SOURCE: “A Case of Unfair Proportions: Philosophy in Literature,” in New Literary History, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1998, pp. 501-20.

[In the following essay, Zamir contends that through the character of Richard Shakespeare explored the philosophy of “ethical skepticism,” the view that there are no convincing arguments for choosing to behave morally.]

The degree of his actual ugliness is still difficult to determine. Various sources tell us that he was short, that one of his arms was smaller than the other, that his legs, too, were of unequal size, and that his shoulders were disproportionate. We are also told that he was not merely crook-backed, but had a “mountain on his back,” and that his face was ugly, that he was a crab-faced impotent who was born feet-first and toothed. The historical soundness of this description has been challenged many times. But whether or not it constitutes an adequate description of the historical Richard III is unimportant for the purpose of an aesthetic exploration of the psychological links between alienation and villainy, and even less so for a philosophical inquiry into a literary presentation of ethical skepticism. What is significant for such an undertaking is close scrutiny of the details with which a literary work configures a context that permits a uniquely powerful presentation of a conceptual claim.¹

Moral experience through literary works has become a focal point of much discussion into the relations between philosophy and literature.² The attractiveness of the idea partly lies in the way in which it can accommodate and justify the belief that greater comprehension of philosophical concepts requires literature. The challenge that faces proponents of this approach is to suggest ways by which to avoid conceiving the connections between moral experience and fiction solely through general or programmatic terms. Most of this paper will be devoted to a detailed investigation into the characterization and motivation of Richard III. My broader theoretical aim is to use these details in order to point to one avenue by which the specifics of the connections between the rhetoric of literary texts and philosophical response patterns can be explored.

Let us call “ethical skepticism” the position according to which there are no compelling reasons for choosing morality. There are other terms that have been used to designate this position (meta-ethical skepticism, amoralism, immoralism, and so on), and there are other kinds of ethical skepticism (verities of relativism). But for our purposes the ethical skeptic is one who answers negatively the “Should I be moral?” question. Ethical skeptics can put in practice such a rejection of morality in two ways: they can simply ignore ethical considerations, or—more palpably—they can challenge morality through choosing immoral conduct. In Shakespeare's terms the second option would amount to willfully choosing villainy, a theme that he explores in Richard III.³

“Exploring a philosophical theme through literary means” can mean various things. One can try to “confirm” or “refute” a position by, for example, showing how an agent who chooses it flourishes or is made to regret his choice.⁴ If he would have chosen such routes, Shakespeare could have “taken sides” in disputes concerning skepticism, a position which gained considerable strength in Renaissance theological and intellectual polemics.⁵ The subtleties of Shakespearean rhetoric, however, cannot be reduced to such simple modes of contact with a conceptual position.

RICHARD'S JUSTIFICATION OF EVIL

When the atrocity of an action is itself considered an advantage, the notion of evil suggests itself strongly. Richard's justification of his actions in the opening soliloquy of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard the Third is unique in that, unlike Edmond, Iago, or Macbeth, for whom villainy at least appears to start off as a form of revenge or as instrumental for future gain, Richard finds merits and pleasure in the villainous action itself and chooses it as such.⁶ How exactly this is marshaled becomes apparent from a scrutiny of his opening soliloquy:

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.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag'd War hath smooth'd his wrinkled front:
And now, in stead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of frightful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
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.
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.
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 …(7)

We observe a tripartite breakdown: lines 1-13 inform us about the peaceful times; lines 14-31, the section of most relevance to this paper, establishes the cause and effect nature of Richard's ugliness and his justification of villainy. Lines 32-40 inform us of the plots Richard has already laid.

Taken literally, however, Richard's justification is peculiar.⁸ It is presented as an argument, the “stages” of which are as follows: (1) these are peaceful times; (b) love is most appropriate for such periods; (c) I am ugly, hence, unfit for love. Therefore, since I cannot be a lover, I will be a villain. This characterization differs from the very similar pseudoargument which “he” gives in 3 Henry VI:

And am I then a man to be belov'd?
O monstrous fault to harbour such a thought!
Then since this earth affords no joy to me
But to command, to check, to o'erbear such
As are of better person than myself,
I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown;
And, whiles I live, t'account this world but hell,
Until my misshap'd trunk that bears this head
Be round impaled with a glorious crown.

(3.2.163-71)

Since “this earth” gives him none of the joys of love, Richard will “dream upon the crown” his villainy being merely a means to that end. We may therefore observe that in Richard III the characterization of his villainy significantly shifts from mere ambition to stress upon a primarily noninstrumental form of villainy chosen for its own sake.⁹ We observe also that the syllogistically styled justification of villainy Richard employs in the opening soliloquy works only if he also assumes that being a lover or a villain is an exhaustive existential alternative. But why should he believe that? What is there in villainy to replace that achieved by love?

