SOURCE: Marienstras, Richard. “Of a Monstrous Body.” In French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems, pp. 153-74. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1995.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1990, Marienstras studies the cultural tradition and symbolic significance of Richard's deformed body in Richard III.]

In Bill Alexander's 1984 production of Richard III with the Royal Shakespeare Company,¹ the “monstrous” aspects of the protagonist were particularly emphasized. Antony Sher, who acted Richard, used crutches and, insectlike, hopped on four legs. Sometimes, with his huge hanging sleeves reaching down to the floor, he would assume the hallucinating appearance of a six-legged giant spider. The guiding idea of the production was to magnify the “animality” of Richard, a choice that Antony Sher settled upon after rejecting several other conceptions:

As he found himself growing intuitively into the role, Sher's trial impressions of the arch-demon altered drastically. His Richard would metamorphose—indeed Shakespeare's writing demanded it—from human being to animal and back again.²

Thus Richard would be the “bourgeoisie invaded by gargoyle.”³ Sher built up the character with reference to the images of the “bottled spider,” the “poisonous bunch-back'd toad,” the “lump of foul deformity,”⁴ and these quotations are to be found, in bold type, in the central double page of the production's program under the title “Richard in Performance.” There are also two references to Richard's demoniac character (“Foul devil” and “thou cacodemon”⁵), although this aspect was not particularly stressed by the actor's attitudes or his makeup. I might add that Antony Sher

began his informal research at nursing homes where he could observe at first-hand the ravages of spinal disease and how it affected movement in its victims. Sher found his subjects to be prisoners of incapacity and smoldering frustration. Tempted as many were “to see inside themselves,” they could only be met with distortion. Their monstrosity constantly stared back at them with a hollow gaze and a shrunken presence.⁶

Hence Antony Sher's conviction that the magnetic powers of Richard are founded on a number of gestures and words “so deadly and eccentric that they cannot be got used to, or predicted, or repelled.”⁷ In short, better than any actor before him, Sher strove to embody Richard's malignant impetus by making his formidable vitality a consequence of his infirmities rather than a way of overcoming them. His crutches seemed to increase his swiftness, making it almost supernatural and demoniac: now he seemed a giant spider striking his prey at a lightning speed; now he would assume the ominous shape of a vulture. As S. P. Cerasano writes, “What came across was not that he had to have the crutches to function, but that he was much better off with them.”⁸

Sher gave an immense symbolic importance to the image so often found in the text of the play, that of Richard contriving his treacheries as a spider spins its web: his father, the Duke of York and a wily know-how, had already boasted about it in 2 Henry VI: “My brain, more busy than the laboring spider, / Weaves tedious snares to trap mine enemies.”⁹ The image of the mortal, “tedious” net is taken up again in Richard III by Queen Margaret when she evokes this “bottled spider, / Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about” (1.3.241-42).

Animality is again made especially prominent in the mute scene of Richard's coronation (mute because it is not to be found in Shakespeare's text, being invented by the director,) a scene in which Richard with his bare, pale chest like that of a blind larva, crawls towards the throne, giving the nearly physical sensation of some foul and obscene desecration.

Sher thus revived a tradition¹⁰ which, along with historical narratives, dramatic works, Seneca's plays, memories of the morality Vice, and political treatises on tyranny or Machiavellianism contributed to the fashioning of Richard's fictive personality. I refer to the various stories—dramatic, homiletic, biblical—concerning Herod the tyrant, or rather the three Herods¹¹ whose lives are often confused in different medieval or Renaissance writings. These are Herod the Great; his son, Herod Antipas, who mocked Christ and ordered the execution of Saint John the Baptist; and his grandson, Herod Agrippa, who imprisoned Saint Peter and died of a horrible disease. Herod is often described as suffering many pains, afflictions, and illnesses, which sets him in glaring opposition to Jesus and his healing powers:

My legges roten and my armes;
that now I see of feindes swarmes—
I have donne so many harmes—
from hell comminge after me.(12)

Moreover, a Herod afflicted by a swarm of infirmities appeared in illuminated manuscripts and stained-glass windows:

Herod's verbal gymnastics in the drama match his weird anatomical positions in art. … [He holds] his hands in such a way that the joints bend back on themselves in all directions … [his] anger and arrogance are expressed pictorially through the iconography of physical disorientation.¹³

The tradition according to which Richard had the physical traits which likened him to a monster and a fate evoking that of Antichrist was established very soon after the death of King Richard III. In his Historia Regum Angliae,¹⁴ John Rous, who died in 1491, states that Richard stayed two years in his mother's womb, that he was born with teeth and hair grown as low as his shoulders, and that like the scorpion (which Rous wrongly declares to be Richard's astrological sign, though he was born under the sign of Libra), he had a genial demeanor and a poisonous sting. Rous adds that he was short of stature, with his right shoulder higher than the left.

This detail is taken up by Thomas More, who adds that Richard was a hunchback (“croke backed”—“extanti dorso”).¹⁵ More also gives the following details:

It is for trouth reported, that the Duches his mother had so much a doe in her trauaile, that shee could not bee deliuered of hym uncutte: and that he came into the world with the feete forwarde, as menne bee borne outwarde, and (as the fame runneth) also not vntothed, whither menne of hatred reported aboue the trouthe, or ells that nature chaunged her course in hys beginning, whiche in the course of his lyfe many thynges vnnaturallye commited.¹⁶

The amazing statement that says Richard stayed two years in his mother's womb is to be found neither in Thomas More nor in Hall, or Shakespeare. The latter, however, has him delivered prematurely¹⁷ and suggests that he might have been born with teeth (2.4.27-28). More's allusion to what was probably a cesarian birth is possibly alluded to by King Henry before he is murdered by Richard in 3 Henry VI. Henry also mentions that Richard “was not vntothed”:

Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain,
And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,
To signify thou cam'st to bite the world.

