[In the following essay, Knights examines the structure and method of characterization of Richard III, considering the drama as more than simply a political morality play.]

To call Shakespeare's Histories ‘political’ plays is simply one way of indicating that they deal with such matters as the nature of power—and the conflict of powers—within a constituted society, and with the relation of political exigencies to the personal life of those caught up in them. In other words, they belong not with the limited class of Elizabethan chronicle plays, but with that extensive range of world literature that includes Antigone, Athalie, The Possessed and Under Western Eyes. To say this is not of course to offer a definition: it merely suggests the nature of the interest that we bring to bear. What that interest finds to engage and direct it in such plays as Richard III and Julius Caesar is a matter for particular criticism: there is no formula that will help us. But there is one preliminary generalization that may be made. Shakespeare's early plays show an increasingly subtle relation between observation and what—for want of a better word—we may call inwardness. It is observation that strips off pretence, shows us how the world goes, points a useful moral. But at its furthest reach it can do no more than offer a truth that we acknowledge about other people—the Bastard's ‘Commodity, the bias of the world …’, or Dr. Stockman's summing up in An Enemy of the People:

I only want to drum into the heads of these curs the fact that the liberals are the most insidious enemies of freedom—that party programmes strangle every young and vigorous truth—that considerations of expediency turn morality and justice upside down.

Inwardness on the other hand is not only the probing of character and motive, it involves the observer: some revelation of what is usually concealed prompts not only dramatic sympathy but a sense that something potential in the spectator is being touched on. It is the development of this quality that, above all, links the political plays with the great tragedies—with Macbeth, for example, which is simultaneously political play and universal tragedy. In the plays before us there is indeed no clear line of progression, but we shall, I think, appreciate more vividly what each play has to offer if we see it not simply as an isolated achievement but as pointing towards the masterpieces that lie outside the scope of this study.

Richard III (1592-3) is clearly linked to the three parts of Henry VI by what Dr. Tillyard calls ‘the steady political theme: the theme of order and chaos, of proper political degree and civil war, of crime and punishment’; but, unlike its predecessors, it is very much more than a dramatic presentation of the Tudor view of history. It is not simply a play about the providential accession of the House of Tudor, it is, in the first place, an elaborately formal dramatization of power-seeking in a corrupt world, held together by what Rossiter calls a ‘basic pattern of retributive justice’.¹

The formal pattern of the play has often been described, and certainly it is a contrivance of great ingenuity. Basically (as Dover Wilson, following Moulton, points out), it is composed of a complicated system of nemeses: crime brings punishment, for, in the words of York in 3 Henry VI, ‘Measure for measure must be answered’, or, in the words of Buckingham in this play, ‘Wrong hath but wrong, and blame [sc. fault] the due of blame’. Clarence (who broke his promise to Warwick and was one of those who killed Edward, the Lancastrian Prince of Wales) goes to his death in the Tower just as Hastings is released. Hastings, hearing of the death of the Queen's kindred at Pomfret, exults in his own security:

Think you, but that I know our state secure,
I would be so triumphant as I am?

(III.ii.81-82)

just before he is hustled to his death by Richard and Buckingham. Buckingham, ‘the deep revolving, witty Buckingham’, who plays his part as Richard's ‘other self’ with something of his master's swagger, breaks with Richard partly because of the proposed murder of the Princes, partly because he can't get payment for his services: when he too falls and is led to execution, he recalls the false oath with which he sealed his reconciliation with the Queen's party:

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

(V.i.20-22)

As for the arch-contriver, there is the succession of eleven ghosts before Bosworth to remind him—and us—what he is now paying for. This kind of repetition in the action gives an effect of irony both to the mutual pledges and to the boastful self-assertion of the characters; whilst at the same time the device of formal accusation of one character by another keeps the crimes committed constantly in view—each is, as it were, his brother's bad conscience. The effect is to present almost all these people as interlocked in a ‘destiny’ made of ‘avoided grace’ (IV.iv.219).

The formal patterning of the action is of course paralleled in the verbal structure: ‘the patterned speech of the dialogue … is fundamentally one with the ironic patterns of the plot’ (Rossiter). I do not know whether rhetorical devices are more numerous here than in any other of Shakespeare's plays; they are certainly more obtrusive. No purpose would be served by listing the various figures of speech—alliteration, repetition, antithesis, stichomythia, and more recondite Elizabethan ‘figures’—it is enough if we notice the stiff formal texture of so much of the verse:

ANNE.
Lo, in these windows that let forth thy life
                                                  [the wounds of the dead Henry VI]
I pour the helpless balm of my poor eyes.
O cursed be the hand that made these holes!
Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it!
More direful hap betide that hated wretch,
That makes us wretched by the death of thee,
Than I can wish to adders, spiders, toads,
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives!

(I.ii.12-20)

GLOUCESTER.
Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.
ANNE.
Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make
No excuse current but to hang thyself.
GLOU.
By such despair, I should accuse myself.
ANNE.
And, by despairing, shouldst thou stand excused
For doing worthy vengeance on thyself,
That did unworthy slaughter upon others.