UGLINESS

Six times is the first-person plural (“our”) repeated in the first eight lines of the soliloquy. It contrasts sharply with the nine times the first-person singular forms (“I,” “my,” and “mine”) are used in lines 13-30. This, however, provides evidence of a strange usage: unlike the typical employment of the first-person plural, in Richard's case it is not inclusive; our “glorious summer,” “merry meetings,” and “delightful measures,” are not “mine.” Richard's speech conveys a strong sense of alienation not merely by distinguishing between “I” and “them,” but rather by deploying an “I”/ “our” distinction. It is not simply a matter of a group of people who enjoy certain states that Richard cannot share, but that he cannot be a part of his group. He cannot fulfill desires planted in him by his formative context because of his ugliness.¹⁰

In a space of ten lines that follow the first part (ll. 14-23) Richard uses no less than nine different expressions to describe his deformity. Only one of the constructions used by Richard—“rudely stamp'd”—metaphorically refers to his ugliness. Three others designate activities he cannot perform because of it: “not shap'd for sportive tricks,” “nor made to court an amorous looking glass,” and “want love's majesty to strut before a wanton ambling nymph.” The constructions “not shap'd for sportive tricks” [Q's “sharped”], “unfinish'd,” “half made up,” and “lamely” strongly hint at impotency.¹¹ The other five are synonymous with ugliness through negatives or implied negatives: “curtail'd of this fair proportion,” “cheated of feature,” “deform'd,” “unfinish'd,” and “unfashionable.”

In all of these expressions, Richard is in the passive, linguistically positioned as someone for whom ugliness is not merely a state, but rather the consequence of some action. The cause of the unfairness is nature, “dissembling nature.” This suggests that, like Edmond and Iago, Richard's villainy is also vindictive. Indeed, it is “The most replenished sweet work of Nature” which he later causes to be destroyed (4.3.17-19).¹² Whereas Edmond and Iago direct their revenge at a particular person, however, Richard's vengeance seems to be general. It is unindividuated and appears to work through a crude self/world distinction: the outer world has been the cause of his suffering, therefore “it” has to pay.

“Dissembling nature” is a telling construction. It reveals to us something about Richard's conception of beauty: it is a false mask (compare 1.2.268), a cover-up of the true nature of people that needs to be camouflaged. Moreover, the words Richard chooses are nonspecific: “features” (beauty) are dissembling not for this or that person but for all of them. The implication of this conceptualization is that villainy creates a consistency between exteriority and character. Villainy reveals through performance the true, core content of every person, thereby turning villains like Richard into messengers of truth. This challenges the Elizabethan belief in physical appearance as an outward reflection of internal constitution.¹³ Such a belief is true only concerning ugliness. Beauty reflects nothing. It simply lies. Another possible implication is that beauty contributes to forming systems of signification in which representatives—such as Richard's face and body—are rejected precisely because they contain the threatening possibility of truth.

But since he does not develop the point, and never returns to it, such an abstract move—arguing from human nature to conduct—seems merely to function as a superficial excuse. Like many others who want to justify an immorality, Richard, too, appeals to a particular belief concerning human nature, which he then supposedly exemplifies by his conduct. But he is not really interested in making explicit such a general conceptual defense. The implied philosophical is only alluded to and then immediately gives way to a return of the explicitly personal: his preoccupation with his ugliness.

DOGS

The aforementioned descriptions of ugliness, however, do not yet include perhaps the strongest: the “barking dogs.” This construction completes Richard's self-description and paves the way for lines 24-27, which are devoted to his self-hatred. The strength of this particular terminological choice lies in the way it eliminates a conventionalized conception of ugliness. The use of dogs, of extrahuman entities, means that reacting to beauty and ugliness is more than conditioning to a socially constructed opposition. For Richard, to be ugly is not only to be “unfashionable” but not to belong to the human world. Alienation is at its extreme. So is the irony of the celebrative “our” of the first eight lines. He is out of time, out of fashion, spurned as a lover and avoided not only by every person but also by any creature. But the use of dogs—specifically, the barking of dogs—means more than this. It in fact explains in a fascinating way why Richard employs such a repetitious chain of nearly synonymous adjectives to convey his motivation for his choice of villainy.

To theorize about literary repetition is to analyze sufficiency. The use of repetition presupposes that components of meaning are left out if certain information is communicated only once. Such components cannot be part of the meaning of the repeated concept itself, since in that case they would have been sufficiently conveyed merely through using it once. One of the uses of literary repetition is as a tool by which to express the significance of certain information to a specific character. This is what partly seems to be going on in Lear's five “nevers” when he bemoans Cordelia (“Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never.”), although the force of that line is more a result of a degree of grief that reduces Lear almost to speechlessness, to an inarticulate repetition of information using a single word. Lear reaches this breakdown of elocution—identical repetition was considered by Renaissance rhetoricians to be a grave fault¹⁴—after realizing an aspect of his grief; he loses forever that particular kind of joy brought about by having one's child enter one's visual field.

Richard's repetition, on the other hand, appears to mark expressive failure. He seems to fumble about, to grope for a precise formula with which to capture his ugliness and what it means for him. He is not only “rudely stamp'd,” “unfinish'd,” “deform'd,” or any of the other complex adjectives. But although it would be tempting to surmise that these labels together succeed in forming a description of his state that satisfies him, the uniqueness of this specific soliloquy will not allow us to do that. Richard's self-descriptions move from a metaphor to a bark, from a sophisticated figurative expression to a vocal reaction that is not language anymore. The process is a collapse of language. Literal and figurative signifiers fail for Richard, so he has to resort to nonhuman aversion.

