SOURCE: “Richard III,” in Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments, University of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 67-100.

[In the following essay, Hunter reviews the plot and characters of Richard III, and also discusses Shakespeare's adaptation of his sources.]

We regard the hellish fall of Dr. Faustus and wonder at the forces that explain it, particularly at the mysteries of grace and free will, of election and reprobation. The hellish fall of Richard the Third directs our minds toward the same unlawful things, but Shakespeare's first great tragic protagonist is the protagonist of something more (or other) than tragedy. The Richard III plays (I shall be considering Henry VI, Part Three as well as Richard III) are doubly generic—tragic history within comic history—and the tragic destruction of Richard is simultaneously the comedy of England's salvation. Evil is done but good comes of it. Divine providence is necessarily among Shakespeare's subjects. The mysteries of grace and free will, of election and reprobation are contained within the mysteries of providence and predestination. The result is a work of art more complex than Marlowe's.

Not that the explanation for the increase in complexity is to be found wholly or even largely in the theological concepts evoked. Shakespeare is making art out of history and Northrop Frye is right when he maintains that “the poet … can deal with history only to the extent that history supplies him with, or affords a pretext for, the comic, tragic, romantic or ironic myths that he actually uses.”¹ Nonetheless, once the artist declares himself a writer of history he can achieve “the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure” only by accommodating his mythic urges to those facts which are too well known to be altered and by producing characters who are moved by impulses human enough to be reconcilable with the historical nature of the events which form the mythic pattern. Thus in the Henry IV plays Shakespeare must reconcile his mythic Hal—the legendary prodigal prince—with the Machiavellian power struggle which makes up the history he is dramatizing. The result of the effort is a Machiavellian prodigal, a character more complex and significant than the Henry of Monmouth produced by either popular legend or official history, and to create this figure Shakespeare invents one of his greatest mythic actions—the story of Falstaff and Prince Hal.

The accommodation of the legendary Richard III, the murderous Machiavel, to the facts of history had largely been done before Shakespeare took on the job. Indeed the legendary figure had been to some degree created by the historians and declared a fact by royal authority in order to validate what has since been called the Tudor myth. That pious version of the past held that the coronation of Henry VII (i.e., the arrival of the Tudor dynasty out of genealogical left field) was the happy ending of God's providential plan for sinful, suffering England, a plan that necessarily included the agonies inflicted upon the English by the villainy of the supplanted king. I do not believe that the propagation of this quaint notion was Shakespeare's overriding purpose in the Histories. The providential view is, however, among the materials Shakespeare had to deal with in making these plays and he did not choose to deal with it by eliminating it. On the contrary he used it as an essential ingredient for transforming what the historians presented him with—a melodrama about a melodramatic villain—into a tragedy with a tragic protagonist.

Authorized historical legend presented Shakespeare with a villainous instrument of God's beneficent providence. Shakespeare proceeded to discover the tragic meaning of such a figure by creating him through action. But in order to do so, it was necessary for Shakespeare to create a complicated work of art—complicated primarily in its sense of cause. The actions of the play must take place within a dramatic version of what we may call the world of second causes. What happens in that imagined world must be clearly the result of acceptable artistic imitations of those emotional and political forces with which, as creatures who inhabit the real world of second causes, we are altogether too familiar. But because the world in which the action of the play unfolds is proclaimed to be providentially ordered, the play must also make us aware that those very psychological and political forces are themselves caused and that their first cause is the nature and will of the God who has created and now governs that world—or Shakespeare's imitation of it. And what is true of action must be true of character also. Richard III is a vividly imagined expressionistic imitation of a man. Shakespeare has selected, emphasized, and repressed the various elements of human nature to create a brilliant artifact. But he has also imagined for this creation a creator other than the playwright himself. Richard the Third is presented as a manifestation of the first cause of the world he inhabits. Both action and character in the earlier histories are evidence of the nature of the God who governs the world of these plays, and the nature of the God they bear witness to is an important source of tragic terror for the audience at Richard's tragedy. By looking first at some aspects of the action of the plays and then at the character of the protagonist, I would like to try to discover what these tragical histories suggest about the nature of the God who creates and destroys Richard.

Not that divine nature is constantly being forced upon our attention in the Histories. God's existence is easy to forget, so completely does the action of these plays appear at times to be entirely the outcome of the characters' lust for power. Before the emergence of Richard, Warwick the King-maker is the most important human determiner of the design of these plays, the human God of the political world of Henry VI, Part III. Indeed, he is described more than once in terms that make him appear to be a human embodiment of Fortune, a man who, like Marlowe's Mortimer, “makes Fortune's wheel turn as he please,” or seems to. Queen Margaret calls him the “Proud setter up, and puller downe of Kings” (3H6.3.3.157), and on the occasion of his final fall Warwick finds it necessary to remind Edward IV that he owes his royalty to the talents of the King-maker: “Confesse who set thee up, and pluckt thee downe” (3H6.5.1.26).

With these images of royal rise and fall, Warwick is being associated with the goddess Fortuna, and by the association Shakespeare is saying something about the nature of Fortune as well as of Warwick. From one point of view, the force which moves these characters to catastrophe and success is blind chance, an unseeing goddess mindlessly turning a meaningless wheel. Looked at from another perspective, however, Fortune appears to own the features of Warwick, and the motivating force of these plays is the human drive for power. The tragic rises and falls result from the Machiavellian skills which the various characters bring to the political struggle the plays dramatize. This way of seeing explains the action by presenting it as a series of cause and effect relationships and thus satisfies our need to find a structure in the chaos of our lives. It does not, however, quite satisfy our need to find a meaning. The political perspective tells us that event is consequence, but we know that the coinciding of consequence and justice is rare and usually accidental. We want what happens in drama to be what, morally and ethically, should happen and Shakespeare presumably shares this desire. At any rate, he certainly plays with it, using it for the purposes of creating his tragic effect. He allows us to perceive that a design formed by the assertion of human will coexists in tragedy with the mindless revolutions of Fortune's wheel. But coexisting with both these patterns and transcending them both is a pattern determined by the exercise of the omniscient and omnipotent will of God. The plays suggest that chance and consequence have first and final causes and that they are appearances which conceal the reality of divine providential justice. The dramatic action is thus made meaningful and we are made happy, our need for meaning satisfied. But Shakespeare's tragedies are never content simply to achieve our happiness. The art then goes on to show us that the meaning which has pleased us is, in fact, incomprehensible and terrifying. If we choose to contemplate the vision of divine providence that these early histories present us with, we find that there is little in it for our comfort. What we confront is a mystery and when we attempt to solve that mystery by embodying in a god the logical conclusions toward which the clues in the art direct us, we find our reason bringing forth monsters. Thus we can discover if we wish to that our need for meaning leads us to terror and a knowledge of our ignorance. We learn from tragedy what we have been told by theology: the coveting of knowledge is a kind of madness.

We are mightily assisted in our first attempts at understanding by the fact that the men and women around Richard are also trying to discover a transcendent meaning for their more or less horrible lives. As a result, the various characters present us with a series of versions of God and of a divine providence whose existence will explain away the meaningless injustice that is inherent in accident or mere consequence. This is true even of Warwick. As a preeminently political man, he is usually content with political meaning, but he is also conscious of divine power—though far more conscious of his own—and can appeal to it in moments of unusual stress:

Why stand we like soft-hearted women heere,
Wayling our losses, whiles the Foe doth Rage,
And looke upon, as if the Tragedie
Were plaid in jest, by counterfetting Actors.
Heere on my knee, I vow to God above,
Ile never pawse againe, never stand still,
Till either death hath clos'd these eyes of mine,
Or Fortune given me measure of Revenge.

