righter similarly sees Richard III as being “like Hamlet … a tragedy filled with assertions of the actor's power,” to the point that Richard himself emerges “more as an example of the power wielded by the actor than as a figure of treachery and evil” (p. 88). And Jan Kott's essay on the histories, operating from very different premises, insists on the necessity of interpreting Hamlet in the light of Richard III and Richard III in the light of Hamlet.”⁶

Richard's confidence in the efficacy of acting as a mode of action certainly stands at the opposite pole from Hamlet's metaphysical agonies, but it, too, is the product of something much deeper than mere connoisseurship—just as Shakespeare's own assertions of the actor's power are more than an extravagant mannerist flourish. Hamlet sets out to obey the philosopher's precept “know thyself,” and the play is about the vertiginous terrors concealed by that deceptively simple injunction. Richard, with none of Hamlet's moral sensibility, but poised on the edge of the same ontological abyss, sets out, rather, to create himself. His methods are those of the theater. Crucial to both plays is the familiar quibble on “acting” and “action”: it is through action that we realize what we are; it is through acting that we make real what we are not. Trapped by his awareness that this apparently absolute distinction is, in existential terms, unviable, Hamlet finds significant action impossible. He can redeem himself only by an act of nominalist faith, a magical proclamation of his selfhood—“This is I, Hamlet the Dane”—a proclamation that works only because it is rooted in a larger faith that makes the quest for intellectual self-knowledge an irrelevance.⁷ Richard begins and ends with a similar proclamation of his integral selfhood—“I am myself alone;” “Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.” But the blasphemous self-sufficiency of his “I am” belongs to the rhetoric of despair. The tragic paradox of Richard's position is that only action can validate the self he proclaims; and yet just because that self can be located only in action—because it is otherwise null, a chaos, unformed and unknowable—action must take the form of acting, must become a way not of proving but of concealing the self, the void at the center of being. And when the external motives for action are removed, “Richard,” literally, disintegrates.

I

Of course, both the metaphors which invite us to view historical events in a theatrical perspective and the characterization of Richard as a diabolic actor-hypocrite have a basis in the traditional materials on which Shakespeare was building. The world of Richard III is figured as a Wonderful Theater of God's Judgments, and men are depicted as mere puppet-actors, their movements dictated with a nice regard for witty symmetry by the Cosmic Ironist. Margaret, the furious prophetess, is the Chorus for His tragedy of blood. In Act IV, scene iv, which she describes as a “dire induction” to a tragedy (ll. 5-7), she recalls the murder of her son Edward as a “frantic play,” with Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey as its sadistic audience (ll. 68-69); and she goes on to type the reign of Edward of York as a kind of May Game pageant, with Elizabeth as a Summer Lady:

I call'd thee then vain flourish of my fortune;
I call'd thee then poor shadow, painted queen,
The presentation of but what I was;
The flattering index of a direful pageant;
.....A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.

(IV.iv.82-91)

The impotence she ascribes to the pageant-actors is confirmed by the Duchess of York's abstraction of herself as “Woe's scene”—a passive spectacle of grief (l. 27). And that image in turn looks back to Elizabeth's sorrow at her Edward's death:

Duch. What means this scene of rude impatience?
Q. Eliz. To make an act of tragic violence.

(II.ii.38-39)

Though she sees herself as the maker of her own play, the best that Elizabeth and her fellow mourners can do is to compose an inert tableau of grief in a pageant they cannot direct:

.....

Q. Eliz. Ah for my husband, for my dear Lord Edward!
Chil. Ah for our father, for our dear Lord Clarence!
Duch. Alas for both, both mine, Edward and Clarence!
Q. Eliz. What stay had I but Edward? and he's gone.
Chil. What stay had we but Clarence? and he's gone.
Duch. What stays had I but they? and they are gone.
Q. Eliz. Was never widow had so dear a loss.
Chil. Were never orphans had so dear a loss.
Duch. Was never mother had so dear a loss.

(II.ii.71-79)

Those who fancy themselves as directors of the theatrical procession find themselves in turn caught up in its inexorable movement. Hastings rejoices in the downfall of the Queen's party in III.ii—“I live to look upon their tragedy” (l. 59)—but before two scenes are out, the plot has come full circle: “They smile at me who shortly shall be dead.” (III.iv.107). Death changes partners in a dizzy reel: God calls the tune. Buckingham, envisaging heaven as no more than the auditorium for God's brutal theater of revenge (V.i.3-9), squarely confronts its terrible ironies:

That high All-Seer, which I dallied with,
Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head,
And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest.
Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points in their masters' bosoms. …

One thinks of Beard's Marlowe, gouging his own eye with the hand of blasphemy.

A God of the kind implied by these play metaphors will do well enough for a Puritan fanatic like Thomas Beard or a propagandist like Halle, and his activities accord with the providential scheme defined by Tillyard. But he presents problems for a dramatist—witness the didactic clumsiness of The Atheist's Tragedy. Seen from the viewpoint of Shakespeare's supposed “official self,” the play belongs to an impressive but drastically limited kind of ritual theater, plotting the ironic symmetries of providence with equally exact schemes of action, spectacle, and rhetoric. The limitations are both moral and dramatic. Moral, because providence too easily appears, if not a mere instrument of human faction,⁸ then a model for its vicious plots; dramatic, because in denying the possibility of significant moral activity, it tends to reduce human action to a meaningless writhing.

Of course, Richmond's triumph appears to give official endorsement to this grand scheme—it could hardly do otherwise. But the play's total poetic statement is another matter. It is significant that the most humanly moving of Margaret's speeches is not among the cursings by which she marks the progress of nemesis but is her agonized questioning of the whole fatal process in Act I, scene iii:

Did York's dread curse prevail so much with heaven
That Henry's death, my lovely Edward's death,
Their kingdom's loss, my woeful banishment,
Should all but answer for that peevish brat?
Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?

(I.iii.190-94)

By the end of the scene she has convinced herself otherwise:

I will not think but they ascend the sky,
And there awake God's gentle-sleeping peace.

(I.iii.286-87).

But even here the violent yoking of gentleness and savagery creates an ambiguity. The endless spectacle of death glutting on life can hardly be other than sickening, and Margaret's question forces us to ask by what scale God distributes justices—if indeed He concerns Himself with it at all. Elizabeth's despairing retort to Richard in Act IV, scene iv suggests a heaven which denies justice to the victim, just as it cuts the oppressor from the sun:

What good is cover'd with the face of heaven,
To be discover'd, that can do me good?