But this is still not enough for him. The fact that the barking dogs description in line 23 is given through an aposiopesis implies that he wants to go even further but cannot.¹⁵ The line is incomplete not only because—as Dolores Burton notes—the curtailed sentence imitates the incomplete work of nature (DD 58), but also in order to take the incapacities of description one step further. In a context of self-hatred and alienation, the bounds of copious speech are fixed by the move from the human to the nonhuman and from there to silence. Richard's soliloquy moves to its termination using words that are set on a course of an ever growing amplification of self-aversion; a process which culminates in a total disconnection, a gap that parallels the state and message of the speech's alienated producer. For Richard, language can no longer capture the degree of his deformity. He is that ugly.

SPLITTING

Richard then moves to his double “delight”: “spying” (or “seeing”¹⁶) his own shadow and descanting (commenting or singing about) his own deformity. Aversion is not only a relationship between the world and a self, but between a self and his own body. Richard becomes one with society. He, too, mocks the ugly. This process of conforming to a conventional reaction allows Richard to belong. It is only then, when his body is externalized and mocked, that he experiences delight. Language moves from the passive to the active. Richard becomes an agent through self-hatred.

This split suggests further understanding of his choice of villainy. As long as Richard feels one with his body he does not belong. His ability to relate to himself like a spectator to a perceived object makes at least one part of him harmonious with his social setting. Indeed, Anne blames him for experiencing “delight” when he views his “heinous deeds” and the “pattern of [his] butcheries” (1.2.53-54). Externalizing evil performance allows socially constructed voices to participate; ugliness is thereby overcome, and the loneliness it induces is broken. Such a pattern of belonging is introduced immediately after the extreme degree of alienation implied by the aposiopesis of the previous line. Richard's dissent from the human to the extrahuman ends up in his totally moving out of language. His re-entering language can only be achieved through self-aversion, since regaining structural position within the set of human signifiers requires reaffirming the hierarchies which constitute that system. Later on in his soliloquy at Bosworth Field (given below) he repeats the pattern: self-hatred through negative self-descriptors (ll. 190-202) culminates in an aposiopesis (l. 202) that resolves itself into a justification and reaffirmation of conventional social reaction (ll. 203-4). Whether such reaffirming is actually necessary is not our question. It is sufficient that Richard chooses it, thereby betraying a psychology that connects self-aversion with belonging.

Further support for reading Richard this way is found in an observation—made by several commentators—that he repeatedly refers to himself as an actor playing a role: that in his determination to “prove” a villain, he seems to be acting out the part.¹⁷ Indeed, at a later point in the play, Richard calls attention to his acting skills:

I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl:
The secret mischiefs that I set abroach
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
Clarence, whom I, indeed have cast in darkness,
I do beweep to many simple gulls,
Namely to Derby, Hastings, Buckingham;
And tell them 'tis the Queen and her allies
That stir the King against the Duke my brother.
Now they believe it, and withal whet me
To be reveng'd on Rivers, Dorset, Grey.
But then I sigh, and, with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

(1.3.324-38, my italics)

The last line encapsulates the double-acting in which Richard involves himself. He not only uses acting—seeming to be “a saint”—to achieve the villainies he relates (compare 3.2.182-85, 191-92; 3 Henry VI, 1.2.266), but his actual villainy is a performance too. He plays the devil (compare 3 Henry VI, 5.6.77 when Richard claims that in this world he should “play the dog”). Further on in the play, he likens himself to “the formal Vice, Iniquity” (3.1.82), that is, he relates to himself as a dramatic exemplification of evil. That Richard's villainy is a performance is further suggested by its unmistakably exhibitionistic nature. In many of his asides and soliloquies Richard describes his actions to the audience (1.1.32-40, 2.231-68, 3.324-38; 3.1.82-83) revealing a self-proclaiming villainy that seeks to be perceived. He not only communicates his villainy to the audience; most of his victims also get to know precisely who caused their sufferings. His evil is not, therefore, merely a form of revenge set off by the psychological consequences of exclusion, but a performance that is inherently tied to perception, and ultimately, to self-perception.

Indeed, it is precisely after such a performance—the successful wooing of Lady Anne—and before conducting another one—his return to her, “lamenting” after he has buried her father-in-law—that the need for self-perception arises:

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.

(1.2.265-69)

Self-seeing, calling out to be perceived through the very faculty responsible for his exclusion, is Richard's victory over dissembling nature. This victory is orchestrated on two levels: his intelligence enables him to defeat his ugliness when he wins Anne, and his rhetorical tour de force allows him to be picked out as a fascinating object of sight by the same faculty that can kill him “with a living death” (1.2.156). After twice circumventing the avoidance for which he was naturally doomed by sight (compare 1.2.151), Richard is willing to become an object for his own gaze. His villainy makes him worthy of a look, so he calls the sun—nature's condition of sight (and ultimately of ugliness) introduced in the ambiguity of the first sentence of the play—to “shine out.” The vehicle that enables exclusion is called upon to allow for a complicated belonging.