(3H6.2.3.25-32)

The effect of this bombast is more than ordinarily complex for a play so early in the canon. Warwick's theatrical metaphor reminds us that he is wrong—the tragedy is played in jest by counterfeiting actors. But the action and speech that follow the metaphor remind us that he is doubly wrong. Prayers in the theater are usually addressed to the second balcony. By falling to his knees and calling God to witness, Warwick suggests that there is a divine spectator within the play's world for whom the imitated reality takes place in the theater of God's judgments. For the God of the play the action may be as much as drama as it is for us, the “children of paradise,” the human audience in the theater. Edward extends that sense by joining Warwick and further defining the power to which both appeal:

Oh Warwicke, I do bend my knee with thine,
And in this vow do chaine my soule to thine:
And ere my knee rise from the Earths cold face,
I throw my hands, mine eyes, my heart to thee,
Thou setter up, and plucker downe of Kings:
Beseeching thee (if with thy will it stands)
That to my Foes this body must be prey,
Yet that thy brazen gates of heaven may ope,
And give sweet passage to my sinfull soule.

(3H6.2.3.33-41)

Warwick vows; Edward also prays, and that characterizes both men. But in praying Edward modifies Warwick's vow. For Warwick, God is a spectator at the theater of His judgments; for Edward, He is the all-powerful actor in it. Warwick looks to Fortune for revenge. Edward looks beyond, defining Fortune's true nature. As we have seen, the phrase “Thou setter up, and plucker downe of Kings” could serve nicely to describe Fortuna and her wheel. It does serve to describe Warwick the King-maker, but in using it Edward is talking about neither Fortune nor Warwick. He is describing divine will, the ultimate reality which contains the meaning both of blind chance and of human will.

The pattern of royal rise and fall, which can be ascribed to the random working of blind Fortune, can also be seen as the result of such human power drives and political skills as are embodied in Warwick. But just as the appearance of Fortune is rejected by the more pious for the reality of divine will, so is the appearance of human freedom and control, and appropriately enough it is the pious Henry who defines the true relationship with precision:

But Warwicke, after God, thou set'st me free
And chiefely therefore, I thanke God, and thee,
He was the Author, thou the Instrument.

(3H6.4.6.16-18)

To be sure, the clarity of Henry's sense of the true nature of causes does not prevent him from immediately going on with an apostrophe to Fortune and an announcement of his political intentions. For the actors in the theater of God's judgments, chance and will are realities, and though they may not be the ultimate reality, the patterns they form have a perceptible existence and coexist with the overriding design of divine providence. One way of looking at the drama in which Shakespeare involves us is to see it as taking place in the theater of God's judgments and Henry is here defining God's true relationship to that theater. God is more than a spectator and participant. He is the author and the characters are his characters—his instruments. His providential plot will conclude with apocalypse—joy for some, horror for others. Along the way, providential comedies and providential tragedies occur. As a human imitator of divine creation Shakespeare devises imitations of both kinds of action in the course of his career. The late Romances are supreme examples of providential comedy but Richard III is a providential tragedy—that is, a tragic action set within a providential frame, and the apparent contradiction between the agony and villainy of the protagonist and the proclaimed beneficence of the whole action inevitably raises within a Christian audience questions, doubts, and fears which Shakespeare is less interested in answering or allaying than in turning to artistic account.

Such questions arise necessarily from the material which Shakespeare has chosen to dramatize in Henry the Sixth, Part Three and Richard the Third. The Tudor myth requires that Richard be the villain protagonist of a providential action. Shakespeare accepts the myth as a “given” and pays lip service to it, but the only important enthusiast for the myth in the plays is Richmond himself—and Shakespeare has made the first of the Tudors a dramatic nonentity, a vacuum in shining armor. Richmond's repeated pieties (I count eight variations of “God and our good cause fight upon our side” in the last one hundred and sixty lines of Richard III) give an intellectual existence to the purely beneficent Tudor myth version of providence and create for us a God in whom it would be pleasant to believe. Like Edward's, Richmond's God is a participant in the action of the play, but far more than Edward's, he is a benevolent participant. He is ultimately responsible for the good that happens and that includes, of course, the deserved punishment of the wicked, especially of Richard himself. Richmond's God, the author of good and the enemy of evil, is the last version of divine nature we meet with in the first tetralogy of history plays and it is possible, if one has a talent for optimism, to leave the theater in undisturbed possession of something rather like the semi-Pelagianism which the medieval miracle plays promote, and which Dr. Faustus also permits the unreflecting Christians in its audience to retain. But like Marlowe, Shakespeare creates other possible Gods for his tragedy. Two such divinities are imagined by characters within the plays as possible first causes for the tragic action. Because the God-devising (or perceiving) characters in question—Queen Elizabeth and Queen Margaret—are far more vivid than Richmond and because the events that inspire their speeches are tragic rather than triumphant, their visions have an intensity and a conceptual validity for the plays that Richmond's lacks.

The theological question that Elizabeth and Margaret are forced by the horror of their lives to confront is basic: is God responsible for the evil which results in human suffering? For Elizabeth the answer is, “Yes, in a sense.” For Margaret, “Yes, hallelujah!” The event which prompts their varying responses is Richard's murder of Elizabeth's sons, the two princes, in the Tower. The scene which explores the significance of this horror has a choral quality which is, appropriately, as much ecclesiastical as dramatic, turning it into a kind of mass for the dead with the Kyrie eleison of Elizabeth set against Margaret's Dies irae. The litany gets to its point when Elizabeth questions God's concern for the innocent:

Qu. Wilt thou, O God, flye from such gentle Lambs,
And throw them in the intrailes of the Wolfe?
When didst thou sleepe, when such a deed was done?

(RIII.4.4.22-24)

For the benevolent good shepherd of Richmond's version of divine power, Elizabeth is tempted to substitute a bad shepherd who abandons his flock when it is in danger. She begins, indeed, to go further and to see him throwing the innocent to the wolf. But then she turns back and modifies her accusation to one of ignorant uncaring, of sleep. The God she imagines is one who is responsible for evil only in the sense that he permits its existence and fails to prevent its effect. This, with the accusation of indifference removed, is close to the God of the theologians, like Hooker, who hold that God must permit evil in order to preserve human freedom: “all men of knowledge grant, that God is himself no author of sin. … And yet we must of necessity grant that there could be no evil committed, if his will did appoint or determine that none should be.”² In terms of his control over the theater of his judgments, this God is more than Warwick's spectator, more than Richmond's benevolent participant, but less than Henry's “author.” He is rather like, to punish the metaphor, a commedia dell'arte scenarist who leaves his characters free to improvise dialogue and invent business (especially wicked business) but who has determined both the outline of the plot and its conclusion.

Elizabeth's God is not Margaret's. Henry the Sixth's queen has done and suffered evil for so long that her sense of it is bound to make Elizabeth's appear naive by contrast. Elizabeth asks when God has slept through a deed as evil as the murder of her children. Margaret tells us: “When holy Harry dyed, and my sweet Sonne” (RIII.4.4.25). In Margaret's world, the slaughter of innocents is banal, and her incantations prove it:

I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him:
I had a Husband, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou had'st an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou had'st a Richard, till a Richard kill'd him.