(3 Henry VI 5.6.49-54)

And Shakespeare emphasizes the unlicked, unfinished, formless, and chaotic aspect of his limping hero. It is also Thomas More who wrote the episode of the council that met on 13 June 1485, where Richard offered for all to see his arm blighted—so he said—by magic, an episode that Shakespeare developed with great gusto (3.4). But here is More's narrative:

he plucked up hys doublet to his elbow vpon his lefte arme, where he shewed a werish withered arme and small, as it was never other. And thereupon euery mannes mind sore misgaue them, well perceiuing that this matter was but a quarrel.

(P. 48, lines 9-13)

Physical deformities, then, greatly contribute to the fictive image of Richard III, an image boosted up by the historical tradition that helps create the impression of an incontrovertible truth. As fiction seems to feed on history, it acquires absolute verisimilitude. Shakespeare will use this “truth effect” to give the tyrant a compelling presence on the stage, without exceeding the limits beyond which the character would lose his truthfulness and be launched into an unthinkable—or at least a hardly credible—unnatural space.

Jean Céard points out that after defining monsters as things that “arise against the normal course of nature,” Ambroise Paré changes his mind and writes “beyond the usual course of nature,” and even “beyond the usual run of things,” thus agreeing, as Céard puts it, with the capital statement of Saint Augustine, that strictly speaking, “nothing is against nature.”¹⁸

For how can an event be contrary to nature when it happens by the will of God, since the will of the Great Creator assuredly is the nature of every created thing? A portent, therefore, does not occur contrary to nature, but contrary to what is known of nature.¹⁹

This conception was not unfamiliar at the end of the Renaissance. At least it was not unfamiliar to Montaigne:

Those which we call monsters are not so with God, who in the immensitie of his worke seeth the infinitie of formes therein contained. And it may be thought, that any figure [which] doth amaze us, hath relation unto some other figure of the same kinde, although unknown unto man.²⁰

In a book whose first edition was published in Zurich in 1554, De conceptu et generatione hominis, but which was translated into English and published not earlier than 1637, Jacob Rueff (James Rueff in the translation) wonders why certain children are born flawed or monstrous. His answer is in keeping with a providential view of history:

But if it be demanded of the causes of such conceptions and birthes, we must know before all things that they come not to passe without the providence of the Almighty and Omipotent [sic] God; but also that they are permitted oftentimes by his just judgement for to punish and admonish men for their sinnes.²¹

Richard is monstrous both in his appearance and his deeds; his being, will, and infirmities account for one another not only because of their individual essence but also because of the place assigned to him by Providence in the history of England, where he plays the part of Nemesis or the Scourge of God. Moreover, as will be seen later, he is not a monster in the legal sense of the word. Historical tradition, which made him into an archetype of the tyrant, endowed him with a number of traits that the real Richard did not possess. It used a sufficiently discriminating creative force to produce, for all his deviant characteristics, a political being whose malicious inventiveness made him an ever self-fashioning being, that had the ability and power to change history in his own image—that is to say, to make it crippled and baleful.

The Baynard's Castle scene (3.7) is a good example of his perverse powers. Richard appears on the upper stage with two bishops and indulges in saintly meditation between these pillars of virtue. Buckingham, who has staged this comedy, presents Richard as the only legitimate (but reluctant) heir, who must be implored to accept the crown. But as Marjorie Garber points out,²² his description of the commonwealth is paradoxically inappropriate if applied to the kingdom and pertinent only if applied to Richard:

The noble isle doth want her proper limbs;
Her face defac'd with scars of infamy,
Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants,
And almost should'red in the swallowing gulf
Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion.
Which to recure, we heartily solicit
Your gracious self to take on you the charge
And kingly government of this your land:
Not as protector, steward, substitute,
Or lowly factor for another's gain;
But as successively, from blood to blood,
Your right of birth, your empery, your own.

(3.7.125-36)

So the crippled isle would receive her “proper limbs” from a cripple. She should heal the “scars of infamy” that deface her face and get rid of the grafted “ignoble plants” by the grafting of as healthy and unscarred a sovereign branch as Richard, resist those who shoulder her towards the opaque oblivion of the past. But the term “should'red” metonymically refers to the hunchback who gives the push. Most of the quoted lines must be understood as antiphrases: the repetitive “your,” for example, precisely refers to what does not belong to Richard, just as the phrase “royal stock” cannot be understood as Richard's origin.

If Richard's combined infirmities make up the visible side of his physical (and political) being, one can wonder what each of them separately expresses with an unobtrusiveness that adds to their patent iconic meaning.

Let us first see how monsters were understood in those days. A book by Fortunius Licetus, published in 1616 and translated into French in 1708, has an interesting discourse on the subject:

One generally calls Monsters and considers with admiration anything which occurs rarely and greatly surpasses, in a good or evil way, the order and the laws of its own kind. Thus one has called Monsters the great men who, after achieving distinction by many heroic deeds, seemed to have overreached the forces of human nature and drawn very close to those of the Gods. Conversely such men were called monsters who, living like beasts, seeme to have shed their natural habits to put on those of the animals. Lastly, the same name was given either to women of surpassing beauty or to those whose deformities were a cause of fear. Yet one speaks thus but metaphorically and in vulgar talk, when, in proper speech—like that of a physician—one calls monsters any of those, among the animals, which come to life with limbs organized and ordered in a way different from and contrary to the Nature of their genitors; as, for example, a footless child, a girl with two heads, a child with the head of a dog, a Centaur and the like. … Lastly, I do not call Monsters the animals who differ in kin from their genitors because of some superfluous organ, such as hunchbacks, persons with a limp, or having elongated heads and so on … because such are a common sight and cause neither surprise nor admiration.²³

How and why do monsters appear? One can distinguish about ten causes, some of which would sometimes combine:²⁴

1. The divine will
2. The will of devils
3. Astrological configuration or “aspect”
4. The male seed
5. The menses (when too abundant or too scarce)
6. Unnatural or depraved copulation
7. The effects of the imagination
8. Unfortunate or awkward mechanical action
9. The diseases of the embryo
10. Heredity