The process of belonging, while at the same time conducting a socially deviant performance, is carried out on yet another level through the use of a fascinating inconsistency between the rhetorical style of the opening soliloquy and its content. Rhetorical analysis of the opening soliloquy has shown that it is conducted according to the “ethical style.” The ethical style was one of Hermogenes' seven ideas of style, which were extremely influential in the rhetorical teaching of the Renaissance, and which Shakespeare probably employed in some of his sonnets.¹⁸ The ethical style included four components: subtlety, sweetness, modesty, and simplicity, all of which have been argued to make up Richard's opening soliloquy.¹⁹ The purpose of the ethical style was to win the goodwill of the audience. Speaking in the ethical style was calculated to make the audience feel that the speaker was one of themselves; therefore, it was inoffensive (subtlety and modesty) and uncomplicated (simplicity). Richard's argument for villainy through a speech in the ethical style creates a sharp, cynical contrast between style and content that doubles the ironical disjunction between the peace-proclaiming content of the first four lines and the audience's greater knowledge of what Richard is about to do. Moreover, it manifests the same kind of duality of “belonging through non-belonging” that Richard attempts to achieve. Paradoxically, Richard expresses his alienation through a rhetoric of belonging.

The split in Richard is fully revealed in his soliloquy at Bosworth Field, when he wakes up in horror after the ghosts of all his victims appear to him:

Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu!—Soft, I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by;
Richard loves Richard, that is, I and I.
Is there a murderer here? No. yes, I am!
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why,
Lest I revenge? What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain—yet I lie, I am not!
Fool, of thyself speak well! Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain:
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, ‘Guilty, guilty!’
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die, no soul will pity me—
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent, and every one did threat
Tomorrow's vengeance on the head of Richard.

(5.3.178-207)

After the first prophetic exclamations comes his uncharacteristic cry for divine mercy. The cold villain would never have exclaimed: “Have mercy, Jesu!” Only in sleep could such a thought be formulated and voiced. While awake, Richard successfully rationalizes away his conscience: “I am in so far in blood,” he says while contemplating the murder of Elizabeth's brothers, “that sin will pluck on sin. Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.62-65). Elsewhere he produces a Nietzschean analysis of conscience as a means “to keep the strong in awe” (5.3.310-11).

But the move from sleep to wakefulness allows his submerged conscience to resurface and enables Richard to reflect on his villainy—though not through cynicism or the shallow, unreflective kind of cleverness he usually employs, but through the normative categories he had long abandoned. We witness “insight”—a moment in which he gets to read himself through a frame of reference to which he was previously blind. He reacts by immediately personifying (and thereby externalizing) his conscience, and blames it for being a coward. The split is now fully revealed, making possible the schizophrenic dialogue Richard conducts with himself. He sets forth a chain of self-references: he fears himself, wants to fly from himself, wants to have revenge on himself, and hates himself. In all these descriptions the villain is feared and hated by what can only be a self that conforms to the strictures of conventionality, the same one that delighted in descanting on his own deformity in the opening soliloquy.

Richard seems to divide himself between a bundle of conventional value-judgment producing voices—which he calls his “conscience”—and a monolithic character type—the one he was determined to become—which he terms “villain.” He moves in and out of these constructions—between the “I and I”—which make up his psychic ontology. The quickly “won” self-argument concerns what he is and what he feels toward it. The detached third person of “Richard loves Richard,” gives way to the emotional first person: “O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself.” Recognition, the process by which a particular self-description is accepted as true by this plurality of voices, then takes place. We shall later return to this crucial moment of recognition, especially to what Richard does not include in it.

SPITTING

Why is it that just one scene after the opening soliloquy with its elaborate discourse of the alienated and unloved, Richard not only is accepted as a lover, but also refrains from following up this possibility? In what is undoubtedly the strangest scene in the play, he succeeds in wooing Anne after he has killed her father-in-law and her husband. The clever rhetoric Anne uses in the scene (esp. ll. 74-89) makes it interpretatively implausible to regard her simply as silly or shallow. The peculiarity of the scene lies not only in Anne being insufficiently motivated to turn so quickly from the extreme hatred she manifests throughout most of the scene, to partial acceptance of Richard's wooing (one wonders if any motivation could count as sufficient for that), nor in the further implausibility involved in the public setting of the process (during her father-in-law's funeral), but also in the fact that—contrary to his opening soliloquy—Richard is accepted as a lover (at least potentially) and simply ignores the options such acceptance opens up.

For some interpreters who refuse to take Richard's opening soliloquy at face value, this fact merely supports their dismissal of Richard's explicit motivations for his villainy. That would mean, however, that if one also dismisses ambition as a motivational factor,²⁰ Richard's villainy simply turns out to be unmotivated. Such a reading has been defended by regarding Richard as conforming to the mid-sixteenth-century dramaturgic convention of the Vice, a personification of diabolical evil that only seems to be motivated by human or rational reasons. But since Richard's villainy can be explained without dehumanizing him, there is no reason to fall back on a reading that simply demonizes Richard, thereby making him psychologically uninteresting.²¹

The insights contained in the opening soliloquy concerning Richard's psychological constitution make his “avoidance of love” only superficially illogical. As we have seen, Richard's method of belonging is not to be accepted as what and who he is (a mechanism which ideally culminates in love), but to participate in his own rejection. This, and not his ugliness or his implied impotency, is the deeper reason he “cannot prove a lover.” This point is revealed by the close proximity of the argument in the opening soliloquy to its too obvious “refutation” in this scene. This proximity yields a further characterization of Richard by revealing the extent of his alienation—that it has already become irremediable by any worldly fact.