(RIII.4.4.39-42)

The duchess of York is also on stage and her memory is as long and her experience as rich as Margaret's. She reminds the queen and us that Margaret's role in the horrors has been far from passive:

I had a Richard too, and thou did'st kill him;
I had a Rutland too, thou help'st(3) to kill him.

(RIII.4.4.43-44)

With the mention of Rutland, that pattern of the murder of innocent children in the two plays has been completely recalled. The Lancastrian Clifford's murder of young Rutland, the stabbing of Edward, prince of Wales, at Tewkesbury, and the murder of the little princes in the Tower form a series of events presented as doubly caused. The design results immediately from the repetitious barbarity of human impulses, but it also expresses the nature of Margaret's God, whose justice is served by such impulses even in their most barbarous forms.

Young Clifford, Margaret's chief general, is the most barbaric servant of such impulses in Henry VI, Part III. He comes into full dramatic being in Henry VI, Part II at the Battle of Saint Albans, entering immediately after the duke of York's murder of Old Clifford. Before he sees his father's body Clifford apostrophizes war:

                                                  O Warre, thou sonne of hell,
Whom angry heavens do make their minister,
Throw in the frozen bosomes of our part,
Hot Coales of Vengeance.

(2H6.5.2.33-36)

War and the heavens answer his invitation by presenting him with the sight of Old Clifford's corpse and he replies with a demand for nothing less than apocalypse itself.

                                                  O let the vile world end,
And the premised Flames of the Last day,
Knit earth and heaven together.

(2H6.5.2.40-42)

This early but very Shakespearean invitation to chaos to come again is a sign that the heavens have chosen Clifford as a minister of their wrath against humanity. As a servant of the drive toward chaos, he will not spare the innocent:

Henceforth, I will not have to do with pitty.
Meet I an infant of the house of Yorke,
Into as many gobbits will I cut it
As wilde Medea yong Absirtis did.

(2H6.5.2.56-59)

In Henry VI, Part Three he keeps his promise. He captures the twelve-year-old earl of Rutland, York's youngest son, and proceeds to slaughter him despite his pleas:

Rutland. I never did thee harme: why wilt thou slay me?
Clifford. Thy Father hath.
Rutland. But 'twas ere I was borne.
Thou hast one Sonne, for his sake pitty me,
Lest in revenge thereof, sith God is just,
He be as miserably slaine as I.
Ah, let me live in Prison all my dayes,
And when I give occasion of offence,
Then let me dye, for now thou hast no cause.
Clifford. No cause? thy Father slew my Father: therefore dye.

(3H6.1.3.40-48)

When Rutland realizes that the moral argument of his own innocence will not move Clifford, he tries to influence his murderer by suggesting that vengeance breeds vengeance. Blood will have blood and the same impulses move Yorkists and Lancastrians, Shepherdsons and Grangerfords, Hatfields and McCoys. But Rutland is not arguing simply from the brutality of men. Clifford should fear for the life of his innocent son “sith God is just.” By killing the innocent, men serve divine justice. But although Clifford suffers deserved death within the play, the sin of Rutlands' murderer is not visited on his posterity. Instead Queen Margaret appropriates the punishment to her own child by the enthusiasm with which she uses the death of Rutland to torment her enemy, York, before she helps Clifford to kill him:

          … where is your Darling, Rutland?
Looke Yorke, I stayn'd this Napkin with the blood
That valiant Clifford, with his Rapiers point,
Made issue from the Bosome of the Boy:
And if thine eyes can water for his death,
I give thee this to drie thy Cheekes withall.

(3H6.1.4.78-83)

The extravagance of this guarantees our memory of it, which must last on into Richard III if that play is to make the sense it should. It certainly lasts until the murder of Edward, prince of Wales, by York's remaining sons in act 5, scene 5 of 3 Henry VI, where it creates a context for Margaret's agonizing that gives a grim absurdity to such assertions as “Men, ne're spend their fury on a Childe” (3H6.5.5.56). But it also keeps us conscious of an emerging pattern when she turns upon the murderers:

You have no children (Butchers) if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr'd up remorse,
But if you ever chance to have a Childe,
Looke in his youth to have him so cut off.
As deathsmen you have rid this sweet yong Prince.

(3H6.5.5.62-66)

Her own example (and Clifford's) invalidate the first of these sentiments. Neither maternity nor paternity is a guarantee of decent human impulses. But the death she is suffering for is clear evidence that she is right in expecting the sins of parents to be visited upon their children. Hers were visited upon her child.

Margaret is here beginning to justify her epithet: “well skilled in curses.” But her virtuoso performances in the genre come only in Richard III. Her skill is double. She is both eloquent and accurate. Her eloquence is in part native, in part, as she explains to Elizabeth at act 4, scene 4, lines 116 and following, the result of wits sharpened by hatred. Her accuracy also has two sources: first, her ability to sense the consequences of the destructive nature of the human beings, particularly Richard, whom she hates, and second, a growing ability to perceive the pattern of divine vengeance, which becomes steadily clearer as the plays unfold. The first such moment of perception in Richard III comes in act 1, scene 3, when Margaret, having spied long enough on the band of wrangling pirates that the house of York has become, is amused to notice that her appearance and the memory of her evil—the death of Rutland in particular—serve to reunite the Yorkists temporarily:

What? were you snarling all before I came,
Ready to catch each other by the throat,
And turne you all your hatred now on me?

(RIII.1.3.188-190)

This is an important moment of analogous action. What Margaret does for the house of York, Richard will do for all England. The process of strife which originates and continues in human hatred can only be ended by human hatred. By being absolutely horrible Richard forces his society to unite in hatred against him. But this is not Margaret's perception of the future—it can only be ours, and only by hindsight. Margaret's vision is triggered by a pair of pieties from Richard and Queen Elizabeth, who see Margaret's suffering as the result of divine justice for Rutland's murder:

Rich. … God, not we, hath plagu'd thy bloody deed.
Qu. So just is God, to right the innocent.

(RIII.1.3.181-182)

Now Margaret knows that her sufferings, her plagues as well as her curses, have taken the form of the suffering of the innocent—she has been punished with the murder of her innocent son and husband—and she perceives that God can be expected also to visit the sins of the house of York upon guilty and innocent alike:

Did Yorkes dread Curse prevaile so much with Heaven,
That Henries death, my lovely Edwards death,
Their Kingdomes losse, my wofull Banishment,
Should all but answer for that peevish Brat?
Can Curses pierce the Clouds, and enter Heaven?
Why then give way dull Clouds to my quick Curses.
.....Edward thy Sonne, that now is Prince of Wales,
For Edward our Sonne, that was Prince of Wales,
Dye in his youth, by like untimely violence.

(RIII.1.3.191-201)

Margaret has conceived her God, has found out the providential pattern, the design worked out by the dynamics of divine justice in this Shakespearean example of the theater of God's judgments. The principle which emerges is that of punishing the infliction of suffering upon the innocent by inflicting suffering upon the innocent. In cursing an innocent child Margaret is asking that the will of her God be done on earth.

Margaret's God is a concept shockingly foreign to the liberal humanitarianism that has characterized middle-class Christianity for at least a century. It is distinctly less foreign to Shakespeare's play and Shakespeare's time. When the innocent Rutland warns his murderer that more innocents may suffer for the crime, he does so on the grounds that God is just. And every twelve-year-old Elizabethan bright enough to memorize his catechism knew how God characterizes himself in the second commandment: “I the Lorde thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the thirde and fourth generation of them that hate me.”⁴ Such a visitation of iniquities is being presented in 3 Henry VI and Richard III.