The substantial number of possible “causes” clearly indicates that the real or fictional existence of monsters or of uncanny phenomena raised philosophical, theological, medical, and legal problems. As early as the thirteenth century, Henry Bracton, whose treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae was still an authority in the sixteenth century, had written that if a woman gave birth to a monster or a prodigy deprived of human shape, that creature could not be considered as a free subject nor as an inheritable one. The same legal restrictions applied if the woman gave birth to an offspring that turned out to be a monster, as when it uttered a roar when it ought to utter a cry. Bracton, however, would not call an offspring “monstrous”

although nature may have diminished or amplified its members: diminished them, as in the defects of fingers or such like; amplified them, as if it has more fingers or joints, as six or more, when it ought not to have more than five; if nature has rendered the members useless, as if it has been crooked or humpbacked or has had twisted limbs.²⁵

From a legal point of view, Richard, though he limps, is humpbacked, and has a shortened or withered arm, is not a monster. Yet one must point out that after his coronation, Richard becomes—as Francis Bacon puts it—a persona mixta cum sacerdote.²⁶ The Church, following biblical prohibitions, barred from sacerdotal functions all those whose bodies were too visibly blemished:

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of the seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is broken-footed, or broken-handed, or crookbacked, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; no man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the LORD made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.

(Leviticus 21: 16-21, King James version)

Though Shakespeare's character was neither legally nor even physically a monster (he had “blemishes”), yet because of the position he coveted and the way he conquered it, because of his distorted self and the way he experienced and controlled his own body, and because of the number of his physical and moral flaws, he probably inspired the awe, horror, and fascination of a monstrously warped and misshapen creature.

If a humble human being was disabled, misshapen, or crippled, the sight was upsetting enough, for even a beggar was a microcosm in the days when people were considered a mirror and an epitome of the universe. A human being's measurements were regarded as symbolic:

The manner of measuring [a man] agreeth two ways: for look how much a man is betweene the ends of his two longest fingers streching hys armes out. So long is hee betweene the sole of hys foote and the crowne of his head: and therefore the naturall Philosophers deeme man to be a little world.²⁷

This was all the more reason for a king to have, ideally, a body free from any blemish if he was to carry out adequately his kingly functions: to dispense justice, preserve the king's peace, maintain the coherence of the body politic, and cure the king's evil. The king's body as well as the body politic were supposed to symbolize the natural order of things. In 1558 John Knox expressed this concept as follows:

Augustine defines order to be that thing by the which God has appointed and ordained all things. Augustine will admit no order, where God's appointment is absent and lacks. And in another place, he says that order is a disposition, giving their own proper place to things that be unequal, which he terms in Latin Parium et Disparium, that is of things equal or like—or unequal and unlike. … He has set before our eyes two … mirrors and glasses, in which He wills that we should behold the order, which He has appointed and established in nature:

• a. the one is the natural body of man
• b. the other is the politic or civil body of that commonwealth, in which God by his own word has appointed an order.²⁸

The accession to the throne of a misshapen and criminal king in the fictional kingdom of a dramatic work made credible by its references to history was a means to create the archetypal figure of a fabulous and oversize tyrant, so fabulous indeed that it freed most real monarchs from the suspicion that they might be tyrants.

We must then examine more closely the rather strange circumstances attached to Richard's birth: he has been—so he says in the drama—

                    … 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—

(1.1.18-23)

“Before my time” and “scarce half made up,” as well as “unfinish'd” imply unachievement and incompleteness. Rueff, in his book of obstetrics, discusses the question of premature births. He asserts that in its seventh month “the infant is alwaies moved to the birth,” but if “hee remaineth in the womb” and comes forth to birth “the eight moneth following, hee cannot live at at all.” First he has been weakened by his attempt to come forth in the seventh month, and second, “the eight moneth is proper to Saturne, an enemy off all things which receive life.”²⁹

Although premature birth could be either favorable or unfavorable, Shakespeare, using two different versions of Richard's birth, indicates two “baneful” kinds of birth: a premature one (as indicated in Richard's speech) and a late one as implied in the young Duke of York's rejoinder to his grandmother, who has just said that Richard was “so long a-growing …” (2.4.19).

Marry (they say) my uncle grew so fast
That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old;
'Twas full two years ere I could get a tooth.

(2.4.27-29)

He seems to imply what Jean Rous reported, a belated and abnormal birth. Though obviously considered an ominous sign by Thomas More and in the play, it was not so in Pliny's Natural History, nor in the books of some authors who referred to it.³⁰

But for a child to be born “with the feete forwarde,” as Thomas More put it, was unquestionably a disastrous sign whose ominous meaning had an ancient tradition.³¹ In Rome, children thus born were called “Agrippa,” which Pliny explains as “aegre partos”—that is, painfully born. Du Cange's Glossarium elaborates on this idea: “Qui in pedes nascitus inversus, quasi aegre parto” (he who is born in an inverted position with the feet first in a way [is born] painfully).³² Nicole Belmont, from whose book I borrow this information,³³ adds a quotation from Pliny, who considers that in the right order of nature a child should come into the world with its head first and leave the world with its feet first. This idea seems to have been rather widespread. In The Spanish Mandeuile of Miracles one can read:

Others come to be borne with their feet forward, which is also passing dangerous. … Of these cam the linage of Agrippas in Rome, which is as much to say as Aegre parti, brought forth in pain, and commonly those that are so born, are held to be vnlucky, & of short life. Some say that Nero was so borne of his mother Agrippina.³⁴

A pamphlet published in 1580 and attributed to Antony Munday contains the following story:

A WOMAN OF LIX.YEERES DELIUERED OF THREE CHILDREN

A woman of lix.yeeres olde, named Margaret, her husband called John Bobroth the Clark of the Town. This woman for the space of xxv. weeks was diseased and no help could be had, but through this present accident shee was deliuered of three Children, their mouthes replenished with teeth as Children of three yeeres olde, the first borne spake saying. The day appointed which no man can shun. The second said. Where shall wee finde living to bury the dead? The third said. Where shall we finde corne to satisfie the hungrie?³⁵

An ancient tradition or rather a topos discussed by Ernst Curtius and William R. Elton is the convention of the “puer senex”: some children or teenagers have wisdom much above their age that compels admiration. Curtius points out that the convention was established by the beginning of the second century a.d. and continued at least to the seventeenth century.³⁶

Shakespeare gives the convention a strangely ironic slant. In Richard III Richard and Buckingham comment on the wisdom and wit of the young prince and his brother York:

RICH.
[Aside] So wise so young, they say do never live long.