(I.ii.81-88)

Q. Elizabeth.
If you will live, lament: if die, be brief

(II.ii.43)

DUCHESS of York.
Dead life, blind sight, poor mortal living ghost,
Woe's scene, world's shame, grave's due by life usurp'd,
Brief abstract and record of tedious days,
Rest thy unrest on England's lawful earth,
Unlawfully made drunk with innocent blood!

(IV.iv.26-30)

These are characteristic examples; and the internal patterning of the verse is emphasized by the formal stance of the characters, as when Richard and Anne engage in a ‘keen encounter of our wits’, or when Queen Margaret makes a late appearance (clean contrary to historical fact and probability—‘Here in these confines slily have I lurk'd’) solely that she may join with Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York in a prolonged antiphonal lament that serves, once more, to recall the crimes and miseries of the past that have made the wretched present. Together, the elements of rhetorical speech and carefully balanced action combine to produce a complicated echoing effect of revenge and mutual wrong.

Yet what we have to do with is not a self-enclosed world of evil. The characters, it is true, move in a dense atmosphere of hatred, suspicion, treachery and fear, but the standards against which we, the spectators, are expected to judge ‘the grossness of this age’,² are firmly presented. This is not only a matter of explicit religious reference, as when the Second Murderer of Clarence surprisingly quotes Scripture—

How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands
Of this most grievous murder—

(I.iv.272)

Shakespeare had already at command more varied means of awakening the moral imagination. When compared with the second part of Clarence's dream, which is explicitly about hell, the first part may at first seem almost extraneous to the matter in hand: in fact it is an effective symbolist transformation of the more explicit moral commentary:

Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks,
A thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon,
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalu'd jewels,
All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and, in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems. …

(I.iv.24-31)

This, we may say, is a Shakespearean condensation of the contrast that runs all through Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. At the other extreme is the dialogue on conscience between the murderers of Clarence:

FIRST Murderer.
How dost thou feel thyself now?
SECOND Murderer.
Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.
FIRST Murderer.
Remember our reward, when the deed's done.
SECOND Murderer.
‘Zounds! he dies! I had forgot the reward.
FIRST Murderer.
Where's thy conscience now?
SECOND Murderer.
O, in the Duke of Gloucester's purse.
FIRST Murderer.
So when he opens his purse to give us our reward, thy conscience flies out.
SECOND Murderer.
'Tis no matter, let it go: there's few or none will entertain it.
FIRST Murderer.
What if it come to thee again?
SECOND Murderer.
I'll not meddle with it: it makes a man a coward: a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour's wife, but it detects him. 'Tis a blushing shamefast spirit, that mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills a man full of obstacles; it made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found; it beggars any man that keeps it; it is turn'd out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and live without it.

(I.iv.120ff)

Irrelevant from the point of view of ‘plot’, this—which has obvious parallels in the later plays—is clearly a low-life variation on the main theme. (‘Conscience’, says Richard, when he has just suffered his worst defeat at its hands, ‘is but a word that cowards use.’). Nor, if we remember the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman, shall we find anything incongruous in the humour. The serious comedy of this scene is one more reminder that behind Richard III is the tradition of the morality play.³

Now all this, although necessary, has done little to bring into focus what it is that makes the play worth watching or reading, what makes it indeed characteristically Shakespearean: that is, the felt presence of a creative energy centering in, but not confined to, the figure of Richard of Gloucester. It is something that takes possession of our imagination as soon as Richard declares himself in his opening soliloquy.

… Grim-visag'd War hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds,
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty,
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain. …

(I.i.9ff)

There is a colloquial vividness here that reminds us of Mosca's self-revelation at the opening of the third act of Volpone, but the total effect is quite un-Jonsonian. The idiomatic gusto—the pleasure in speaking words that have the well-directed aim of caustic popular speech—points forward to the Bastard, and will be an element in the poetry of all the greater plays. And this blends unobtrusively with effects of rhetoric and artifice: consider, for example, how the alliteration insists on a slight meaningful pause after ‘spy’ and ‘descant’ in the lines,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.

What is not Jonsonian is the felt presence of a world behind the lines—a world of strutting gallants and affected ladies, with, by contrast, the dogs barking at the malformed Richard; and behind this, pressing on it, is the private world of the man who has always felt himself to be outside the world's game and will, in consequence, simply play his own.⁴