Margaret's second and final appearance in Richard III returns us to our starting point—the fulfillment of her curse, the murder of the princes in the Tower. It is here that her perception of the two forces—human and divine—that shape the design of the play's horror comes into focus and presents her with a vision of Richard as the human agent of divinely willed suffering. Richard is God's enemy, “hell's black intelligencer,” the “foul defacer of God's handiwork,” but God is to be thanked for his existence:

O upright, just, and true-disposing God,
How do I thanke thee, that this carnall Curre
Prayes on the issue of his Mothers body.

(RIII.4.4.55-57)

It will not do to dismiss Margaret's vision of the God of her play as the ravings of a wicked woman. Her God is the inevitable corollary of Richmond's God. If the Tudor myth is to claim for Richmond the role of God's providential instrument, then it must confront the complementary possibility that Richard has previously served the same function. Before the Battle of Bosworth, Richmond prays, “Make us thy ministers of Chasticement.” An instrument for chastisement is a scourge, but for the Elizabethans the term “scourge of God” connoted human guilt.⁵ Richmond's innocence is a necessity for the completion of the providential pattern and so he is a minister. Richard is not innocent, but he is nonetheless an instrument of God. By slaughtering the innocent he has served the mysterious purposes of Margaret's “upright, just and true-disposing God.”

That the “justice” entailed is beyond the comprehension of human reason goes without saying. And yet a belief in providence demands of the honest mind a recognition that undeserved human suffering is as much an expression of divine will as the misery of the wicked or the happiness of the good. But what is mysterious by the light of nature, as Luther puts it,⁶ is comprehensible by the light of grace—that is, the innocent human suffering exemplified in the murder of Rutland and the little princes can be understood as necessary for the achievement of the benevolent purposes of providence—though in my opinion the play gives only minimal encouragement to this sort of piety. Beyond that, divine justice may be conceived of as insuring eternal compensation for temporal sufferings, but again, though so thumping a commonplace would hardly need emphasizing, this comfort is not strongly put forward by the play.

If we think of the God of Richard III as the first cause of the play's action, he is a terrifying figure, but one who becomes less frightening when he is viewed by the light of grace. It is when we view him as the first cause of Richard's nature that the terror is raised to tragic intensity. The pathos of innocent suffering is not finally so mysterious nor so frightening as the creation and destruction of God's evil instrument for inflicting that suffering. It is here that the light of grace fails even for the believing Christian to illuminate the mystery and leaves the spectator at the theater of God's judgments with the frightening sense that, as Luther put it, “the fault lies not in the wretchedness of man, but in the injustice of God.”⁷

It is also here, I think, that the imagination of Shakespeare is most fully engaged by the material he is dramatizing. The theological problem is central: is human evil of the sort embodied in Richard the result of God's permission or God's will? Augustine insists on the former, Calvin on the latter. But the question is also psychologically central. Whether phrased theologically or not, the question of the degree to which our wills are the creatures of forces other than our own is patently at the heart of our view of ourselves and the meaning of our minds' processes. Shakespeare's fascination with creating the illusion of minds in operation made the problem central artistically as well.

The artistic problem is complex. Just as the design of the plays must be the product simultaneously of the interaction of human wills and the expression of an omnipotent divine will, so the character of the protagonist must entail an acceptable imitation of the human psyche while remaining a fated instrument for the working out of the providential design. Shakespeare solves the problem primarily through the language of Richard's soliloquies. These convince us that they are the self-presentations of a human mind while at the same time they reveal the nature of the speaker in aspects of which the speaker could not be consciously aware. The psychomachies expressed by Richard's soliloquies are sciamachies as well. They betray the presence of causes other than those which the speaker tells us about. As moderns we define these causes as unconscious motivations and we marvel, rather naively, at Shakespeare's “instinctive grasp” of psychology. If we stay within the context which I am attempting to develop for these tragedies (and I do not insist that we must or should) then we can see these “other causes” as evidence of the first cause, the nature and will of God. But however we define or account for the character who emerges from the soliloquies Shakespeare has written for Richard, we are attempting to describe Shakespeare's first brilliant work of art. Richard III and a Shakespeare who invites bardolatry come into being at the same moment.

That moment arrives in Henry VI, Part Three, act 3, scene 2, line 124. Richard's first soliloquy dramatizes the creation of a self. The character who emerges from the speech at the end of it is Shakespeare's first great role for Burbage—and for all the Burbages who have inhabited the theater since. Richard III, the murderous Machiavel, the reverend vice Iniquity, the player king, who can smile and murder while he smiles, exists by the time the speech is over. That Shakespeare can call so brilliant a theatrical artifact into existence demonstrates that he is as great a playwright as Marlowe, who had shown his contemporary the way by calling into existence Barrabas, the Jew of Malta. But Shakespeare does more. He not only creates Richard, he has him created and doubly created. Richard is brought into existence by himself. The Richard who speaks the opening lines is a sardonic, ambitious, destructive, hate-filled, and desperate man. His desperation has its origin in a half-conscious perception that his destructive ambition is finally self-destructive and he creates a new self as an alternative to self-destruction. This Richard is a brilliant comment on the psychic forces that move us to will ourselves into existence. But again, Shakespeare does more, for the Richard here created has a divine, a superhuman cause as well. In creating himself, Richard unwittingly creates an instrument designed to serve the will of God.

The soliloquy opens with a declaration of hate—for Edward (“Would he were wasted, Marrow, Bones and all”) and for all the Plantagenets whose claims upon the throne are better than Richard's: Clarence, Henry, Edward, and the Prince of Wales “and all the unlooked-for Issue of their Bodies,” Richard's enemy is human fertility—or at least Plantagenet fertility—which produces the living barriers that stand between him and the only pleasure of which he is capable, the exercise of absolute power. The frustration which has procreation for its source is bound to be intense and the brilliance of this soliloquy is founded on two similes for Richard's frustration: the images first of a man on a promontory and then of a man in a thorny wood. The first of these comes immediately after Richard's consideration of the human barriers that stand between him and the crown:

Why then I doe but dream on Soveraigntie,
Like one that stands upon a Promontorie,
And spyes a farre-off shore, where hee would tread,
Wishing his foot were equall with his eye,
And chides the Sea, that sunders him from thence,
Saying hee'le lade it dry, to have his way:
So doe I wish the Crowne, being so farre off,
And so I chide the meanes that keepes me from it,
And so (I say) Ile cut the Causes off,
Flattering me with impossibilities.

(3H6.3.2.134-143)

Here is an early Shakespearean tragic height, an early version of the cliffs of Dover in King Lear or of “the cliffe, / That beetles o're his base into the sea” of Hamlet. The two later “heights” are associated with the self-destructive impulse and the landscape of all three is like that of Brueghel's Fall of Icarus.⁸ The Icarus emblem, also symbolic of tragedy as self-destructive aspiration is, I think, just below the surface in Richard's case. Later, he makes it explicit, in act 5, scene 6 of Henry VI, Part Three, where he applies it to Prince Edward:

Why what a peevish Foole was that of Creet,
That taught his Sonne the office of a Fowle,
And yet for all his wings, the Foole was drown'd.