(IV.iv.240-41)

It is as though God (at best) has withdrawn His light from the fallen world and left it for the devil, Richard, to bustle in.

What finally raises the play's theater of revenge above mere ritual is the character of Richard himself—dramatist, producer, prologue, and star performer of his own rich comedy.

II

The way in which the character of Richard is developed out of a combination of More's Machiavellian “deep dissimuler” with the self-delighting witty Vice of the Moralities is perceptively traced by Anne Righter in her section on “The Legacy of the Vice.”⁹ Here I am concerned with the surprising psychological insights which Shakespeare manages to produce from the manipulation of such thoroughly traditional material. Because the shaping of Richard's character is a process substantially begun in 3 Henry VI, any full account of it must take that play into account, although Richard III as a dramatic structure is perfectly able to stand on its own.

Richard's delight in his prowess as an actor, the bustling energy of his performances, makes him in a sense the only lively moral positive in the play. His most sustained virtuoso exercise comes in the second scene, where it is tellingly placed against the embodiment of orthodox virtue—a corpse—the “poor, key-cold figure of a holy king” whom even Margaret recalls contemptuously as “Holy Harry” (IV.iv.25). Clearly it was this quality of style in Richard—what Honigmann calls his “glamour”—which attracted the citizen's wife to Burbage, and has excited audiences ever since. It's the same quality that stirs us in a Barabbas, a Volpone, or a Vindice. Just as it is the quality which wins Anne herself, who falls to Richard precisely because she is not deceived, because (as he intends) she is bowled over by the nerve, the sprezzatura, of the performance itself:

Arise, dissembler! Though I wish thy death,
I will not be thy executioner.

(I.ii.184-85; italics mine)

What is perhaps less obvious is the subtle psychological realism which lies behind the compelling staginess of Richard's character: the way in which his titanism is shown as the reflection of a most appalling emotional weakness and deformity.

Two important soliloquies in 3 Henry VI contain all that is necessary for the development of Richard's character in the last play of the sequence.¹⁰ Like most of Richard's monologues, both take the form of extended asides to the audience, and both are ostensibly expressions of his naked, all-consuming ambition. But in fact they are much more than merely signposts to the plot. In the first (III.ii.124 ff.), Richard sketches the development of his ambition in a pseudo-dialectical form: too many lives stand between him and the crown he desires, and therefore he would be wiser to direct his energies to private satisfactions; but his physical ugliness appears to make this gratification of sexual lust a vanity even more absurd than lust for dominion, so that he is forced back again on his political aspiration. Trapped in this logical impasse, he concludes that the politician's formula of violence masked by smooth deceit offers his best release. The structure of Machiavellian rationalism is not, however, sufficient to contain the confused emotional impulses behind the speech. Richard broods obsessively on the theme of sexual love and his own deformity, the whole speech grows out of his bitter reflections on Edward's carnal prodigality, and one senses that the means of the curse he invokes—the grotesque tortures of syphilis—are imaginatively more important than its ends: to open Richard's pathway to the crown. The wanton multiplication of claimants to the throne—“Clarence, Henry, and his son young Edward, / And all the unlook'd-for issue of their bodies” (ll. 131-32)—is as much an affront to his sexual capacity as to his ambition. He posits an alternative to political enterprise only to provide an excuse for further masochistic flagellation. The unstable combination of self-pity, savage irony (tending always towards brutal self-parody), and an almost masturbatory relish in his own wickedness becomes the keynote of Richard's descants on his own deformity:

Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,
And deck my body in gay ornaments,
And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.
O miserable thought! and more unlikely
Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!
Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb;
And for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub,
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size,
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp
That carries no impression like the dam.

(3H6, III.ii.146-62)

It is the strident self-assertion of an ego monstrously enlarged to protect an inner self pitiably warped and enfeebled. Physical deformity is felt as the outward manifestation of an inner formlessness, a mirror of psychological chaos. And the ontological vacuum is located in a profound emotional alienation: Richard cannot know himself because he cannot love himself, and he cannot love himself because he has never been loved—“love forswore me in my mother's womb.” It is not only in a physical sense that Richard resembles the unlicked bear-whelp “that carries no impression like the dam”: his relation with his mother, whose loathing is displayed with admirable economy in Richard III, has failed to provide Richard with the necessary locus for his sense of self.¹¹

The second of the two 3 Henry VI soliloquies returns to this theme of love and maternal alienation:

Indeed 'tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward.
.....The midwife wonder'd and the women cried,
“O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!”
And so I was, which plainly signified
That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog.
Then since the heavens have shap'd my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am myself alone.

(3H6, V.vi.69-83)

Richard here conceives of love in the terms set out in Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium:

Likeness generates love. Similarity is a certain sameness of nature in several things. If I am like you, you are necessarily like me; therefore, the same similarity which compels me to love you, forces you to love me. … Moreover, a lover imprints a likeness of the loved one upon his soul, and so the soul of the lover becomes a mirror in which is reflected the image of the loved one. Thereupon, when the loved one recognises himself in the lover, he is forced to love him.¹²

Ficino, significantly, insists on love as a mode of self-realization: “When you love me, you contemplate me, and as I love you, I find myself in your contemplation of me; I recover myself, lost in the first place by [my] own neglect of myself, in you, who preserve me. You do exactly the same in me. … I keep a grasp on myself only through you as a mediary” (II.viii; p. 145). And the highest form of self-realization is naturally through love of God, of which all other loves are but shadows: “… we shall seem first to have worshipped God in things, in order later to worship things in God; and shall seem to worship things in God in order to recover ourselves above all, and seem, in loving God, to have loved ourselves” (VI.xix; p. 215). Love, the creative mirror by which we realize ourselves, has been withdrawn from Richard. A child, says Winnicott, “needs one person to gather his bits together,” a mirror to establish his sense of integral identity;¹³ Richard, the unlicked bear-cub, carries no impression like his dam and so identifies his self as a chaos. Without form he can be “like” no one, and no one can be “like” him: he is “himself alone,” with all the horror of isolation which that arrogant despair implies.