(3.1.79)

RICH.
[Aside] Short summers lightly have a forward spring.

(3.1.94)

BUCK.
With what a sharp-provided wit he reasons!
To mitigate the scorn he gives his uncle,
He prettily and aptly taunts himself:
So cunning and so young is wonderful!

(3.1.132-35)

Richard, one could say, has also been a “puer senex,” but his qualities were far from being wise and understanding. Just as his birth produced an overgrown and frightening child, his adult traits denote the overgrowth of the animal part that in most men is balanced by the spiritual:

The midwife wonder'd and the woman cried,
“O Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!”
And so I was, which plainly signified
That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog.
Then since the heavens have shap'd my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.

(3 Henry VI 5.6.74-79)

The inversion between heaven and hell is clearly indicated here, to match, as it were, the inversion suggested by his birth. According to Nicole Belmont, since “the order of the world demands that one should enter the world head first and leave the world with one's feet forward,” to be born with one's legs forward is like a kind of death.³⁷ This belief was linked to the fact that in ancient times, “dead people [in Europe] were laid on couches with their feet oriented towards the door.”³⁸ The newborn babe appears inside the house without actually coming into it. In relation to birth, the house is both the place where the child appears without coming in and a place whose issue (for one who wishes to go out) has an analogy with the mother's womb.³⁹ But, Belmont continues, “a child which is born with its feet forward has already accomplished the reverse motion which denotes the end of its life. Even if it lives, it does not belong to this world: metaphorically speaking, it is already in after-life.”⁴⁰ Thomas More used a very apt phrase indeed when he wrote that Richard came into the world “as menne be borne outwarde.” In the play the Duchess of York speaks of her womb as of a deathbed:

O ill-dispersing wind of misery!
O my accursed womb, the bed of death!
A cockatrice hast thou hatch'd to the world,
Whose unavoided eye is murtherous.

(4.1.52-55)

Richard, to whom she gave birth, is indeed in the beyond, and in a way the beyond is hell (the word hell or its compounds appear sixteen times in the play). Moreover, judging by the way he describes himself in 3 Henry VI,

I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am myself alone.

(5.6.80-83)

He is a being entirely merged with himself. One can hardly say that he was ever delivered from his mother's womb: rather, he was let loose from “the kennel of [her] womb” like an “alien,” like an animal created with an instant ability to kill, a deadly creature or a hunter whose function is to devour the living and spread terror among them:

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death:
That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes
To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood,
That foul defacer of God's handiwork,
That excellent grand tyrant of the earth
That reigns in galled eyes of weeping souls,
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.

(4.4.47-54)

According to Elias Canetti, the living always react strongly to the obscure life of the dead. They experience fear and terror, for the dead are jealous of life and they want to ensnare or devour the living. Dying tyrants want to take their followers along with them into death: they are ready to unpeople the world so that no one should outlive them.

Those who have murdered a tyrant fear the revenge of their victim. They try to completely abolish the times when the tyrant lived. They give the world a new start and proclaim the emergence of a new era, beginning with year one of a new calendar.

It is frequent for the living, even when they lament the dead, to feel elated because they have outlived them. One can imagine a tyrant who exults at finding that he outlives his victims and yet lives in fear of them. Richard III is a murderer full of alacrity who gloats as much about the murders he has committed as about his being once again a survivor, indeed the survivor. Part of the gruesome comedy in Richard III derives from Richard's jubilant humor when he has made yet another victim and rejoiced at his own victory and survival.⁴¹

Richard's deformities, then, are significant in a variety of ways. His limping gait can have several meanings, the most obvious and least convincing being a metaphor of castration. It is noticeable that the leg, foot, or thigh have considerable significance in a variety of texts, whether biblical, ancient, medieval, or modern. After the sacrifice of an animal, the shoulder is one of the choice pieces reserved for God (Exod. 29:22-27; Lev. 10:14-15). Homer writes that the same parts are fit for sacrifice (Iliad 1.460, 2.423, 7.240; Odyssey 3.455). He also implies that the knee is a source of strength (Iliad 4.314, 19.354, 22.388). Ancient and medieval anatomy taught that the veins coming from the kidneys and the genitalia joined at the heel. In medieval literature, a king with a wounded leg could become sterile, which made him responsible for his kingdom turning into a wasteland. In Richard II Shakespeare explicitly links the moral sickness of the king and the waste that has spread throughout the kingdom:

Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land,
wherein thou liest in reputation sick,
And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Commit'st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee.
A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head,
And yet, incaged in so small a verge,
The waste is no whit lesser than thy land.

(2.1.95-103)

Gloucester's limp is mentioned in his opening soliloquy, then he stands by himself, gloating on his easy seduction of Lady Anne. He had reason to gloat, for according to popular beliefs, bodily flaws were thought to be evil signs and major obstacles to sympathy. So they were described in The Kalendar of Shepherdes, an almanac translated from the French in 1503 and reissued “at least seventeen times during the ensuing century and a half.”⁴² Portions of The Kalendar were pirated in The Compost of Ptolemus in which, among many pieces of advice concerning the future, one can read:

beware of all persons that have default of members naturally, as of foot, hand, eye, or other member; one that is crippled; and especially of a man that hath not a beard.