(3H6.5.6.18-20)

Henry accepts the emblem and applies it:

I Dedalus, my poore Boy Icarus,
Thy Father Minos, that deni'de our course,
The Sunne that sear'd the wings of my sweet Boy,
Thy Brother Edward, and thy Selfe, the Sea
Whose envious Gulfe did swallow up his life.

(3H6.5.6.21-25)

For Richard in his first soliloquy the sea is the barrier of other human lives standing between him and the crown. I would propose, however, that Henry's equation of Richard with the destroying sea indicates, in retrospect, the full meaning of the first metaphor. Richard is destroyed by other men but he is also self-destroyed by the psychic forces which impel him to step toward his “far off shore.” The “envious Gulfe” into which he finally falls is as much Richard as Richmond and the event is predicted here. The image of a man on the edge of a cliff longing to take one step is an image of suicide. The total image is an emblem for, as well as from, the mind that has produced it. Richard is cliff and sea as well as man. Like Donne, he is his own precipice.

In the soliloquy Richard draws back from the suicidal vision and turns his mind to the possibilities of compensation:

Well, say there is no Kingdome then for Richard:
What other Pleasure can the World affoord?
Ile make my Heaven in a Ladies Lappe,
And decke my Body in gay Ornaments,
And 'witch sweet Ladies with my Words and Lookes.
Oh miserable Thought! and more unlikely,
Then to accomplish twentie Golden Crownes.

(3H6.3.2.146-152)

This is unduly pessimistic, as Richard's later spectacular success at “witching” the Lady Anne will prove. What Richard's self-mockery reveals is not so much the impossibility of making his way to a lady's lap as the unlikeliness of his finding heaven there. Straightforward sexual pleasure is no compensation for the frustration of a power drive as strong as Richard's and the absorption of that psychic energy in love is not a possible solution for Richard, who is capable neither of feeling nor inspiring it:

Why Love forswore me in my Mothers Wombe:
And for I should not deale in her soft Lawes,
Shee did corrupt frayle Nature with some Bribe,
To shrinke mine Arme up like a wither'd Shrub,
To make an envious Mountaine on my Back,
Where sits Deformitie to mocke my Body;
To shape my Legges of an unequall size,
To dis-proportion me in every part:
Like to a Chaos, or an un-lick'd Beare-whelpe,
That carryes no impression like the Damme.
And am I then a man to be belov'd?
O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought.

(3H6.3.2.153-164)

The declaration of hate has become a declaration of self-hate. Love, we can see, in forswearing Richard, has forsworn him entirely, so that he is incapable of inspiring love for himself in himself, and his deformity, the sign of love's desertion, repels him more than it does any other character in the play. But love being absent, pity is absent too. The lines contain no element of pathetic self-display. Richard is not asking for our alms. He covers his self-hatred with sardonic self-mockery and covers it so effectively that, I believe, he conceals it from himself. Richard nowhere expresses a consciousness of the self-hatred which he here betrays—not, at least, until the very end of his life—and he does not express it because he does not know of its existence. And yet self-hatred informs his being and his actions. His deeds and desires are responses to it and this Shakespeare makes clear in the lines that follow:

Then since this Earth affoords no Joy to me,
But to command, to check, to o're-beare such,
As are of better Person then my selfe:
Ile make my Heaven to dreame upon the Crowne,
And whiles I live, t'account this World but Hell,
Until my mis-shap'd Trunke, that beares this Head
Be round impaled with a glorious Crowne.
And yet I know not how to get the Crowne,
For many Lives stand betweene me and home.

(3H6.3.2.165-173)

The hatred which fills Richard can be safely diverted and even transformed to pleasure, to “joy,” by directing it outward. The exercise of power over others is the only release possible for Richard, but the frustration of his power drives forces him to fantasies of absolute power. Yet these unrealizable fantasies, like the sexual fantasies of a prisoner, torment their creator. Richard's self-hatred, prevented from dissipating itself in the “overbearing” of others, transforms itself into fantasy and returns to torment the self which originally inspired it. Richard is trapped and expresses his sense of being so in a second and tremendously powerful image of frustration:

And I, like one lost in a Thornie Wood,
That rents the Thornes, and is rent with the Thornes,
Seeking a way, and straying from the way,
Not knowing how to finde the open Ayre,
But toyling desperately to finde it out,
Torment my selfe, to catch the English Crowne:
And from that torment I will free my selfe,
Or hew my way out with a bloody Axe.

(3H6.3.2.174-181)

The simile gains in claustrophobic effectiveness from being the visual and tactile opposite of the openness of the promontory image. Like the sea, the wood is for Richard the barrier of other men, the many lives that stand between him and home. Shakespeare uses the thorny wood again in the play, and, as he did with the Icarus image, applies it to the Lancastrians, Prince Edward prominently among them. Edward of York makes the application:

Brave followers, yonder stands the thornie Wood,
Which by the Heavens assistance, and your strength,
Must by the Roots be hew'ne up yet ere Night.

(3H6.5.4.67-69)

For Richard's brother, the wood really is what Richard claims it is for him—an obstacle that stands between him and the throne. Edward will remove it, will hew it up. Richard is trapped inside and must hew his way out. In part this is because for Edward the thorny wood is the declared enemy—the house of Lancaster—and thus something totally other than himself. Richard's thorny wood is the house of York as well as that of Lancaster and he is trapped within the family loyalties he must destroy. There is more to the difference than that, however, and Richard comes near to discovering what it is. Richard is tormenting himself. He is using his ambition as a flagellant uses his scourge. The thorns which rend him are his own neurotic ambition, his masochism, his “self.” To free yourself from self-torment, you must free yourself from yourself, and using a bloody ax to hew yourself out of yourself entails destroying yourself.

Richard does not destroy himself—at least not at this moment. What he does instead is to create a new self. It has been pointed out that the thorny wood simile is a symbolic description of birth⁹ and as such it is in keeping with the birth imagery that precedes it. But Richard is giving birth here—to himself. As an alternative to self-destruction Richard assumes a new self, one capable of satisfying ambition by acquiring power. Shakespeare, in other words, is here creating the Richard who will serve as the villain protagonist of the tragedy to come. But the making of this magnificent bogeyman is not a creation ex nihilo. Shakespeare fashions the apparently inhuman Richard out of such recognizably human elements as the ambition which has hatred, and self-hatred, for its source. Thus the finished creation contains, temporarily controlled and directed outward, the self-destructive qualities that have gone into the creature's making. The process of self-creation and the nature of the self created, are hardly realistic in any documentary sense. But they are brilliantly expressionistic versions or imitations of psychic realities.

The “murtherous Machevill” who emerges from the soliloquy is a formidable instrument of destruction. Before Henry VI, Part Three is over he has killed two of the four men he has named as standing between him and “home.” After the murder of the second, King Henry, Richard delivers a second soliloquy which is primarily a descriptive analysis of the self which we saw come into being during the first, a self which Richard characterizes as “I that have neyther pitty, love, nor feare,” and, a few lines later:

I have no Brother, I am like no Brother:
And this word (Love) which Gray-beards call Divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am my selfe alone.

(3H6.5.6.80-83)

Because Richard is incapable of compassion he can be literally ruthless and this is the source of his success in gaining power. It is also the primary explanation for his almost immediate loss of it.