If Richard can be explained through his previous characterization, Anne cannot. Her acceptance of Richard's wooing is outrageously unmotivated, and the very blatancy of this fact makes it implausible to dismiss it simply as an aesthetic fault in the play. Nor could one see the scene as merely exemplifying Richard's rhetorical abilities or exhibiting what Moulton calls Richard's “fascinating power” over his victims (DA 97-98). No degree of rhetorical force or fascination could plausibly explain Anne's acceptance of Richard under the circumstances.

Insight into this question is gained when one drops the attempt to remotivate Anne. Respecting her irrationality is achieved by outlining the point made by portraying her acceptance of Richard as an irrational process. That the scene involves wooing which succeeds contrary to rational reasons is, in fact, consistent with Richard's seemingly irrational persistence in his villainy, given the possibility of love. For both of them, logic breaks down. Richard holds to a conclusion of a refuted argument and Anne accepts a wooer contrary to her better judgment. Both of them are explainable if we regard their actions as conveying a deep sense of this scene, that belonging overrides rationality. The need to belong is aroused by the context of ultimate separation, a funeral—a process with which Richard interferes and which he eventually spares Anne the need to complete. But while this explanation might clarify why accepting Richard must in fact be insufficiently motivated, it does not yet tell us precisely how Richard succeeds in promising Anne belonging.

She spits at him in the center of the scene. With her spit “hanging” from his face (ll. 151), he woos and wins her. The spitting is, in fact, the turning point of their dialogue, since it is followed by her gradual acceptance of him (it is also their first physical contact). Their discourse turns from legalistic argumentation and verbal fencing to actions. This process begins with her spitting, which is followed by her inability to stab him, her inability to ask him to kill himself, her acceptance of his ring, and, finally, her granting him a favor by leaving. What allows Richard to move confidently from words to self-endangering praxis is the discovery of her weak spot in the lines that lead up to the spitting:

Rich. It is a quarrel most unnatural,
To be reveng'd on him that loveth thee.
Anne. It is a quarrel just and reasonable,
To be reveng'd on him that kill'd my husband.
Rich. He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband,
Did it to help thee to a better husband.
Anne. His better doth not breathe upon the earth.
Rich. He lives that loves thee better than he could.
Anne. Name him.
Rich. Plantagenet.
Anne. Why that was he.
Rich. The self same name, but one of better nature.
Anne. Where is he?
Rich. Here.
                                                                                                    She spits at him

(1.2.138-48)

Richard discovers in these lines that Anne is accepting his identification of a “better husband” (l. 143) with someone who loves her more. It is the discovery of her self-centered conception of love—revealed by her aroused curiosity when she wants her new lover to be named—that enables him to win her. Asking for the name, she in practice accepts his justification of Edward's murder. All that is left for Richard is to convince her—through what she will retrospectively refer to as “his honey words” (4.1.79)—that such a lover exists.²² Asking her to stab him, inverting roles of penetration that he only superficially does not control, is a form of bodily union that grotesquely entails the death of the acceptor at the very moment of somatic reception. Like sexual desire, belonging turns into a paradoxical drive, which is eliminated at the moment in which it is gratified. This is too much for Anne. She wants him to live.

Spitting, like the barking of dogs, is communication that is a withdrawal from the realm of language. It is aversion not supported anymore by argumentation or reasoning (note that in line 140 above, Anne still wants her quarrel to be “just and reasonable”). From the moment Anne reaches that stage, Richard can quickly manipulate her to accept him. Anne moves from cursing and dehumanizing Richard—comparing him either to animals or to supernatural entities—to rehumanizing him through arguing with him, and, from that, to an insupportable aversion, which collapses into acceptance. This is an elaboration on the same pattern of response to Richard we have already noted in the opening soliloquy, when Richard moved from curse-like self-descriptors, to extrahuman aversion, and from that to his own method of belonging.

BARKING

The man determined to prove a villain has succeeded. His soliloquy after his nightmare at Bosworth Field makes that clear. The thousand tongues of his conscience all condemn him for a villain, and now he is in a position to assess his success. It is not clear what his verdict is. He hates himself and has no pity for himself. He knows that no one loves him or would pity his death. He acknowledges his crimes in all their gravity and does not attempt to justify them. But do such words manifest regret? Was this not precisely what he set out to do? Was he looking for love or self-love when he made villainy a vocation? Was not this exclusion from the sphere of love already an established assumption on which he built his argument for choosing villainy—an assumption he not only considered true, but also made true in his rejection of Anne?