(Sig. H7)⁴³

Of course, stumbling was also a bad omen and in Richard III Hastings remarked on it after being arrested: “Three times to-day my foot-cloth horse did stumble, / and started when he look'd upon the Tower” (3.4.84-85). Yet limping also had its better side, so to speak, as Montaigne noted in his essay “Of the lame or crippel”:

Whether it be to the purpose, or from the purpose, it is no great matter. It is a common Proverbe in Italie, that He knowes not the perfect pleasure of Venus, that hath not laine with a limping Woman. Either fortune, or some particular accident have long since brought this by-saying in the peoples mouth: and it is well spoken of men as of women: For the Queene of the Amazons answered the Scithian, that wooed her to love-embracements. … The crooked man doth it best.⁴⁴

What is striking, however, in Montaigne's essay is that the lame or cripple are rather briefly dealt with, the main theme of the essay being the questionable character of human convictions. Here are the opening lines of the essay:

Two or three years are now past, since the yeere hath beene shortned tenne days in France. Oh how many changes are like to ensue this reformation! It was a right remooving of Heaven and Earth together, yet nothing remooveth from its owne place.⁴⁵

To associate the calendar with limping or halting—even if only by making those notions adjacent—is a way of commenting on time. As Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out:

A normal gait, by which the left foot and the right foot move in a regular alternative way, offers a symbolic representation of the recurrence of the seasons. [But if the recurrence is disrupted, if time is perturbed] a limping gait caused by two legs of unequal length, provides, according to the terms of the anatomic code, an appropriate signifier.⁴⁶

Now, Richard is a man in a hurry (“Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste [to come into the world], / And seek their ruin that usurp'd our right?” (3 Henry VI 5.6.72-73). He constantly confronts, or pits himself, or tries to overcome time. He was “sent before [his] time / Into this breathing world” (1.1.20-21). Most of his actions cause time to deviate from its natural course: Anne bemoans “th' untimely fall of virtuous Lancaster” (1.2.4). The moment Gloucester choses to court her is shockingly improper, for it associates courtship with funerals. Clarence's death warrant was delivered faster that it was revoked. Richard swiftly orders the illegal executions of Vaughan, Grey, and Rivers, as well as the beheading of Hastings, while the warrant for the execution is not yet written down: the brief scene in which the scrivener delivers his soliloquy (3.4.1-14) is perhaps one of the most telling dramatic comments on Richard's misappropriation of time. Another typical instance is the scene in which Richard, after the coronation, asks Buckingham to approve the murder of the princes, the latter answering that he needs some time to catch his breath and reminding Richard that he should now obtain the promised gift, the earldom of Hereford:

BUCK.
My lord—
K. Rich.
Ay—what's a'clock?
BUCK.
I am thus bold to put your Grace in mind
Of what you promis'd me.
K. Rich.
Well, but what's a'clock?
BUCK.
Upon the stroke of ten.
K. Rich.
Well, let it strike.
BUCK.
Why let it strike?
K. Rich.
Because that like a Jack thou keep'st the stroke
Betwixt thy begging and my meditation.
I am not in the giving vein to-day.

(4.2.108-16)

Richard's living against the tide of time confirms him in his role of political and spiritual enemy of the Kingdom of God, where the course of time is tuned according to the order of nature. John Rous explicitly compares him to Antichrist:

This king Richard, who was excessively cruel in his days, reigned for three years [sic] and a little more, in the way that Antichrist is to reign. And like the antichrist to come, he was confounded at his moment of greatest pride.⁴⁷

Thomas More also alludes, though less directly, to Richard as an antichrist figure. As Richard Sylvester points out, in the Latin version of More's Richard III,⁴⁸ Doctor Shaa designates himself as a saint, John the Baptist, who will expose the illegitimate marriage of Edward IV and open the way to Richard's coming, Richard being the “verus & indubitatus filius” (67/20-30). Even more striking, in Sylvester's view, is the ironic passage of the English text where Richard, “as a goodly continent prince clene & faultles, sent out of heauen into this vicious world for the amendment of mens manners” (54/24-26), chastises Jane Shore. Books and pamphlets concerning the Antichrist are indeed numerous in the sixteenth century. Dozens of them—mostly anti-Catholic, with the pope of Rome being described as the Antichrist—were circulated before 1600.⁴⁹ According to one of those, written by George Sohn, the Antichrist “is adversarie onelie to one parte of the doctrine of Christ, or else almost to the whole bodie thereof.”⁵⁰ Sometimes the Antichrist is described as a more secular figure, a tradition that has its roots in texts of the first or second century, when the Antichrist was a type of a God-opposing tyrant. Some of these texts contain a psychological description of this “man of sin,” as did the one found in a French translation of Saint Hippolytus.⁵¹ The Antichrist, in the early days of his coming, will be kind, amiable, peaceful, quiet, hate injustice, loathe gifts [bribes], love the Scriptures, revere priests, honor old age, and show himself full of mercy. He will help the widow and the orphan, love all his neighbors, restore friendship between men at war with one another. He will not possess gold nor covet riches; in fact, he will hate money. But all the while his true self will be hidden, for he will use perfect dissimulation to deceive people in order to become their king. When people see such conspicuous apparent virtue, they will all say: we shall obey you, for we recognize in you a just man. And this lawless, iniquitous, and malicious creature will mendaciously proclaim that he is unable, unfit, and unwilling to accept so great an honor but he will nevertheless accept it with counterfeited reluctance.

The Antichrist can thus be an antitype of the Christian prince. It is not surprising that a number of features described by Saint Hippolytus apply so well to Richard, whose representations by Thomas More and Shakespeare were guided by an imaginary silhouette of the political and spiritual archenemy.