In order to gain the crown, Richard must perforce destroy his natural power base—the house of York. He has no compunction about this and is careful to replace the power he derived from family loyalties with the support of self-interested politicians and magnates—primarily the duke of Buckingham, and Hastings, the Lord Chamberlain. Act 1, scene 3 of Richard III is largely devoted to an exposition of the brilliance with which Richard works upon the rivalries, petty hatreds, and snobbism of such men in order to alienate them from Queen Elizabeth's party. Such successes require no understanding of love or pity and Richard achieves with great efficiency the destruction of the threat to his own power that is posed by the claims of young King Edward V's uncle and half-brothers to have some say in the governing of the kingdom. Thus Richard achieves unchallenged control of the kingdom as Lord Protector, but, of course, he is not satisfied with it. For him the symbolic glorious crown is even more important than the reality of power—or the reality is not complete without the symbol of it. But he discovers that in order to achieve coronation he must not only obliterate the rest of the house of York, he must also destroy his new power base as well. Lord Hastings, incomprehensibly to Richard, loved his master, Edward IV, and has transferred that love to his master's sons:

          that Ile give my voice on Richards side,
To barre my Masters Heires in true Descent,
God knowes I will not doe it, to the death.

(RIII.3.2.53-55)

That a man should be capable of feeling such sentiments, much less of intending to act upon them, must necessarily be beyond the comprehension of a Richard who is himself alone. Not that Hastings is an extraordinarily noble fellow. Insofar as he is characterized, it is by an intensely human delight in the destruction of his enemies. This portion of his humanity Richard can play upon for his own purposes, but Hastings's loyalty to those he loves is something Richard cannot manipulate, not, by any means, because it is too noble for manipulation, but because it is a kind of humanity that Richard cannot understand. The solution to Hastings therefore must be mere stupid brutality: “Chop off his Head: / Something wee will determine” (RIII.3.1.194-195). And that “something” turns out to be “Chop off his head.” The subtlety with which Richard concealed his guilt for the murder of Clarence disappears completely when he destroys Hastings, causing the scrivener to comment: “Who is so grosse, that cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who so bold, but sayes he sees it not?” (RIII.3.6.11-12). Richard appears to believe that the achievement of power marks the end of any need for the concealment of villainy, that so long as men can be frightened into acquiescence no more is necessary. But, of course, Richard does not really understand fear either, does not see that it can inspire men to destroy him as well as obey him.

A miscalculation of the effects of both pity and fear causes Richard to turn Buckingham from an essential supporter to an active enemy. The loss of power entailed is entirely preventable and again the result of Richard's inability to foresee the reactions of “men like one another.” Earlier in the play Richard flattered Buckingham by calling him “My other selfe.” When the time comes to kill the little princes, Richard appears to have convinced himself of the truth of the epithet, forgetting that he is himself alone and that Buckingham is subject to the inconvenient emotions and inefficient moral hesitations of other men. When Buckingham fails or refuses to understand Richard's coy hints (“Young Edward lives, thinke now what I would speake”), Richard, instead of dropping the matter, loses his temper: “Cousin, thou wast not wont to be so dull. / Shall I be plaine? I wish the Bastards dead” (RIII.4.2.17-18). It is not Richard's business to be plain, even with Buckingham. The duke's recoil from the proposed murders is evidence only of a greater moral sensitivity than Richard's—greater, that is to say, than none at all. Buckingham soon returns to claim the reward promised for his connivance in the judicial murder of Hastings. It is not clear whether he wishes Richard to understand that, as DeFlores puts it in The Changeling, “The last is not yet paid for” and that he will proceed to new villainy only when he has been rewarded for old, or whether he wants to collect what is coming to him before he clears out. Richard does not bother to discover. He insults Buckingham and leaves him terrified:

Buck. O let me thinke on Hastings, and be gone
To Brecnock, while my fearefull Head is on.

(RIII.4.2.102-103)

Richard's disaffecting of Buckingham is the gross stupidity of an extremely intelligent man. The destruction of Hastings would probably have eventually become a necessity for Richard. Properly managed, Buckingham could have been his creature forever. But Richard is a Machiavel and a Machiavel can be most succinctly defined as an incompetent Machiavellian. With the great and significant exception of Claudius, the true, competent Machiavellians (Bolingbroke, Tiberius, Octavius) of the Elizabethan drama survive. The Machiavels (Barrabas, Richard III, Sejanus, Iago) destroy themselves. The source of Richard's self-destructive incompetence as a politician is the source of his strength as a destructive force—his inability to share in and hence to understand and to predict the emotions of other men.

In creating a Richard to inhabit the world of second causes, Shakespeare has imagined a self-created self. He has given us a Richard who responds to the threat of a loveless, hate-filled and destructive nature by devising a persona which can successfully direct outward the hatred and destructiveness that would otherwise destroy their owner. But, of course, in the end they do destroy their owner, first because they force the men and women against whom Richard directs his destructive instincts to unite in hatred against him and to destroy him in order to preserve themselves. But also there is within Richard's nature none of the love that sometimes moves men, however minimally, in their dealings with one another. Because he cannot understand what he does not possess, Richard is unable to predict and control the actions of men moved by love and pity. The absence of love is essential to the efficient functioning of the murderous Machiavel, but it is also the flaw which results in his destruction. In order to preserve himself, Richard creates a destructive self, but the self he creates turns out to be as self-destructive as the desperate man who called him into being.

The question remains, to what degree does Shakespeare present this ultimately self-destructive act of self-creation as the free choice of a free will? Within the context of human causes a minimal freedom is present, I think. Richard boasts of choosing to be what he is: “Let Hell make crook'd my Minde.” “I am determined to prove a Villaine.” But these melodramatic proclamations of free choice are expressed in a context that limits their freedom almost to the point of making it disappear:

Then since the Heavens have shap'd my Body so,
Let Hell make crook'd my Minde to answer it.

(3H6. 5.6.78-79)

And therefore, since I cannot prove a Lover,
To entertaine these faire well spoken dayes,
I am determined to prove a Villaine,
And hate the idle pleasures of these dayes.

(RIII.1.1.28-31)

In fact Richard's choice of self is severely limited by the nature from which he can form that self and in his first soliloquy the only apparent alternative to the murderous Machiavel is a desperate thug, a hewer with a bloody ax. Which brings us to the question of what has so limited Richard's nature, the question of the first cause.

“Nature,” says Hamlet, thinking socially, “cannot choose his origin.” Richard's unchosen origin is, like everyone else's, his mother's womb and he believes that it was there that love forswore him. He is thinking consciously in the first soliloquy of human, venereal love. It is important that our thoughts should not be so limited as Richard's, for here Shakespeare is having him tell us more than he knows, or more, at least, than he is conscious of knowing. For Richard, his abandonment by love in the womb resulted in his deformity:

And for I should not deale in her soft Lawes,
Shee did corrupt frayle Nature with some Bribe,
To shrinke mine Arme up like a wither'd Shrub.

(3H6.3.2.154-156)

The other characters in the play see the deformity as significant of something more than the corruption of nature. Margaret makes the point with her usual force:

Qu. But thou art neyther like thy Sire nor Damme,
But like a foule mishapen Stygmaticke,
Mark'd by the Destinies to be avoided,
As venome Toades, or Lizards dreadfull stings.