The re-entrance of conventional belonging—the need to be loved—so violently silenced in the opening soliloquy, overlaps the climax of belonging through self-hatred. At this point Richard fears and wants to flee from himself. He wants to have revenge on himself. He says that no creature loves him (note the return to an alienation that includes more than humans). He hates himself. He has no pity for himself. We already know that through this “descant” on his moral deformity he belongs, so we may conclude that achieving self-hatred parallels his successful attempt to prove himself a villain. But embedded in the same moment of the realization of his sad success is its cost and what he had to give up. Gone is the delight he used to experience through self-hatred. Plain, conventional, banal love is what he craves now.

Here we should expect regret. Hastings acknowledges his mistake in such a moment of recognition. So do Clarence and Buckingham, each explicitly regretting his previous actions. In Richard's speech, however, there is no remorse or regret, only pain and fear. What may be concluded from the textual evidence is that, for him at this moment, his life is a miserable one. This by no means implies that he regards his choices as mistakes. This is easy to overlook because Richard mentions many seemingly close notions, such as guilt and sin, and he makes a case of his unhappiness. Nevertheless, there is no regret. Regret is missing not only from his soliloquy, but also from his actions following it. Not only does he not change at the last moment like Edmond, he does not even contemplate such a change.²³

The frustrating of the audience's natural expectations for regret is even more disturbing because another structural expectation of dramaturgy—that Richard and his accomplices be punished—is fully met by Shakespeare. Nemesis works in calculated and subtle ways in this play; each crime meets with its appropriate punishment.²⁴ But retribution is not enough, and, in Richard's case, it is not accompanied by regret. This absence of regret uniquely allows the work to position the reader between the ethical condemnation elicited by the unfolding of a certain chain of fictional events and the empathy we are made to feel toward a villain—an empathy achieved through the deployment of an ethical skeptic who chooses villainy not out of some general, philosophical, consideration, but out of the painfully personal.

Indeed, one of the ways through which choosing morality has been traditionally defended is by attempting to ground moral conduct on the avoidance of pain. Afterlife punishment or the Socratic thesis that immoral conduct causes suffering to the agent are examples of such justifications. If the avoidance of suffering supports a choice of conduct, however, then there is no way to argue against someone for whom such avoidance requires immoral performance. Richard turns villainy into a way through which a basic human need can be met and satisfied. It is certainly not the only way open to him, but—as his rejection of Anne makes clear—his constitution blinds him to any alternatives (note that after she yields to him, he never contemplates the possibility of actually loving her). Paradoxically, the same need to belong, responsible at least partly for normative conformity, causes Richard to choose immorality.

Ethical skepticism is not merely a stage in intellectual discussion but an experience in which a strong need to maintain and reassert one's moral beliefs and sentiments clashes with a conceptual impasse. This text positions us precisely at this emotive and intellectual point. The literary tools of character and plot bring forward many of the same sentiments and principles that are used in interpreting, judging, and relating to nonfictional events. Only then, when these elements are drawn out, are we challenged by the skepticism that underlies this work. That Richard chooses villainy means he would, on one level, agree with any ethical condemnation of him that an audience might entertain, but, on another, challenge the entire framework from which that judgment was initially produced. This work leaves the reader suspended at this point of disorienting nonjudgment.

We can employ various adjectives and value judgments merely to describe Richard; that is, we can simply follow him in his Bosworth Field soliloquy when he describes his actions and calls himself a villain. But the fascinating power of this work is not only that its underlying skepticism will allow us to go no further, but that it makes us repeat the movement of his first soliloquy. Recall that Richard described his ugliness directly and through elimination of its opposite; he described three different inabilities he experienced because of it, and only then mentioned barking. These are the stages which readers also undergo: they can describe Richard's villainy; they, too, experience inability, an inability to ground their reaction, being eventually reduced to nonjustifiable aversion. We attempt to describe ethical ugliness and end up barking.

While barking is reached from “within,” by a reading experience that identifies with the motivations supplied by the fictional system, a reader may, of course, step “outside” the grip of this work and try to reconstruct a philosophical condemnation of Richard. Bernard Williams has convincingly argued that a philosophical justification of morality of whatever kind cannot constitute a definite answer to the ethical skeptic, since the latter can always dismiss any rational, compelling reason to choose morality through preferring immorality over rationality.²⁵ As we have seen, this route is precisely the one built into Richard's (and Anne's) characterization. The constitutional presuppositions of Richard are such that, for him, psychological needs override philosophical claims. This disposition is itself unassailable by philosophical argumentation precisely because such a preference limits the power and scope of such a tool. Richard is unphilosophical through and through. He never attempts to formulate a philosophical defense of his actions, though, as we have seen, there are implied routes which he can follow. He does not relate to himself through generalizations concerning conduct or human nature. He holds to a conclusion of a refuted argument. Why should a philosophical defense of morality matter to him? In fact, Richard never doubts that his actions are wrong, and it is absurd to suppose that what he requires for the mending of his ways is some general explanation of why he should choose to be ethical. If, as Williams claims, philosophy is reduced to silence when faced with an immoral skeptic, barking is experienced not only through identification with the “internal” assumptions of the work, but also “externally” to it.