In the prologue-soliloquy with which he opens Richard III, Richard plays again on the theme of physical deformity and emotional alienation:

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—
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.14-27)

The glass which Richard mockingly rejects is the old icon of vanity, displaying the narcissistic image of the physical self. But since the body in turn is only an image or shadow of soul and mind, the inner self,¹⁴ the icon also doubles as an emblem of self-knowledge. And one is aware that Richard is as much concerned with psychological reality as with physical appearance. The solution to his anguish is a paradoxical one: “to see my shadow in the sun, / And descant on mine own deformity.” He makes himself into a kind of travesty Narcissus, creating a false self to be the object of his consuming need for love. Ficino's account of Narcissus is helpful:

A certain young man, Narcissus, that is the soul of bold and inexperienced man, does not see his own countenance, he never notices his own substance and virtue, but pursues its reflection in the water, and tries to embrace it; that is, the soul admires the beauty in the weak body, an image in the flowing water, which is but the reflection of itself. It deserts its own beauty and never catches its shadow. …

(VI.xvii; p. 212)

Richard's narcissism is in fact precisely a strategy to avoid the contemplation of his own true countenance. He sublimates his tearing consciousness of inner formlessness by concentrating on its outward image, which he creates as something outside himself, a shadow. Like an actor's shadow-self, it is a role whose recognition involves no necessary acknowledgment of self-knowledge, being part of the self-consciously adopted persona of a Machiavellian villain:¹⁵

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)

It is characteristic of Richard's mode of histrionic self-consciousness that he regards even the wicked self concealed by his pious performances as itself a role, something to be “played:”

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

(I.iii.335-37; italics mine)

And the broad element of self-caricature, which is never more apparent than when he is ostensibly laying himself naked—“dogs bark at me as I halt by them”—is a reflection of this self-divisive strategy.

III

In that long soliloquy from 3 Henry VI where Richard contemplates his own chaos, he imagines his political struggle in terms which powerfully suggest his agony of psychological confusion:

And I—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way, and straying from the way
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out—
Torment myself to catch the English crown;
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.

(3H6, III.ii.174-81)

The implication of self-division in the self-torment, and of self-destruction in the self-division, unconsciously anticipates the horrors of Richard's last night at Bosworth Field. And the method by which he proposes to end his torment is also, ironically enough, a method of self-division:

Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
.....I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murtherous Machevil to school.

(3H6, III.ii.182-93)¹⁶

It is the method of the actor—a creator of multiple selves—and it is as an actor that Henry contemptuously sees him—“What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (3H6, V.vi.10). On the level of simple plot Richard emerges as the perfect actor-hypocrite, identifying himself in the last scene of 3 Henry VI with the archetypal figure of Judas:

To say the truth, so Judas kiss'd his master,
And cried “All hail!” when as he meant all harm.

(3H6, V.vii.33-34)

In Richard III we are constantly being reminded of Richard's theatrical virtuosity in perhaps a dozen different roles, by his self-congratulatory asides, by the games he plays with Buckingham, and even by the extravagant energy of the performances themselves, his sensuous delight in histrionic rhetoric:

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

(I.iii.47-53)

In one sense, of course, Richard's flair makes him only the most accomplished performer in a court of hypocrites, as the pageant of dissimulation in II.i shows. Indeed, the logic of political corruption ensures that the self-division of hypocrisy is paralleled beyond the court: in the First Murderer's denial of conscience—“My voice is now the King's, my looks my own” (I.iv.170)—and in the pathetic evasions of Brakenbury and the Scrivener:

I will not reason what is meant hereby,
Because I will be guiltless from the meaning.

(I.iv.93-94)

                                                                                                    Who is so gross
That cannot see this palpable device?
Yet who['s] so bold but says he sees it not?

(III.vi.10-12)

The scrivener's death warrant, beautifully engrossed for an execution which has already taken place, is an epitome, at once horrible and absurd, of a political charade in which all become passive, but nevertheless guilty, actors. All, that is, except Richard. For what gives him his demonic power is the way in which he seizes the freedom which an actor's function normally denies. The selves he creates are, or (at least until Act IV) appear to be, independent of any plot-mechanism but those which he himself devises; and, more than that, they are actually agents in determining the roles others must perform within his plots.

The prologue-like speech with which Richard opens his play, summarizing previous action and outlining the shape of that to come, creates for him a kind of extra-dramatic status which is borne out in his running commentary of asides through the first four and a half acts. In the speech itself the presenter-function is conflated with that of playmaker:

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.

(I.i.32-35; italics mine)

The puns are appropriate both because, until the end of IV.iii, the plot of the play is virtually indistinguishable from Richard's plotting and because his characteristic way of working out his plots is theatrical: consequently, the action tends to resolve itself into a series of plays within the play with Richard as author-actor.¹⁷ Of these, the most breathtaking is that with Anne in I.ii, the play of “The Witty Lover.”

The purpose of playing, as Hamlet tells us, is to hold a mirror up to nature, and Richard's theatrical magic works by mirrors. Hamlet's performance for Gertrude in the closet scene sets up a glass to show her her inmost self; Richard's performance for Anne works by more confusing sleights. If there seems to be something unconvincingly histrionic about Anne's first two big speeches, we soon find out why. Seeming to accept her role of grief-enraged wife and daughter, Richard draws Anne through a mirror-maze of stichomythia, where speech reflects speech in apparently innocent antithesis for eighty lines, until she is made to feed him precisely the cue he wants:

.....

Anne. Out of my sight, thou dost infect mine eyes!
Glou. Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine.
Anne. Would they were basilisks, to strike thee dead!

(I.ii.148-50)

Disastrously—but inevitably—her gibe recalls a thousand Petrarchan clichés on the killing beams of the lady's eyes, and it enables Richard to slip into the full routine of the Rejected Lover. By a further mirror-trick his speech becomes an inverted image of her opening salvo of curses: the revenge invoked then is offered her now—but in terms which render it farcically irrelevant. Anne may have his life, but only if she consents to close his play in a final tableau of the Cruelty of Love: the earthly Venus plunging her sword into the humble heart of her servant. And yet, in the rhetorical labyrinth into which she has wandered, the only conceivable alternative is the grant of mercy:

Glou. But shall I live in hope?
Anne. All men, I hope, live so
[Glou.] Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
[Anne. To take is not to give.]