Other abnormalities are in keeping with these features, such as Richard's shortened, weakened, or withered arm. Shakespeare does not say whether it is the right or the left one, but the matter is not important since the symbolism of both arms and hands is very rich and complex. God's left hand is related to justice, his right hand to mercy. In the act of blessing, the right hand symbolizes priestly authority. The left hand, when raised, can typify royal power. In Celtic mythology, Balor of the Evil Eye was a king or hero of the legendary Formorians,⁵² a deformed race said to have held Ireland in subjection. The Formorians were variously mutilated. Balor had one evil eye, so swollen that in battle, assistants had to lift the eyelid open with a hook. Richard, mutilated by nature, is compared to a basilisk or a cockatrice because he is thought to have an evil eye (and other less obvious powers), for a mutilation or a deformity is a price to be paid for the acquisition of magic gifts.⁵³

Richard's unbalanced and twisted body and his disposition, which make him incapable of having any natural rhythm in his life, prevent him from experiencing any form of bodily and spiritual integration, making him akin to a nonliving creature, or as someone living in the realm of the undead. As Ambroise Paré put it, the hand “is the organ of all organs and the instrument of all instruments.”⁵⁴ It would be impossible to give even a simplified idea of the many layers of meaning attached to the image of hands. Two aspects, however, can be pointed out: the healing power of the royal hand and the mediating attributes of human hands.

About healing “by touche alone” there is nothing I can add to Marc Bloch's definitive study.⁵⁵ Let me merely note that the power to cure the King's Evil was not a gift bestowed indiscriminately on each and every king:

The Apostles and primitive Christians did heale by touche alone. … The power of curing the Kings Evill is by the blessing of God granted to the Kings of Great Britain, and France, which is denied to other Christian Kings. And so Edward the Confessor, for his singular piety, cured not only the Kings Evill (which prerogative redounded to his Successors after him) but also other ulcers by touch alone, which his successors could not doe. …

… it is to be noted, that the … kings on whom God hath bestowed that favour, have it upon a certain condition, nor is it derived unto their successors, unlesse they be lawfull heires, and abide by the Christian faith. For if an Usurper (as there have bee suche in times past, and God knowes what shall be the destinies of Kingdoms) should depose a lawfull Prince from his Imperiall Throne, he should not with the Kingdome obtain this prerogative to himself.⁵⁶

Richard's shortened arm and his metaphorical kinship with Herod—whose diseases clearly meant that he could not be a healer—made the usurping king the opposite of a wonder-worker. Richard had only the hateful prerogative of spawning woe. His withered arm was a sure sign that, as bound up as he was within himself, he could never defeat his alienation, his utter solitude, for a proffered hand or two extended arms are mediators between oneself and the world. This notion is so self-evident that conclusive proof is not possible. A commentary from the Talmud may throw some light on concept since it examines the legality of actions consisting in transporting objects from private to public ground or vice versa, which are forbidden on the Sabbath: “See, for that the Lord hath given you the Sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days: abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day” (Exod. 16:29).⁵⁷

MISHNAH:

The poor man stands without and the master of the house within.

1. If the poor man stretches his hand within and places [an article] into the hand of the master of the house; or 2. if he takes [an article] from it and carries it out, the poor man is liable [for desecrating the Sabbath], and the master of the house is exempt.^a

again 1. if the master of the house stretches his hand without and places [an object] in the poor man's hand,

or 2. takes [an object] therefrom and carries it in, the master is liable while the poor man is exempt.

3. if the poor man stretches his hand within and the master takes [an object] from it, or places [an object] therein and he carries it out, both are exempt.

4. if the master stretches his hand without an the man takes [an object] from it, or places [an article] therein and he carries it inside, both are exempt.^b

a. because the poor man performs the two acts which together constitute “carrying out” in the Biblical sense. The master, on the other hand, is quite passive, performing no action at all.

b. in 3. and 4. each performs one act only, either removing from one domain or depositing in another.

GEMARA:

Abaye said: I am certain that a man's hand is neither like a public nor like a private domain:^c it is not like a public domain—[this follows] from the poor man's hand;^d it is not like a private domain—this follows from the hand of the master of the house.^e

c. If a man stands in one and stretches out his hand into the other, the hand is not accounted the same as his body, to have the legal status of the domain in which the body is.

d. For the Mishnah states that if the master takes an article from the poor man's hand stretched within, he is exempt.

e. If the poor man takes an object from it, he is not liable.

Since the hand belongs neither entirely to the private person nor to the public domain, it is an excellent mediating instrument between the two spheres: Richard's withered arm is the signifier of his incapacity to mediate between the sacred and the secular, between his body politic and his body natural.

Another infirmity evidencing Richard's lack of any quality of or capacity for integration is his hump. And while his limping gait, unusual birth, and being constantly off balance⁵⁸ aroused persistent rumors, gossip, and reports, Richard's withered arm was a known fact (it “was never other,” wrote Thomas More), so his claim that it had been shrunk by witchcraft was just another sign of formidable ability to deceive. Both his arm and his hump constantly recall the essential incompleteness of Richard's deeds and his existence.

A collection of several Italian comedies performed in France during the reign of Henri III has a number of illustrations, among them drawings of traditional characters of the Commedia dell'Arte. One of them is a hunchback. He is surrounded by a score of smaller characters that obviously have just been hatched.⁵⁹ His hump is like a pregnancy displaced backwards: it resembles human pregnancy, but at the same time suggests the laying of eggs. This inversion connotes bisexuality or hermaphroditism.⁶⁰ Richard (“I am myself alone”) ends up believing that he will be able to produce posterity through incest. Incest here can be understood as a means of self-reproduction, a snare to attract and avoid death, and a way of bringing the dead to life again, or to the state of undeath. The allusion to the Phoenix is Richard's morbid dream of self-sufficiency, Richard's chaotic body breeding deadly copies of himself. These various themes seem to emerge rather clearly during Richard's confrontation with Queen Elizabeth whose daughter—his niece, also named Elizabeth—he wants to marry. First, here is the theme of incest:

Q. Eliz.
What were I best to say? Her father's brother
Would be her lord? Or shall I say her uncle?
Or he that slew her brothers and her uncles?
Under what title shall I woo for thee,
That God, the law, my honor, and her love
Can make seem pleasing to her tender years?

(4.4.337-42)

Next comes the temptation of the devil, meaning oblivion of the past and death:

Q. Eliz.
Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
K. Rich.
Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good.
Q. Eliz.
Shall I forget myself to be myself?
K. Rich.
Ay, if yourself's remembrance wrong yourself.