Barking, like spitting, is a retreat from language and the rational discourse it permits—a discourse that typically seeks to ground ethical condemnation on something else. When we discover that Richard's villainy fulfills a basic human need for him, we follow Anne's reaction to him. The discovery of Anne's particular conception of love paved the way to both her spitting at him and her acceptance of him. Similarly, we, too, are reduced to simultaneous acceptance, barking, and spitting through a rehumanizing psychology this play supplies. Explanation collapses into justification, and the attempt to rigidly separate these categories fails for us, as it failed for Anne when she allowed Richard to explain his actions. A consistency appears between intertextual elements and actual response patterns. Affective relationships within the fictional domain predict and reflect the positioning of the reader, which the textual rhetoric achieves.

PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

The metaphor of positioning makes it possible to explain the special way in which this piece of literature enables us to relate to conceptual content. Ethical skepticism is faced only after certain aspects that constitute our real-life relations to others—moral sentiments which we use for the purpose of ethical judgments, character interpretation, empathy—have been drawn out. This allows an involvement with a philosophical position that transcends merely comprehending truth claims and argumentation. Philosophy becomes an experience, one that includes such cognitive elements but is not exhausted by them. When philosophy is viewed this way, the textual tools that can make such an experience possible become pertinent. The often vague intuition that literature is relevant to philosophy is thereby replaced by the informative claim that a certain conception of philosophy underlies such intuition, a conception that views philosophy as including more than what more limited versions of its nature are willing to admit.

Our reading of Richard III shows, I think, that we can take a step further the belief that philosophy is an experience that includes both cognitive and emotive elements that can be forcefully tapped by literary texts. The philosophical experience created by the rhetoric of fiction need not be merely a conclusion of philosophical and literary theorizing, but a notion that itself can be investigated. Certain literary works do not simply create an experience in the reader, but recreate it after it has already been intratextually articulated. We thereby gain insight into our experience, allow literature to read us, not simply by inspecting our own response patterns but through the examination of the detailed description of that experience in the text.²⁶

An inability to justify the choice of morality: such is the conceptual heart of ethical skepticism. A repeated use of synonymous adjectives to describe what is feared and hated, a feeling of impotence that finally resolves itself into unjustifiable condemnation: such is its experience. When philosophy is regarded as both conceptual information and experience, its full comprehension requires the use of tools such as literature that are able to construct such cognitive experiences.²⁷

Notes

1. The sources of this description of Richard are Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard the Third, and Shakespeare's descriptions of him in 3 Henry VI. For a critique of the historical inadequacy of this description, see Emyr Wyn Jones, “Richard III's Disfigurement: A Medical Postscript,” Folklore, 91 (1980), 211-27.

2. See Jesse Kalin, “Philosophy Needs Literature: John Barth and Moral Nihilism,” Philosophy and Literature, 1 (1976), 170-82; Ronald Duska, “Philosophy, Literature and Views of the Good Life,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 54 (1980), 181-88; Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990); and Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and Culture (Oxford, 1992).

3. In his typology of immoralities, Ronald D. Milo has further distinguished the second type of ethical skepticism (what he terms “wickedness”) into “preferential wickedness” (the villain acknowledges his actions as wrong, but performs them because he values some other end over morality) and “perverse wickedness” (the agent believes his actions are actually good). Since in both variants the agent does not choose morality, this further distinction does not affect the way in which both exemplify ethical skepticism (Ronald Milo, Immorality [Princeton, 1984]).

4. See, for example, Kalin's treatment of nihilism in Barth (Kalin, “Philosophy Needs Literature,” pp. 170-82).

5. For one historical account that traces the growing popularity of skeptical thinking from Erasmus through Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola to Montaigne, see Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford, 1992), pp. 239-60. But apart from the revival of classical skepticism during Shakespeare's times (which might well be dismissed as coincidental with, but not related to, his work), a strong case for the idea that Shakespeare's plays are actually preoccupied with questions concerning skepticism has already been made by Stanley Cavell's well-known Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1987).

6. Moulton and Rossiter both ground the ascription of evil to Richard on this, although the fact that Richard's villainy is noninstrumental is not the only reason for regarding him as evil (Richard G. Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist [1885; New York, 1966], p. 93, hereafter cited in text as DA; A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures [London, 1961], p. 13). Further support for the use of the extreme notion are the many direct and indirect Satanic allusions to him. For a survey of these see R. Chris Hassel, Jr., “Last Words and Last Things: St. John, Apocalypse, and Eschatology in Richard III,” Shakespeare Studies, 18 (1986), 25-40, and Gillian M. Day, “‘Determine'd to Prove a Villain’: Theatricality in Richard III,” Critical Survey, 3 (1991), 149-56.

7. All references and quotations from Richard III and 3 Henry VI are taken from the Arden editions except this quotation, for which—for a reason I shall give later—I preferred The Riverside Shakespeare.

8. Moulton claimed that Richard's villainy is insufficiently motivated (Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, p. 93). Bernard Spivack not only accepted this view, but added that “every sensitive reader of the play” will find it so (Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil [New York, 1958], p. 36). This paper will oppose such a conclusion.