(I.ii.199-202)

However she looks, Anne finds her image fatally defined in the mirrors of Richard's art: a looking glass world in which joke becomes reality and reality a player's sour jest, where Anne's curses reflect back, as Richard has mockingly warned (l. 132), upon herself—

If ever he have wife, let her be made
More miserable by the [life] of him
Than I am made by my young lord and thee!

(I.ii.26-28)

—where Margaret in turn will be made to curse herself, Hastings to pronounce his own sentence of death, and the citizens of London to implore a tyrant's accession.

Act I, scene ii ends as it began, in monologue—Richard's epilogue balancing Anne's prologue. And in this concluding flourish of the theatrical mirror, Richard himself returns to the icon of the looking glass:

My dukedom to a beggarly denier,
I do mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds (although I cannot)
Myself to be a marv'llous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking-glass
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favor with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.
.....Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(I.ii.251-63)

The scene we have just witnessed has been just such a glass. For if its immediate end has been the conquest of Anne, its true purpose, like all of Richard's performances, has been to reflect, and to realize, himself—to call a self into being out of the nothing, the chaos within: “And yet to win her! All the world to nothing!” (I.ii.238). The shadow of his nothing falls upon all that is.

The sun which Richard invokes is the heraldic sun of York, but it is also the sun of majesty in whose light he may cast his long shadow upon the world, a world which will thus become a gigantic reflector of his own reality. And at a further remove it may suggest the Sun of Divinity, which his shadow seems to cut from the world,¹⁸ Plato's inner light on which all human understanding and commerce depends:

The sun generates eyes and it bestows upon them the power to see. This power would be in vain, and would be overwhelmed by eternal darkness if the light of the sun were not present, imprinted with the colours and shapes of bodies. … In the same way, God creates the soul and to it gives mind, the power of understanding. The mind would be empty and dark if it did not have the light of God, in which to see the principles of everything.¹⁹

The suggestion somberly deepens the resonances of his threat to Clarence at the end of 3 Henry VI:

Clarence, beware! thou [keep'st] me from the light,
But I will sort a pitchy day for thee.

(3H6, V.vi.84-85)

Clarence's death in Act I, scene iv is made into a grotesque mirror image of the sacrament with which he entered the world, the symbolism of rebirth horribly realized in a literal new-christening in the Tower. So that the golden time of Richard, the third sun of York, becomes the reign of a terrible anti-Christ:

For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill'd it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.

(I.ii.51-52)

K. Rich. And came I not at last to comfort you?
Duch. No, by the holy rood, thou know'st it well,
Thou cam'st on earth to make the earth my hell.
A grievous burthen was thy birth to me,
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;

(IV.iv.165-69)

Not only does Richard appear as an antitype of the Comforter, but also as a kind of travesty Creator, making a new earth in the image of his own deformity, like the clumsy and malign demiurge of Gnostic myth. In Platonic accounts of creation, God, “in love with his own beauty, frames a glass to view it by reflection”; that glass is the universe:

The desire of a thing for the propagation of its own perfection is a kind of love. Absolute perfection consists in the supreme power of God. This perfection the divine intelligence contemplates, and hence the divine will desires to generate the same perfection beyond itself; because of this love of propagation everything was created by Him.²⁰

And it is this creation by love which gives the world its coherent order:

… if Love creates everything, He also preserves everything, for the functions of creation and preservation always belong together. Certainly like things are preserved by like, and moreover, Love attracts the like to the like. Every part of the earth, joined by mutual love, links itself with other parts of earth like itself.

(III,ii; p. 149)

Richard's creation by hate, on the other hand, can only be a creation of disorder: a mirror of his own psychological chaos. Where Love joins the universe together in mutual attraction—“a circle of good, revolving from good to good perpetually”²¹—Richard's self-propagating “I am” sets up an apparently endless cycle of division in which “sin will pluck on sin” (IV.ii.63) as “wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame” (V.i.29), a cycle through which the desperate incoherence of Richard's inner state is at last resolved in annihilating self-division—“Myself myself confound!” (IV.iv.399)—the serpent of evil gnawing at its own tail.

IV

Richard's kingdom is built “on brittle glass” in more than the sense he intends at IV.ii.60. It is a kingdom of mirror-plays and actor-shadows in which he manipulates the lens. Mirror images register in the consciousness of other characters, too, but purely as metaphors for passive observation and reflection, metaphors which tend by their stylized remoteness to suggest an impoverishment of human relations. For Anne, the corpse of her father-in-law is contracted to a kind of mirror-emblem:

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

(I.ii.53-54)

For the bereaved Duchess of York, her dead sons are recalled as reflections of their father; and Richard, seen as a distorting mirror of these dead, is also a reflector of her own shame:

I have bewept a worthy husband's death,
And liv'd with looking on his images;
But now two mirrors of his princely semblance
Are crack'd in pieces by malignant death,
And I for comfort have but one false glass,
That grieves me when I see my shame in him.

(II.ii.49-54)

Shadows, shades, ghosts, and finally distorted reflections—the living are only images, good and bad, of the dead, or (more accurately) of one's own passion of loss.

The way in which relationships are reduced to mere perspectives of solipsist mirrors in this corrupted world is powerfully dramatized in certain “mirror scenes,” notably II.ii and IV.iv. In the antiphonal patterns of the language (and in the staging such patterns appear to invite) one grief reflects another in apparently infinite recession. Elizabeth, for Margaret in I.iii, is merely a spurious image of herself, the true Queen—“Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune!” (l. 240); by Iv.iv., Elizabeth, Margaret, and the Duchess of York have become exact mirror-images of one another's sorrow:

.....

Q. Mar. [Tell over your woes again by viewing mine:]
I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a [Harry], till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill'd him.
Duch. I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;
I had a Rutland too, thou [holp'st] to kill him.
Q. Mar. Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard kill'd him.

(IV.iv.39-46)

“Shadow,” “presentation,” “pageant,” “dream”—the terms of Margaret's speech beginning at line 82 point to the way in which the fantasies of the glass have become reality. But the elaborate parallelism asserts the identity of their situations only, since the formalism denies any identity of feeling, any sympathy. Their relationship is displayed as a mere epitome of the remorseless mechanical formula by which human lives are organized in the first tetralogy—“wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.”