(3H6.2.2.135-138)

The epithet “foul stigmatic” has already been applied to Richard by young Clifford in Henry VI, Part II. Its implications are at least triple. According to the O.E.D. it was a fairly common literaryism for a deformed person. But it derives from Greek through Latin. In classical antiquity a man might be stigmatized—that is have his flesh branded—either because he was a criminal or because he was a slave. (The custom of branding criminals was, of course, current in Shakespeare's time.) Richard qualifies on both counts. His criminality is obvious and his slavery is characterized, again by Margaret in Richard III, where, rising to an eloquence unusual even for her, she addresses him as

Thou elvish mark'd, abortive rooting Hogge,
Thou that wast seal'd in thy Nativitie
The slave of Nature, and the Sonne of Hell.

(RIII.1.3.228-230)

But if Richard is a slave, who has enslaved him? Or to pass to Margaret's contention that he has been “Mark'd by the Destinies,” if Richard's deformity is a sort of skull-and-crossbones label, where did the poison come from?

To arrive at an answer, we must combine the insights of Richard's enemies with the results of his own self-analysis in both the soliloquies of Henry VI, Part Three. For Margaret, Richard's deformity is a mark set upon him by “destiny” to warn his fellow men of his fatal nature. For Richard, it is the result of love's abandonment of him. In the second soliloquy Richard defines that love in a way that reconciles the two explanations for his deformity:

And this word [Love] which Gray-beards call Divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am my selfe alone.

(3H6.5.6.81-83)

If it was divine love that forsook Richard at his conception, the results are precisely what we might expect. The consequence of the withdrawal of the ordering force of God's love would be: “To dis-proportion me in every part: / Like to a Chaos, or an unlick'd Beare-whelpe” (3H6.3.2.160-161). Created order is the result of the imposition upon elemental chaos of God's love. If God, in his just anger, withdraws that love, the result is a return to, or toward, chaos. Richard is the result of such a withdrawal of divine love and his deformity is the sign of it.

These lofty Empedoclean suggestions, concepts basic to Shakespeare's highest art, are, with a self-directed irony typical of Richard, and a willingness to attempt any juxtaposition typical of Shakespeare, set against the grotesque unnatural natural history of the “unlick'd Beare-whelpe.” The Arden edition elucidates by quoting Golding's Ovid: “The Bear whelp … like an evill favored lump of flesh alyve dooth lye. / The dam by licking shapeth out his members orderly.”¹⁰ Anne, in the scene of their courtship, will confirm her future husband in this view of himself by calling him a “lumpe of fowle Deformitie.” But Young Clifford has, in fact, already drawn Richard's attention to the resemblance: “Hence heape of wrath, foule indigested lumpe / As crooked in thy manners, as thy shape” (2H6.5.1.157-158). The “stygmaticke” is a creature enslaved by nature, the “chaos” is a creature deprived of God's love. The “lumpe,” absurdly enough, is the most suggestive of the three:

But, O man who art thou which pleadest against God? shal the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power of the claie to make of the same lompe one vessell to honour, and another unto dishonour?

What and if God wolde, to shewe his wrath, and to make his power knowen, suffre with long pacience the vessels of wrath, prepared to destruction?

(Romans 9: 20-22)

Romans 9 is, I think, the fundamental gloss on Richard's nature and significance. Shakespeare has imagined the coming into being and the destruction of a vessel of wrath. Like Robert le Dyable, Richard has, from the womb, been a creature of evil, but Robert inhabited a semi-Pelagian universe ruled by a benevolent God. Robert's will was free enough and strong enough to accept the grace offered to him. Richard, like Robert (some versions of him at least), is born with teeth “which plainly signified, / That I should snarle, and bite, and play the dogge” (3H6.5.6.76-77). Richard and Robert are born to do evil. Robert chooses to stop doing evil, but like Faustus, Richard chooses to do evil. Yet both Richard and Faustus can, I maintain, be seen as “choosing” out of necessity, in response to the will of a predestinating God who has determined from eternity that they are to be numbered among the reprobate. But neither Richard nor Faustus must be seen in this way. The terrible possibility exists as a device for increasing the intensity of the terror with which an audience responds to these tragedies. It may, of course, also cause the more intelligent and informed members of such an audience to think about the relationship of these created Gods and worlds to the reality they imitate.

Marlowe emphasizes the possibility of Faustus's lack of freedom by having him try unsuccessfully to obtain grace through repentance. In Shakespeare the same purpose is served by the insistence on providential design. Faustus may be trapped in a world created by an omnipotent being who refuses to listen to his pleas for grace. Richard may be the uncomprehending instrument of a power who has decided to use him in working out a plan that requires his (possibly eternal) destruction. Richard's becoming the murderous Machiavel of the first soliloquy is an act of self-creation, but it is also, of course, a transformation into the instrument required by God's plan, and so we may be watching the process by which the potter fashions a vessel of his wrath.

The deterministic possibility gets its strongest single emphasis at the moment of Henry VI's murder. Richard stabs the king at the end of a speech in which Henry prophesies the horror which Richard will create, and asserts that he was born to this end:

Thy Mother felt more then a Mothers paine,
And yet brought forth lesse then a Mothers hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lumpe,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly Tree.
Teeth had'st thou in thy head, when thou was't borne,
To signifie, thou cam'st to bite the world:
And if the rest be true, which I have heard,
Thou cam'st—
Rich. Ile heare no more:
Dye Prophet in thy speech,
                                                                                          Stabbes him.
For this (among'st the rest) was I ordain'd.

(3H6.5.6.49-58)

The theatricality of the moment does not detract from its sincerity. Richard, as the Arden editor says, “adopts the fate of which he is the instrument and the victim.”¹¹ But the adoption is not eager, or even necessarily willing. In some part, Richard kills Henry in order to make him stop talking—stop telling Richard that he is, indeed, predestined to evil, a creature without freedom. Richard's “Let Hell make crook'd my Minde” is partly bravado, an attempt to assert a freedom of choice which he knows or fears is not really his. The knowledge or fear is something we must share, for it is basic to the experience and understanding of Shakespeare's art in the creation of this protagonist.

The catastrophe of Richard's tragedy is accompanied by the same mystery as to its significance that surrounds the soliloquies of self-creation and self-analysis in Henry VI, Part Three. The physical destruction, the defeat at Bosworth, is assigned by the providential pieties of Richmond to the will of God as first cause. It is quite possible to accept this explanation and to see that will working through second causes—through the unifying effect upon England of Richard's destructive ambition and through the inherent incompetence that is the necessary concomitant of Richard's brilliance as a political animal. But mysteries remain despite such explanations and the questions they raise are the most important sources for whatever terror and pity are aroused in us by the spectacle of Richard's destruction. Again the inspiration for these emotions is our sense of the relationship of the creator to his creation, of the potter to the vessel of his wrath.

Richard's first soliloquy dramatized the creation of a self; his last presents us with that self's threatened disintegration:

Cold fearefull drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What? do I feare my Selfe? There's none else by,
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
Is there a Murtherer heere? No; Yes, I am:
Then flye; What from my Selfe? Great reason: why?
Lest I revenge. What? my Selfe upon my Selfe?
Alacke, I love my Selfe. Wherefore? For any good
That I my Selfe, have done unto my Selfe?
O no. Alas, I rather hate my Selfe,
For hatefull Deeds committed by my Selfe.
I am a Villaine. …
I shall dispaire, there is no Creature loves me;
And if I die, no soule shall pittie me.
Nay, wherefore should they? Since that I my Selfe,
Finde in my Selfe, no pittie to my Selfe.