(4.4.418-21)

And lastly the return of the dead to a limbo before birth, the theme of the Phoenix:

Q. Eliz.
Yet thou didst kill my children.
K. Rich.
But in your daughter's womb I bury them;
Where, in that nest of spicery they will breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

(4.4.422-25)

The egg, strongly suggested by Richard's hump, is frequently a symbol of the universe and is linked to the creation of the world. But Richard's hump, as he implies himself in his first soliloquy, is rather an image of chaos. And chaos—imminent and nearly victorious—is a central, secret, and obvious conceit in Richard III.

It is then fitting and admirably cogent that Richard should end divided against himself, self-love turning into self-hatred, as is evident in his last soliloquy. One could then envisage that the tetralogy has a strong and logical construction, if not a structure: the murderous conflict begins by encompassing distant enemies in a foreign land, continues in opposing rival families, pits close relatives and friends against each other, and ends in the self-division of the very character who personifies the evil and the violence spread throughout the nation and within the families.

Notes

1. Played for the first time at the Royal Shakespeare Threatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 14 June 1984, with Antony Sher in the role of Richard. For a review of recent productions, see Lois Potter, “The Actor as Regicide: Recent Versions of Richard III on the English Stage,” in Le tyran: Shakespeare contre Richard III, ed. Dominique Goy-Blanquet and Richard Marienstras (Amiens: Sterne, Presses de l'UFR Clerc, Université de Picardie, 1990), 140-150. For an exhaustive survey of critical reactions to this production, see R. Chris Hassel, Jr., “Context and Charisma: The Sher-Alexander Richard III And Its Reviewers,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (Winter 1985): 630-43.

2. S. P. Cerasano, “Churls Just Wanna Have Fun: Reviewing Richard III,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (Winter 1985): 619.

3. Antony Sher, Year of the King (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985), 21, quoted by Cerasano in “Reviewing,” 619.

4. 1.3.241; 1.3.245; 1.2.57.

5. 1.2.50; 1.3.143.

6. Cerasano, “Reviewing,” 620-21. The author refers to pp. 144-47 of Antony Sher's Year of the King.

7. Ibid., 621.

8. Ibid., 623.

9. 2 Henry VI 3.1.339-40.

10. On Richard's literary kinship with the morality Vice, his deliberate inversion of all Christian values, his function as a Scourge of God, and his relation to other literary, biblical, or political texts, see the penetrating discussion of Antony Hammond in his introduction to the Arden edition of King Richard III, (London: Methuen, 1981) 99-115.

11. On some of these influences, as well as on the importance of the medieval cycles in the re-creation of Richard, see Scott Colley, “Richard III and Herod,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Winter 1986): 451-58. See also S. S. Hussey, “How Many Herods in the Middle English Drama?” Neophilologus 48 (1964): 252-59.

12. The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), lines 422-25, quoted by Scott Colley, “Richard III and Herod,” 456.

13. Patrick Collins, The N-Town Plays and Medieval Picture Cycles (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1979), 37, quoted by Colley, “Richard III and Herod,” 456.

14. Ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1745), after a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. The manuscript of the author (John Rous, or Ross) is in the British Library. The text has also been edited and translated by Alison Hanham in Richard III and His Early Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

15. Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third, ed. Richard Sylvester, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). English and Latin texts are printed on facing pages. The quoted phrases are, respectively, p. 7, line 20 (English text) and line 16 (Latin text).

16. Ibid., p. 7, lines 23-29 (English text), lines 19-25 (Latin text). The words “as menne bee borne outwarde” are in the English text only. The Latin text merely mentions Agrippa: “Quin Agrippam etiam natum eum pedibusque prealatis exigisse ferunt” (Sylvester, p. 167, note 7/20-21).

17. Richard thinks himself “unfinish'd, sent before [his] time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up” (King Richard III 1.1.20-21).

18. Jean Céard, “Tératologie et tératomancie au XVIe siècle,” in Monstres et prodiges au temps de la Renaissance, ed. M.-T. Jones Davies, Centre de Recherches sur la Renaissance (Paris: Touzot, 1980), 5. The quotations of Ambroise Paré come from Des Monstres et prodiges, ed. Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 3.

19. Saint Augustine, City of God, ed. David Knowles, trans. Henry Bettenson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 980 (bk. 21, chap. 8), quoted in part by Céard, “Tératologie,” 5-6.

20. The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1933), bk. 2, chap. 30, p. 640.

21. James Rueff, The Expert Midwife, or An Excellent and most necessary Treatise of the generation and birth of Man. Six bookes. Tr. into English (London, 1637), bk. 5, p. 153.

22. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 39-40.

23. De monstrorum causis, natura et differentiis (Padua, 1616) trans. into French by Jean Palfyn as Description Anatomique des Parties de la Femme qui servent à la génération, avec un Traité des Monstres (Leiden, 1708), 1-3.

24. The alleged causes of deformities are given with some details by Cesare Taruffi, Storia della Teratologia, 8 vols. (Bologna, 1881), 1:176-280.

25. Henrici de Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. and trans. Sir Travers Twiss, 6 vols. (London, 1878), 6:458-60. See also 1:34-36 and 1:554-56. Sir Edward Coke confirmed this ruling at the beginning of the seventeenth century: “a monster not having the shape of mankind, but in any part bearing resemblance of the brute creation, has no heritable blood and cannot be heir to any land, even though it be brought forth in marriage; but although it hath deformity in any part of his body yet if it has human shape, it may be heir.” quoted by C. J. S. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (London: Williams and Norgate, 1930), 126.

26. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), 2:645.

27. Pomponius Mela, The rare and singular worke of P. Mela, Whereunto is added, that of J. Solinus Polyhistor (London, 1590).

28. John Knox, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women ([Geneva], 1558). I use the text annotated and edited by Philippe Cerf for his unpublished master's dissertation, “John Knox, John Aylmer: A Controversy about the Acceptability of Women Ruling,” Université Paris VII, U.F.R. d'anglais Charles V, 1977, 76-77.