Perhaps the most terrible of the play's mirror figures appears in the complex symbolism of Clarence's dream; cast haphazard among the other emblems of mortal vanity are jewels:

Some lay in dead men's skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept
(As 'twere in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems,
That woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatt'red by.

(I.iv.29-33)

It is as though the eyes, travestying their traditional function as “windows of the soul,” have become mere mirrors, at once mocking their owners' humanity and denying the possibility of communication with that humanity. The image anticipates Buckingham's irony in the council scene—

We know each other's faces; for our hearts,
He knows no more of mine than I of yours,
Or I of his, my lord, than you of mine.

(III.iv.10-12)

—and Richard's subsequent rejection of Buckingham:

                                                                                none are for me
That look into me with considerate eyes.

(IV.ii.29-30)

Buckingham—“respective,” “circumspect,”—attempts to see beyond the mirrors, and dies for it.

Clarence's gems reflect only the slimy bottom of the deep upon itself, as Richard's mirror-play ultimately shows Anne only the image of her own corruption. Her eyes which pour their balm on Henry's wounds and which she repeatedly tries to make reject the image of Richard—“mortal eyes cannot endure the devil” (I.i.45) and “Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes” (I.ii.148)—become the metaphorical agents of her fall, as Richard's verbal mirror turns her rhetoric back upon herself:

Glou. Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine.
Anne. Would they were basilisks, to strike thee dead!
Glou. I would they were, that I might die at once;
For now they kill me with a living death.
Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears,
Sham'd their aspects with store of childish drops:
These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear—
No, when my father York and Edward wept
To hear the piteous moan that Rutland made
.....                                                  —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.149-66)

The love-dazzled eyes in Richard's mirror are a monstrous parody, but the brilliance of the reflection blinds Anne's moral vision; and what it reveals to her is a kind of truth. These lovers' eyes get no babies, but they get, in different ways, themselves. In the moment of triumph Richard repeats his offer to kill himself in lines which mimic the mirror-ironies of divine justice:

This hand, which for thy love did kill thy love,
Shall for thy love kill a far truer love.

(I.ii.189-90)

V

Richard III, as critics from Moulton to Tillyard have observed, continues the ironical pattern of nemesis established in the three plays which precede it: punishment follows crime in apparently endless sequence, as though Justice held a mirror to every act. But in this play there is an increasing tendency for the ironies to become self-reflexive: the biter bit becomes the biter bitten by himself. Buckingham's death speech reechoes the familiar “measure for measure” theme—“Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame” (V.i.29)—but recognizes a special malicious wit in the means:

Why then All-Souls' day is my body's doomsday.
.....This is the day wherein I wish'd to fall
By the false faith of him whom most I trusted;
.....That high All-Seer, which I dallied with,
Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head,
And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest.
Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points in their masters' bosoms.

(V.i.12-24)

There is an obviously ironical echo here of Richard's mock offer to Anne; and indeed God's modus operandi seems all too close to Richard's own. As Richard made Clarence's death a new baptism, so God makes All Soul's Day Doomsday for Buckingham. As Richard's mirrors turned Anne's and Margaret's curses, so God turns Buckingham's prayer back upon himself.²²

Richmond's concluding speech (which by its self-conscious appeal to the loyalties of the audience becomes a kind of epilogue, corresponding to Richard's “prologue”) expresses the theme of self-division in political terms:

England hath long been mad and scarr'd herself:
The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compell'd, been butcher to the sire.
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division.

(V.v.23-28)

The events of the fifteenth century are seen as a history of progressive self-division—in the body politic; in its model, the family; and at last within the individual members of the physical body. Thus the motif of the divided self in Richard III is in a sense only the ultimate extension of the political argument. But what makes this a richer play than its predecesors is its new psychological focus. In the Duchess of York's lament in Act II, it is as though civil dissension were now reduced to a mere mirror of the inner crisis of the psychomachia:

                                                                                themselves, the conquerors,
Make war upon themselves, brother to brother,
Blood to blood, self against self.

(II.iv.61-63)

England, “this sickly land,” as the citizens call it in II.iii, is infected by Edward's fatal sickness, a sickness which Richard mockingly describes as self-consumption:

Now by Saint John, that news is bad indeed!
O, he hath kept an evil diet long,
And overmuch consum'd his royal person.

(I.i.138-40)

Edward destroys himself as surely as the courtiers who gather about his death bed in II.i and call down vengeance with their false oaths of friendship. And Margaret's warning to Elizabeth amid the bitter feuds of I.iii has a general application: “Fool, fool! Thou whet'st a knife to kill thyself” (I.iii.243). It is a warning which Elizabeth may recall in her final encounter with Richard in the second wooing scene:

Q. Eliz. Shall I forget myself to be myself?
K. Rich. Ay, if yourself's remembrance wrong yourself.

(IV.iv.420-21)

As the play develops, we are presented with the reality of the self-division that Elizabeth is talking about. Self-forgetfulness, the suppression of the moral self, leads at last to self-abandonment, to despair, as character after character is confronted by the consequences of his abdication:

Q. Eliz. Ah, who shall hinder me to wail and weep,
To chide my fortune, and torment myself?
I'll join with black despair against my soul,
And to myself become an enemy.

(II.ii.34-37)

Anne. Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again,
Within so small a time, my woman's heart
Grossly grew captive to his honey words,
And prov'd the subject of my own soul's curse.

(IV.i.77-80)

Buck. That high All-Seer, which I dallied with,
Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head,
And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest.

(V.i.20-22)

But the most potent version of the motif is once again in the scene of Clarence's murder. The politic self-division of Brakenbury, the pathetic moral stratagem of the murderers, the dramatized contest by which they attempt to objectify conscience as something outside themselves, all help to realize the process of self-division which has led to Clarence's condition of despair:

Ah, Keeper, Keeper, I have done these things
(That now give evidence against my soul).

(I.iv.66-67)

The first murderer's “Come, you deceive yourself” (I.iv.245) reminds us that Clarence before, like the murderers now (“to their own souls blind,” l. 255) has denied a part of himself. Such a denial is a kind of self-murder, and the drowning in Clarence's dream becomes a vivid metaphor for the suffocation of the moral self:

                                                                                and often did I strive
To yield the ghost; but still the envious flood
Stopp'd in my soul, and would not let it forth
To find the empty, vast, and wand'ring air,
But smother'd it within my panting bulk,
Who almost burst to belch it in the sea.