It is the energy with which Richard plays his part—forthright wooer, plain blunt man, reluctant king (‘O! do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham’), satirical commentator on the world's affairs and machiavellian schemer—it is this that makes him into a commanding figure. But we should certainly be wrong to regard him solely as an ‘engaging monster’ to whose successful contrivance we give a reluctant admiration. Not only is Richard, like the other political figures, placed firmly within a framework of explicit moral reference, the energy that informs his language also manifests itself in other ways. I do not intend to take up again the question of ‘character’ in Shakespeare.⁵ It is clear that if Shakespeare was intent on something more than—something different from—the presentation of life-like characters, his figures are never merely embodied abstractions: in some sense we feel them as if they were persons, and we are made explicitly aware of those aspects of their assumed life history (Othello's generalship, Coriolanus' ties to his mother) that are relevant to the main design. In the case of Richard of Gloucester this means that Shakespeare compels us to take into account, and to give full weight to, his deformity—and his rancour at his deformity—that is insisted on in his first soliloquy. When, in Act II, scene iv, young York retails the gossip, picked up from his mother, that his uncle Gloucester was born with teeth, it seems a mere repetition of the legend to which Gloucester had himself subscribed in 3 Henry VI (V.vii.53-54 and 70ff.). The effect, however, is very different; for whereas in the earlier play the abnormality seemed little more than part of the stock legend of the monster (‘which plainly signified That I should snarl and bite and play the dog’), the present context enforces a change of tone and implication. Gloucester—his mother has just told us—‘was the wretched'st thing when he was young’, and this unobtrusive substitution of the real for the conventional momentarily shifts the balance of our sympathies and antipathies, just as when, later, young York gives his uncle a ‘scorn’ about his hunchback (III.i.128-135). There is to be sure no attempt to blur judgement with a sentimental ‘understanding’. But the fact remains that in the presentation of the zestfully sardonic villain there are some disturbing reverberations.

A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild and furious. …

(IV.iv.168-70)

It does not seem fanciful to say that this—from a further exchange between mother and son—presents in miniature the Delinquent's Progress to a manhood that is ‘proud, subtle, sly, and bloody’ (IV.iv.172).⁶

In Richard III, although the various conventions are not yet welded into a unity, the connexion between linguistic vitality and energy of moral insight is already apparent. It is not only that Richard's lively idiom ‘cuts through the muffled hypocrisies of language’.⁷ Even in the elaborately stylized scenes Shakespeare is aiming at something more subtle than a self-conscious display of rhetorical skill: these too can precipitate a moment of lucid truth about human nature; as when Anne gives a somnambulistic half-assent to Richard (‘I would I knew thy heart’) when he has woven round her his net of sophistrïes, which she knows to be such (I.ii.33-224), or when Queen Elizabeth, engaged in a formal rhetorical duel with Richard (IV.iv.376-80), shows him, step by step, that there is nothing he can swear by and be believed—neither honour, nor self, nor religion:

Q. Eliz.
Swear then by something that thou hast not wrong'd.
K. Rich.
Then, by myself—
Q. Eliz.
                                                            Thyself is self-misus'd.
K. Rich.
Now, by the world—
Q. Eliz.
                                                                                'Tis full of thy foul wrongs.
K. Rich.
My father's death—
Q. Eliz.
                                                                                Thy life hath it dishonour'd.
K. Rich.
Why then, by God—
Q. Eliz.
                                                                                God's wrong is most of all.

But perhaps the most striking example of artifice working in the service of psychological realism is the climactic scene of Richard's visitation before Bosworth by the ghosts of his victims (V.iii.119ff.). Judged by the standards of the later Shakespeare the stiffly formal projection of suppressed guilt is crudely done. But this ‘morality masque’, this ‘homily in fancy dress’, does not stand alone; it leads directly to Richard's soliloquy on awakening:

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason: why?
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself. …

Touches of melodrama should not prevent us from seeing that Richard's dialogue with himself is, as Palmer says, ‘no empty catechism, but a dialogue pointed at the heart of the eternal problem of conscience and personality’. It not only points forward to the deeper searchings of the self-division caused by evil in Macbeth, it helps to explain why Richard III is so much more than an historical pageant, more even than a political morality play. It is one instance among others of Shakespeare's sure sense—his sane, sure probing—of what lies behind the heavy entanglements of public action.

Notes

1. Whether directly, or mediately through the chronicles, Shakespeare was deeply indebted to More's Life of Richard, which was ‘an attack on the non-moral statecraft of the early Sixteenth Century.’—R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, (1935) p. 117.

2. Buckingham, objecting to the Cardinal's reluctance to fetch the young Duke of York from sanctuary:

   You are too senseless-obstinate, my lord,
   Too ceremonious and traditional.
   Weigh it but with the grossness of this age,
   You break not sanctuary in seizing him.

   (III.i.44-47)

3. Cf. Dover Wilson's Introduction to his edition of the play, pp. xvi-xvii. There is of course more sardonic humour in the scene (III.vii.) in which Gloucester is ‘persuaded’ to accept the crown.

4. There is an excellent account of this soliloquy by D. A. Traversi in his essay, ‘Shakespeare: the Young Dramatist’, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, 2, The Age of Shakespeare, pp. 180-2.

5. See my essay, ‘The Question of Character in Shakespeare’, in More Talking of Shakespeare (1959), edited by John Garrett.

6. See Grace Stuart, Narcissus: a Psychological Study of Self Love (1956).

7. ‘In scorn or indignation, such writers as Dickens, Heine and Baudelaire sought to cut through the muffled hypocrisies of language’. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1960), p. 25.