29. Rueff, The Expert Midwife, bk. 1, p. 65.

30. “Certaine it is also, that some children are borne into the world with teeth, as M. Curius, who thereupon was surnamed Dentatus; and Cn. Papyrius Carbo, both of them very great men and right honorable personages. In women the same was counted but unluckie thing, and presaged some misfortune.” The Historie of the World commonly called The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601) 164 (bk. 7, chap. 16).

    A similar opinion occurs in The excellent and pleasant Worke of Iulius Solinus Polyhistor, trans. out of Latin into English by Arthur Golding, Gent. (London, 1587), sign. D^v. Anthonio de Torquemada also writes, “Children to be born toothed, is a thing so common, that we have seen it often, among the auncients, as Pliny and Soline writeth,” in The Spanish Mandeuile of Miracles. Or The Garden of curious Flowers (London, 1600), fol. 8.

31. Shakespeare refers to this ominous manner of birth in 3 Henry VI. After murdering Henry VI, Richard says, “I came into the world with my legs forward” (5.6.71).

32. Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, Glossarium mediae and infimae latinitatis, 10 vols. (Paris, 1883), s.v. “Agrippa.”

33. Nicole Belmont, Le signes de la naissance (Paris: Plon, 1971), 131-35. Belmont refers to Pliny, Natural History, bk. 7, chap. 4, p. 8.

34. Polyhistor, translated by Arthur Golding, writes, “it is against nature for the birth to come forth with his feete forward. … Such as are so borne are for the most parte unfortunate and shorte liued.” The excellent and pleasant worke of Iulius Solinus Polyhistor (London, 1585), fol. 8, sig. D^v.

35. [Antony Munday], A view of sundry Examples, Reporting many straunge murthers, sundry persons periured, Signs and tokens of Gods anger towards vs. What straunge and monstrous children haue of late beene borne … (London, 1580), sig. C4 (STC 18281).

36. W. R. Elton notes, following Curtius, that it was Gregory the Great who gave the “puer senex” topic a lasting life by writing at the beginning of his Vie de Saint Benoît: “He was a man whose life was venerable … already when a child he had the understanding of a mature man” (“Fuit vir vitae venerabilis … ab ipso suae pueritiae tempore cor gerens senile”), quoted by Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. from the German by W. R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 98-101. See William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1968), 319-20, 322.

37. Belmont, Les signes de la naissance, 132.

38. Ibid., 135-36.

39. Ibid., 138-39.

40. Ibid., 145.

41. Here I follow rather closely Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. from the German by Carol Stuart (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 305-06, 316-17.

42. On the popularity of almanacs and similar literature, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 295-96. The quotation is on 295.

43. The Compost of Ptolemus (London, 1532?). I owe this reference to Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 296.

44. The French version of “The crooked man doth it best” is “Le boiteux le faict le mieux.” The Essayes of Montaigne, 935. This idea seems to have been rather widespread. Pierre Petit, in his Traité historique sur les Amazones, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1718), 1:265-67 repeats it, tracing it to Erasmus, Athenaeus, and Aristotle.

45. The Essayes of Montaigne, 928. Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian calendar by “leaping” from 9 to 20 December 1581.

46. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques 2: Du miel aux cendres (Paris: Plon, 1967), 399-400. For various meanings attached to the lame or to lameness, see the admirable articles of Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguïté et renversement: Sur la structure énigmatique d'Oedipe-Roi” and “Le Tyran boiteux: d'Oedipe à Périandre,” in Oedipe et ses mythes, ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Brussels: Editions Complexe), 1988.

47. “Iste rex Ricardus diebus suis ultra modum crudelis trienno & parum ultra ad instar Antechristi regnaturi regnavit. Et sicut Antichristus in futuro in maxima sublimitate sua confundetur.” John Rous, Historia Regum Angliae, 218, Trans. A. Hanham Richard III, p. 123.

48. P. lxxii, note 2.

49. Christopher Hill made a survey of later literature in Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). For an earlier period see Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).

50. George Sohn, A Briefe and Learned Treatise conteining a true description of the Antichrist, who was foretold by the Prophets and Apostles [trans. from the Latin] (Cambridge, 1592), facing p. 2.

51. Saint Hippolyte, De la venue de l'Ante-Christ (Paris, 1602), 13, facing 14, 14.

52. I owe this information to Edward S. Gifford, Jr., The Evil Eye: Studies in the Folklore of Vision (New York: Macmillan Co., 1958), 15.

53. On this idea, and on the role of the basilisk in the play, see the remarkable article of Ann Lecercle-Sweet, “Corps, Regard, Parole: Basilisk and Antichrist in Richard III” in Le tyran: Shakespeare contre Richard III, ed. Goy-Blanquet and Marienstras, 38.

54. Les oeuvres d'Ambroise Paré, Conseiller et premier chirurgien du Roy (Paris, 1579), book 2, chap. 20, p. 205.

55. Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (1924; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1983).

56. James Primrose, Popular Errours: Or the Errours of the People in Physick (London, 1651), 437-38, 439. Other authors assert that if a king has the power to cure the scrofula, he is ipso facto a lawful king and must not accept papal censure: see William Tooker, Charisma sive donum sanationis. Seu Explicatio … de solemni & sacra curatione strumae (London, 1597), 91.

57. The Babylonian Talmud, gen. ed. I. Epstein, Treatise Shabbath, vol. 1, trans. H. Freedman (London: Soncino Press, 1938), 1-2, 6.

58. On this aspect of the character, see Lecercle-Sweet, “Corps, regard, parole,” esp. 38-39.

59. Agne Beijer, Recueil de plusieurs fragments des premières comédies italiennes qui ont esté representées en France sous le règne de Henri III. Recueil dit de Fossard (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1928).

60. This interpretation owes much to my old and dear New York friend, the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr. Sheldon Bach. Again, many thanks to him.