(I.iv.36-41)

The imagery recalls Richard's self-torment in 3 Henry VI:

And I—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way, and straying from the way,
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out—
Torment myself to catch the English crown.

(3H6, III.ii.174-79)

Clarence's dream-death, however, proves to be a moral rebirth, just as the dream itself, like Richard's later, is a moral awakening: he dies, not to find the “empty air” of annihilation, but to be confronted by the ghosts of Warwick and Prince Edward—as much the shadows of his murdered conscience as the shades of his murdered enemies.

If Clarence's dream becomes the chief imaginative symbol for the agonies of the divided self, it is in the character of Richard that the process of division is most fully embodied. Richard's perverted self-obsession—at once self-love and self-loathing—leads him to create a whole theater of false selves to conceal his true self from himself, a glass to contemplate his physical deformity in order to forget his inner formlessness. Ficino's Commentary again appears to throw some light upon the nature of this split. Ficino is seeking to explain Aristophanes' myth of the cloven man as a version of the Fall:

“Men” (that is, the souls of men) “originally” (that is, when they were created by God), “were whole” and equipped with two lights, one natural, the other supernatural. … “They aspired to equal God”; they reverted to the natural light alone. Hereupon “they were divided”, and lost their supernatural light, were reduced to the natural light alone, and fell immediately into bodies. “If they become too proud, they will again be divided”; that is, if they trust too much to natural ability, that innate and natural light which remains to them will also be extinguished in some way.

(IV.ii; p. 155)

What has been debased is called, and correctly so, broken and “split” [“fractum … scissumque”].

(IV.v; p. 165)

Richard's proclamation of his self-sufficiency (“I am myself alone”) is nothing if not a revelation of the pride against which Ficino warns—“God alone, in whom nothing is lacking, above whom there is nothing, remains satisfied in himself and sufficient in himself, and therefore the soul made itself the equal of God, when it wished to be content with itself alone.” (IV.iv; pp. 158-59)—and its consequence is the extinction of the natural light of conscience. Perhaps the cruelest of the many ironies at Richard's expense is that the very acts by which he attempts to assert his moral self-sufficiency are those which in fact declare his moral annihilation.

With Anne, Richard can make a game of the sort of self-division by which the murderers seek to excuse themselves (I.ii.89-98) and a game of the final self-division of despair (“By such despair I should accuse myself,” l. 85); and he can shrug off her attempts to remind him of the consistent relation of the self and its actions (ll. 99, 120). His insouciance is possible because, for Richard, the “self” has no moral continuity but is wholly defined in and by the immediate act, or performance—it is a projection, an image, a shadow in a glass.²³ As there is no stable self to which responsibility can be referred, the deed can be acknowledged or denied as the dynamics of performance dictate: “Say that I slew them not?” (I.ii.89). The last theatrical offer—“Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.” (I.ii.186)—is in a sense perfectly genuine: for there is no self to kill, except a part. In his closing soliloquy, as he contemplates the imaginary mirror, Richard presents an almost infinitely refracted image of himself, as though reflected in the facets of a prism:

I do not mistake my person all this while!
Upon my life, she finds (although I cannot)
Myself to be a marv'llous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favor with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.
But first I'll turn yon fellow in his grave,
And then return lamenting to my love.
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(I.ii.252-63; italics mine)

The vertiginous trompe l'oeil multiplication of himself is meant as nothing more than a last exuberant display of his rhetorical sprezzatura, but it anticipates, with ironical precision, the appalling mirror-maze of his agony before Bosworth.

In Act I, scene iii, Richard again mocks the notion of self-enmity in his prayer for the pardon of Clarence's enemies:

So do I ever—(speaks to himself) being well advis'd;
For had I curs'd now, I had curs'd myself.

(I.iii.317-18)

Of course there is a sense in which Richard is already quite self-consciously his own enemy, as the following soliloquy suggests: “I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl” (I.iii.323). The extent of his control over the action means that the other characters appear increasingly as pawns in an elaborate game played with himself. Making it his heaven to dream upon the crown rather than to actually possess it, Richard, like his kinsman Volpone, takes more pleasure in the cunning purchase than in the glad possession. Even Buckingham emerges as a kind of extension of Richard,²⁴ “my other self” as Richard calls him (II.ii.151). But Buckingham, too, conforms to the logic of the split self, and he turns against the king precisely at the point when Richard's own disintegration begins. The board at last swept clean of pieces, the player is left confronting … himself, the image in the glass.

Already in the first scene of Act IV, Anne has given hints of shadows not in the sun:

For never yet one hour in his bed
Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,
But with his timorous dreams was still awak'd.

(IV.i.82-84)

And in the following scene we become aware of the first conscious stirrings of Richard's suppressed moral self:

                                                                                                    But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.

(IV.ii.63-64)

It is as if the grotesque incest in butchery catalogued by Margaret in IV.iv has been pursued to the point where Richard himself is its only remaining object, the last of the issue of his mother's body on which the carnal cur may prey (IV.iv.56-57). His self, in Elizabeth's sarcastic retort (IV.iv.374) is “self-misus'd”; and when Richard picks up her gibe with a repetition of the self-cursing motif, there is behind the willed mockery an hysterical seriousness:

                                                                      Myself myself confound!
Heaven and fortune bar me happy hours!
Day, yield me not thy light, nor, night, thy rest!

(IV.iv.399-401)

The confusion of the episode with Ratcliffe and Catesby, where for the first time the comedy is turned against Richard himself, immediately confirms the descent into psychological chaos, “the blind cave of eternal night.”

Act V, scene iii is the last and physically most obvious of the play's mirror-scenes (recalling in its diagrammatic precision Act II, scene v of 3 Henry VI, the episode of the son-who-has-killed-his-father and the father-who-has-killed-his-son). Now, however, the careful parallels in action and staging serve only to show how much the world is no longer Richard's mirror. The sun, which Richard greeted in the opening lines of the play and in which his shadow has sported for so long, makes its symbolic setting, and for Richard, at least, it is not to rise again. The last scene of his life is played in shadow.