(RIII.5.3.181-203)

Here Richard approaches his own meaning and it is possible, I think, for us to come closer to that mystery than he does. Richard faces, at the end, the truth that we have suspected about him from the beginning: he hates himself. And we can see more clearly than he can that the hateful deeds for which he hates himself have brought him to his destruction. His fear of himself is justified. He is revenging himself upon himself. He is in the presence of his own murderer and he cannot escape. But we can understand, as he cannot, the origin of this psychic paradox: “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.” Identity, he soon admits, is no guarantee of love. But his phrase for identity suggests another. God, when asked by Moses to name himself, obliges with “I am that I am.” Richard, in the presence of himself, is, in a double sense, in the presence of his creator and destroyer. Richard, the self-creator, is here supremely himself alone, but there is one else by. The creator of the self from which Richard creates himself is God and it is to that first creator's decision to withhold love from his creature that Richard's tragedy owes both its beginning and its end. A human being without love is a being of universal hate and though the desire for self-preservation may inspire the self to take forms which will direct that destructive hatred outward, in the end the destruction will include the self, and the full process is seen to have its source in the will of the creating God. The terrifying meaning of evil in a providentially ordered universe is fully dramatized in the nature, crimes, and destruction of Richard III, but a mystery remains in the questions of whether grace may not be offered even to this apparently reprobate creature.

Richard cannot pity, love, nor fear other men; he cannot pity nor love himself. But why should not the paradigm hold for fear? The answer is to be found in the fear's origin.

Give me another Horse, bind up my Wounds:
Have mercy Jesu. Soft, I did but dreame.
O coward Conscience! how dost thou afflict me?

(RIII.5.3.177-179)

Lady Anne has prepared us for the spectacle of these afflictions:

For never yet one howre in his Bed
Did I enjoy the golden deaw of sleepe,
But with his timorous Dreames was still awak'd.

(RIII.4.1.83-85)

Conscience, the origin of Richard's fear, can exercise its power over him only in sleep. When the will relaxes its control, timorous dreams take over the self-tormenting function of those fantasies of power, dreams of sovereignty, with which Richard tortured himself before his rise to the throne. But it will not do simply to modernize Richard's conscience into an equivalent for the diseased superego of a psychic masochist. The Shakespearean meaning of Richard's conscience lies in the fact that though it is a part of his consciousness, it is not simply a part of his self. It is the voice of God within him and consequently Richard can fear it as he can fear nothing human, either self or other. But this raises a question. If Richard is capable of fearing the voice of God, is he also capable of loving it? When Robert le Dyable reaches an equivalent moment in his spiritual career he is impelled to contrition and to the love of God by fear of damnation. Why does this not happen to Richard?

The answer lies hidden in the mystery of God's judgments. The freedom of Richard's will is either real or apparent. In either case its strength is beyond question. What we see in Richard's final soliloquy is a human self threatened with disintegration as a result of pressure from divine power. But Richard's human will successfully resists that pressure and reintegrates the threatened self:

Let not our babling Dreames affright our soules:
For Conscience is a word that Cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keepe the strong in awe,
Our strong armes be our Conscience, Swords our Laws.
March on, joyne bravely, let us too't pell mell,
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to Hell.

(RIII.5.3.308-313)

The irony of this sardonic bravado lies in the fact that Richard's successful preservation of his psychological self invites the destruction of his spiritual self. Shakespeare never pronounces on the eternal fate of his characters, but he frequently demands that we consider the possibilities. He is doing so here and we can only conclude that Richard has not found grace before he goes into battle. Since at Bosworth Field he notoriously did not have even the space between the stirrup and the ground to seek for mercy in, the play forces us to confront the possibility that hell is Richard's destination.

The play does not tell us if Richard's will is free to seek grace nor does it tell us if grace is available were he to seek it. But the absence of answers is not the same thing as the absence of questions. The terrible dreams that affright Richard, the products of God's voice within him, embody a question in the form of two possibilities. Viewed Calvinistically these pangs of conscience can be a deserved, divinely inflicted punishment upon a reprobate sinner. But if we grant the possibility that Richard's will is free, then these torments may be grace itself, battering Richard's heart, attempting to bring him to contrition. When Richard tries to talk Queen Elizabeth into granting him the hand of her daughter despite his murder of her sons, he makes an obviously hypocritical appeal to determinism: “All unavoyded is the doome of Destiny” (RIII.4.4.218). Elizabeth, in reply, appeals to grace in a way that affirms its mysterious nature:

True: when avoyded grace makes Destiny.
My Babes were destin'd to a fairer death,
If grace had blest thee with a fairer life.

(RIII.4.4.219-221)

Does Richard avoid grace or does grace refuse to bless him? Or, to focus upon the final moment of the failure of grace, when Richard says “Have mercy Jesu,” and then continues, “Soft, I did but dreame,” is the failure to complete the impulse toward contrition the result of Richard's freely willed avoidance of grace, or of God's refusal to bless the appeal? The play does not tell us, but it certainly asks us. We may answer as we choose, but we must not attribute our answer to the play, for the play's primary meaning resides in its refusal to provide a meaning and its confrontation of ignorance is a source of its tragic power.

In Richard III Shakespeare first explores the tragic implications of a belief in providence. These implications had, of course, been explored and agonized over by theologians for centuries. In the Old Testament we learn that “The King's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of waters: he turneth it whethersoever it pleaseth him” (Proverbs 21: 1). Augustine assures us that providence permits the rule of evil emperors in order that justice may be served: evil princes are a punishment for evil people.¹² And this is a sentiment heartily and regularly endorsed by the Tudor establishment through the Book of Homilies.¹³ But there is a cause for fear and trembling in this orthodoxy and Calvin expresses it by quoting Augustine:

If any be more combered with this that we nowe say, that there is no consent of God with man, where man by the righteous moving of God doeth that which is not lawfull, let them remember that which Augustine saith in another place: Who shall not tremble at these judgements, where God worketh even in the hearts of evil men whatsoever he will, and yet rendreth to them according to their deservings?¹⁴

Chance does not exist in the providentially controlled world which is suggested as a possibility in Richard III. Richard begins his last speech with the lines: “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the Dye” (5.4.9-10). The play answers Richard with Einstein's reply to Bohr: “Der Herr Gott würfelt nicht.” The Lord God does not throw dice. The concept of providence explains away the injustice that is inherent in accident, but Shakespeare's examination of providence raises the question of whether justice can exist in a world where accident does not.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, “New Directions from Old,” in Myth and Myth Making, ed. H. Murray, Boston, 1968, p. 117.

2. Richard Hooker, Works, ed. Keble, rev. Church and Paget, Oxford, 1888, vol. 2, p. 563.

3. F₁ = hop'st.

4. “The Catechism” in Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. W. K. Clay, Cambridge, 1897, p. 212.

5. See Fredson Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA, 1955, pp. 740-749.

6. See above pp. 32-33.

7. Ibid.

8. See Harry Levin, “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene from King Lear,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. J. Garrett, London, 1959.

9. J. P. Brockbank, “The Frame of Disorder—Henry VI,” in Early Shakespeare (Stratford-upon-Avon Studies #3), London, 1961, pp. 97-98.

10. Andrew S. Cairncross, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part III, London, 1964, p. 78.

11. Ibid., p. 138.

12. D.T.C. vol. 13¹, col. 965.

13. “An Homilie against disobedience and wilfull rebellion,” Homilies, pp. 278ff.

14. Calvin, Institutes, 1.18.4. The quotation from Augustine is from Grace and Free Will, chap. 20.