9. Moulton has argued against regarding Richard as motivated by ambition, because Richard never dwells “upon the prize in view” (Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, p. 92). This conclusion goes too far, since even if Richard's words do not express ambition, his actions certainly do. A fair assessment would be that while ambition does not totally disappear, it is played down in order to stress other motivational components. For the development in Richard's characterization between 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Richard III, see E. Pearlman, “The Invention of Richard of Gloucester,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 410-29.

10. Moulton, Robert Ornstein, and Antony Hammond all play down the significance of Richard's deformity and argue for the implausibility of regarding it as an exhaustive explanation of his motivations (Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, p. 93; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage [Cambridge, Mass., 1972], p. 67; and Antony Hammond, introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard III [New York, 1981], p. 105). However, if the following analysis is correct, the text supplies enough detail concerning Richard's extreme relationship with his body in order to explain his actions sufficiently.

11. Burton and Jones argue for this point (Dolores M. Burton, “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 [1981], 55-84, hereafter cited in text as DD; Jones, “Richard III's Disfigurement,” pp. 211-27, see esp. pp. 223-24). Impotency is already hinted at in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.81-83.

12. The maternal associations of “nature” for Elizabethan audiences suggest that vengeance is only superficially directed at nature and is in fact aimed at nature as mother. This route has been followed in detail by many commentators who trace the relations between Richard and his mother. See the opening pages of Adelman for argument and many references to such attempts (Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest [New York, 1992]).

13. “Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind; and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other” (Francis Bacon, “Of Deformity,” in The Essays of Francis Bacon, ed. Mary A. Scott [New York, 1908], pp. 200-3).

14. “Worse than tautologia is omoiologia [identical repetition], which, as Quintilian says, has no variety to relieve the tedium and is all of one monotonous colour. Who has got ears patient enough to put up even for a short time with a speech totally monotonous?” (Erasmus, De Copia, tr. B. I. Knott, Book I, Ch. 8, lines 10-14, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, 24:302). For two other sixteenth-century texts that regard repetition as a rhetorical fault, see George Gascoigne, Certayne Notes & Instructions Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English (1575; London, 1868), p. 36, and Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550; Gainesville, Fla., 1961), p. 33.

15. I am following Burton in seeing an aposiopesis in line 23 (Burton, “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III”). Such a reading is consistent with the Riverside edition as well as many other editions that hyphenate line 23, thereby indicating an aposiopesis to the actor. The point is controversial, however. The Arden editors have hyphenated line 21 as well as line 23, thereby turning lines 22 and 23 simply into a parenthesized remark. My general point concerning the moving out of language, however, is sufficiently established by the barking dogs construction and does not depend on the existence of an aposiopesis (although it does support the idea that the trope is actually being employed).

16. The variations between F and Q are both consistent with my reading.

17. For detailed support of this claim, see Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 16-19; Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1978); Hammond, introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard III, pp. 112-14; and Gareth Lloyd Evans, The Upstart Crow: An Introduction to Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1982), pp. 36-37.

18. On the centrality of Hermogenes to Renaissance rhetoric, see Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton, 1970), and esp. pp. 22-26. … Patterson argues for the incorporation of the ideas of Beauty and Verity in Shakespeare's sonnets (pp. 136-41).

19. Burton traces these elements one by one in the speech, though strangely she says nothing concerning the irony this involves (Burton, “Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III”).

20. See n. 9 above.

21. Another difficulty I have with the Vice reading—used by Hammond who follows Spivack's major study on this point—is that inadequate motivation does not necessarily entail the choice of villainy to be irrational. It also could be itself an insight concerning the nature of evil: that, as the cases of Edmond and lago show, evil involves a disproportionate response to a cause (Hammond, introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard III; Spivak, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil).

22. He will later (4.4.294-324) appeal to such a notion of love in Elizabeth too—asking her to replace her love to her murdered children with love to future grandchildren—but this time he will fail (one wonders whether this is merely a difference in the characterization of Anne and Elizabeth, or a suggestion concerning a difference between the love of a spouse and the love of a child).

23. Heilman, too, sees no regret in Richard's soliloquy, but regards this fact as indicative of the immaturity of the play. He seems to base this conclusion on the assumption that moral feeling and perspective are required for deep self-knowledge. He does not argue the point, so it appears that, at base, he simply cannot envision an evil that remains untouched by moral scruples (Robert B. Heilman, “Satiety and Conscience: Aspects of Richard III, The Antioch Review, 24 [1964], 57-73).

24. See Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, pp. 107-24; and Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 2-3.

25. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), ch. 2.

26. Systematic investigation into reading experience no doubt raises many problems that need to be dealt with in the framework of a complete theory of interpretation and are, therefore, out of the scope of this paper. However, while the idea that response patterns parallel intratextual elements is not, to my knowledge, used by existing reader-response theories, it is certainly continuous with many of them. Many of the problems that this idea would no doubt raise for several readers (for example, control of subjectivism) can be answered through routes that are already established by such theories.

27. I would like to thank Marcelo Dascal, Elizabeth Freund, Shai Frogel, Miri Rozmarin, and Shirley Sharon-Zisser for insightful comments and criticism of earlier versions of this paper.