In itself, as many critics have felt, the dream sequence is less than fully satisfying: it is probably the one point in the play where the mirror motif becomes obtrusively clumsy. The sequence is constructed as a kind of didactic mirror for magistrates, in which the false king is presented as the distorted mirror-image of the true. But at the same time it has to serve as an image of Richard's psychological torment, and the two functions are incompatible. As long as the ghosts are in Richard's dream, we can take them (like those in Clarence's dream) as shadows of his murdered conscience. The awkwardness arises when they appear in Richmond's, where, if they are not to appear as projections of a smug self-righteousness, they have to be taken as literal specters. The most telling part of the scene, however, is not the dream itself but the agony which follows it, in a speech which is at once the culmination and the fullest expression of the theme of the divided self.

Richard wakes in a sweat of terror from a dream prefiguring (shadowing) his death—“Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!” (V.iii.177)—and the terror gives a voice to self heard nowhere else in the play: “Have mercy, Jesu!” (l. 178). That cry in the dark has a poignancy absent from the conventional pieties of any of the apparently more virtuous characters. The voice, however unfamiliar, is one which Richard, like the murderers before him, recognizes well enough: “O coward conscience, how thou dost afflict me!” (l. 179) “Conscience” here has the full sense of “consciousness” as well as “moral awareness” and implies a total suppression of the inner life and hence of any true self:

What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I [am] I.

(V.iii.182-83)

We are back here in the mirror world of the soliloquy at the end of I.ii. The reassertion of the old blasphemy, “I am I,” is a despairing attempt to proclaim his self-sufficient integrity: “Richard loves Richard,” the name is one with the namer; the image in the mirror is one with the self that sees it.

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.

(V.iii.184-87)

But the struggle to remake the emblem of self-love (the lookingglass of I.ii) inevitably collapses because Richard, the chameleon actor who has created himself only in his fleeting changes, can locate no stable self to love, no self solid enough to be loved:

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.

(V.iii.187-90)

Indeed it proves impossible to find a locus for his self-loathing:

I am a villain; yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well; fool, do not flatter.

(V.iii.191-92)

The self disintegrates into a babel of self-conflicting voices:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

(V.iii.193-95)

The cracked mirror becomes a fragmenting prism. And for a self so lost the only outlet is despair, because no single, integrated focus of consciousness exists, the only sound, the baying of a thousand several tongues:

I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(V.iii.200-204)

Richard, who from the beginning has denied his kinship to the rest of humanity (“I am like no brother”), has thereby alienated himself from his own humanity: he is not like himself and therefore cannot love himself.

“A dream itself is but a shadow,” and Richard's is a dream of shadows, refracted images of his own self, seen not by the artificial sun of his parody of godhead (“Shine out, fair sun”) but looming in the blind cave of night:

Rat. Nay, good my lord, be not afraid of shadows.
K. Rich. By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night
Have strook more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.

(V.iii.215-18)

It is the last trick of God's dissembling mirror that Richard, who makes himself in shadows, is destroyed by shadows:

I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him.

(V.iv.11-12)

The best that Richard can manage in his last performance is a reincarnation of himself in the act. But while, even now, the energy is all his—“Come, bustle, bustle! Caparison my horse!” (V.iii.289)—Richard is far from being (as Olivier gleefully announced) “himself again!” In the willful denial of conscience at the beginning of his oration to his army there must be a self-contradiction:

Let not our babbling dreams afright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!

(V.iii.308-11)

In the bravado of “A thousand hearts are great within my bosom” (l. 347), we can hardly fail to hear an echo of the babbling of conscience in its “thousand several tongues.”

Act V, scene iii has been regarded, somewhat slightingly, as a theatrical tour de force. Of course, if one sets it beside the dramatizations of conscience in Hamlet or even Macbeth, it is certainly that. But what is so impressive is the sure dramatic instinct by which Shakespeare makes the limitations of his immature style work for him. The theatricality of Richard's conscience soliloquy becomes a positive strength because it corresponds so exactly to his own limitations. Where the inner self has been so systematically oppressed, there is no possibility of complex introspection. Richard's interior is a kingdom of night, a blind cave of shadows, at best a hall of mirrors, reflecting endlessly the insubstantial shadows of the lost self: a self he vainly tries to capture with the hopelessly inadequate tools of his old word-games. The cunning vice, Iniquity, moralizing two meanings in one word, is lost in the labyrinth of his own puns.

VI

If the conclusion of Richard III has a weakness, it is not in the dramaturgy of Richard's moral collapse but in the dramatist's moralization of his fall, in his refusal to confront the real issues which the play raises—though the refusal is, I suppose, inevitable. The ironies of the end are God's, and in their light the whole plot with its complex of witty peripeties is evidently the masterwork of a Cosmic Ironist. This being so, one finds oneself asking, despite Richmond's complacent pieties, isn't God only a greater and more competent Richard, fulfilling his fantasies of omnipotence, a malign demiurge delighting in the monstrous shadow of his own ugliness and obliterating it when it attempts to walk alone? Richard tries to declare his independence of the Ironist's tragic farce, to assert himself by making the world in his own image, a mirror-play of his own chaotic deformity, a glass to hold his shadow as he passes. His greatest sin lies in his attempt to become equal to God: the disturbing trouble is that, morally speaking, he appears to succeed.

Notes

1. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 44.

2. A. E. Waite, ed., The Works of Thomas Vaughan (New York: Univ. Books, 1968), p. 5.

3. Cf. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 81-91.

4. E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., King Richard the Third, New Penguin Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 37.

5. Honigmann, p. 37.

6. Kott, pp. 13, 27-28.

7. I have argued this point at greater length in an article, “The Matter of Denmark and the Form of Hamlet's Fortunes,” forthcoming in SQ. All citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

8. The point is well made by Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 94.

9. Righter, pp. 86-91. Richard's descent from the Vice is most fully expounded in Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958). Spivack, however, makes a low estimate of Shakespeare's ability to transform the medieval convention. Of Richard's theatrical displays he writes: “Through them we shall look in vain for anything in the temper of his performance that corresponds to a passion for sovereignty, or to any other motive that is morally intelligible” (p. 403; italics mine).

10. Olivier's film of Richard III acknowledged their importance (perhaps naively) by grafting parts of both into Richard's opening soliloquy.

11. Cf. D. W. Winnicott, “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development” in Peter Lomas, ed., The Predicament of the Family (London: International Universities Press, 1967), pp. 26-33; and David Holbrook, “R. D. Laing and the Death Circuit,” Encounter, 31 (Aug. 1968), 35-45. Writing on the childhood bases of ontological security, Winnicott remarks on the mother's essential “role of giving back to the baby the baby's own self” (p. 33): “in individual development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face” (p. 26). The failure of the mother to provide such a mirror results in “a threat of chaos. … a baby so treated will grow up puzzled about mirrors and what the mirror has to offer. If the mother's face is unresponsive, then the mirror is a thing to be looked at but not into” (p. 28). R. D. Laing's studies of schizoid and schizophrenic experience provide poignant illustrations of the inner “chaos” of which Winnicott writes. Certain of Laing's remarks seem especially illuminating with regard to Richard III:

    There are men who feel called upon to generate even themselves out of nothing, since their underlying feeling is that they have not been adequately created or have been created only for destruction.

    The Politics of Experience (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 36-37.

    If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself … alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing himself.

    The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 42-43.

12. S. R. Jayne, ed. and trans., Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1944), II, viii, p. 146. Ficino's argument goes back to the discussion of the relation between likeness and love in the Lysis, the negative side of which is also relevant: “… the good are like and friendly with the good, but … the bad … are not ever even like themselves, but are variable and not to be reckoned upon. And if a thing be unlike and at variance with itself, it will be long, I take it, before it becomes like to or friendly with anything else” (Lysis, 214 c-d, quoted from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton [New York: Pantheon, 1961], p. 157). There is a remarkable resemblance between Plato's argument and Laing's recognition that “a firm sense of one's own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another” (The Divided Self, p. 44). Jayne notes that the Lysis topic was a frequent subject of debate in Renaissance courts (p. 149 n.). Spenser's Hymnes are often close to Ficino, and Love and Beautie must have been circulating in manuscript when Shakespeare was writing Richard III. Beautie, lines 190 ff., deals with Platonic ideas of love and likeness.

13. Holbrook, p. 39. The image of the mirror in Richard III, with which this essay is much concerned, has been briefly discussed by J. P. Cutts in The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare's Early Plays (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 129-34. Some of Professor Cutts's arguments touch on my own.

14. See, for instance, Ficino, Commentary, II, iii, p. 136.

15. The adoption of such a persona seems to be a well-documented schizoid strategy. A case history recorded by Laing makes an interesting comparison: “The sense Brian made of his sudden inexplicable abandonment by his mother was: because I am bad. To be bad was his credo. He lived by it. It was the rock on which he built his life. ‘Since I am bad, there is nothing but to be bad’” (Self and Others [London: Penguin, 1971], p. 94). Richard's diabolic despair, in fact, corresponds very closely to the schizophrenic experience: “The schizophrenic is desperate, is simply without hope. I have never known a schizophrenic who could say he was loved, as a man, by God the Father or by the Mother of God or by another man. He either is God, or the Devil, or in hell, estranged from God” (The Divided Self, p. 38).

16. It is interesting to compare the theatrical personality projected here with the schizophrenic self described by Laing:

    it was on the basis of … exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment. He learnt to cry when he was amused, and to smile when he was sad. He frowned his approval, and applauded his displeasure. “All that you can see is not me,” he says to himself. But only in and through all that we do see can he be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not his real self, he is irreal; wholly symbolical and equivocal; a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a “mythical” man; nothing really.

    The Divided Self, p. 37.

17. “The Loving Brother,” “The Loyal Friend,” “The Witty Lover,” “The Loyal Subject,” “The Good Protector,” “The Reluctant Prince,” “The Bluff Soldier”—to name only some of the most obvious. Cf. Sanders, p. 89.

18. Compare the exchange with Margaret, I.iii.263-75:

    Glou. Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top
    And dallies with the wind and scorns the sun.
    Q. Mar. And turns the sun to shade—alas, alas!

19. Commentary, VI, xiii, pp. 206-7.

20. Commentary, III, ii, p. 149. Compare, for instance, Spenser's An Hymne of Heavenlie Love, ll. 29-35, 110-19; An Hymne of Love, ll. 195-96. For discussion of the relationship between Love and political Concord in Renaissance thought, see John Erskine, “The Virtue of Friendship in The Faerie Queene,” PMLA, 30 (1915), 831-50; and Charles G. Smith, “Spenser's Theory of Friendship: An Elizabethan Commonplace,” SP, 32 (April 1935), 158-69.

21. Commentary, II, ii, p. 134.

22. The mysterious episode of Hastings' encounter with the Pursuivant in III.ii is symbolically suggestive. The Pursuivant, “also named Hastings,” is a kind of mirror figure; and the meeting itself ironically mirrors the occasion of Hastings's previous visit to the tower. The suggestion of unwitting self-division is appropriate; Hastings is putting his own head in the noose. The irony is complicated by the déjà vu, as though God were playing tricks with time.

23. Cf. Laing, Self and Others (p. 51): “the schizophrenic does not take for granted his own person (and other persons) as being an adequately embodied, alive, real, substantial and continuous being, who is at one place at one time and at a different place at another time, remaining the ‘same’ throughout.” Rosalie Colie's witty and subtle examination of certain ontological paradoxes is also suggestive in this context:

    it is true, in grammar at least, that “nobody” can know himself, especially if he has no context within his disrupted and fragmentary environment. Nobody himself does not exist, in an environment existing only to change. Even if a man might recognize himself in a true mirror, he never can in a false one: if he himself is false, even a true mirror will not reflect a true man.

    The psychological effect of mirrors is that they both confirm and question individual identity—confirm by splitting the mirrored viewer into observer and observed, giving him the opportunity to view himself objectively, as other people do; question, by repeating him as if he were simply an object, not “himself,” as he so surely knows himself to be, by repeating himself as if he were not (as his inmost self insists that he is) unique. … The re-created self, the separated and objectified self, may turn out, one fears, to do instead of one's self, may replace the original and originating self. The re-created self is a threat to the self.

    Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 297-98, 355-56.

24. Buckingham's argument on sanctuary (III.i.44 ff.), for instance, precisely echoes the sophistry of Richard's advice to York regarding his oath to King Henry (3H6, I.ii.18-27). He speaks, in effect, with Richard's voice.