SOURCE: Adair, Vance. “Back to the Future: Subjectivity and Anamorphosis in Richard III.” Critical Survey 9, no. 3 (1997): 32-58.

[In the following analysis of Richard III informed by Lacanian and poststructuralist theory, Adair draws thematic links between Richard's monstrous physical and psychological deformities and the drama's problematic representation of history.]

… the unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area, I would say, of the unborn.

I. DIFFICULT BIRTHS

Having confounded his own expectations in the successful wooing of Lady Anne, Richard has recourse to a model of ego formation that, for modern audiences at least, has much in common with the Lacanian archetype:

I do mistake my person all this while:
Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,
Myself to be a marv'llous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(I.ii.252-58, 262-63)

Internalising the gaze of the Other, in this case that of Lady Anne, Richard's acquisition of a looking glass is accompanied by an idealisation of body image that is redolent of the ‘jubilation’ experienced by the subject of Lacan's mirror stage. Briefly, in the mirror stage the ego is formed in terms of identification with one's specular image, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture upon seeing himself in the mirror will ‘jubilantly assume the upright position’ (Lacan 1977, 2). The apparently ‘orthopaedic effect’ of captation by the mirror image would appear particularly apposite for a character that is frequently disposed to descanting upon on his own deformity. This transition from an uncoordinated body image, the corps morcele, to the Gestalt of bodily wholeness, however, is irreducible to a myth of origins. As Jane Gallop has argued, the mirror stage involves a temporal dialectic at once anticipatory and retroactive which is of paradigmatic significance for Lacan's understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and the signifying chain:

The mirror image would seem to come after the body in bits and pieces and organise them into a unified image. But actually, that violently unorganised image only comes after the mirror stage so as to represent what came before. What appears to precede the mirror stage is simply a projection or a reflection. There is nothing on the other side of the mirror.

(Gallop 1988, 78)

The mirror stage, it seems, is the threshold for a paradoxical short circuit from the ‘not yet’ to the ‘always-already’. Lacan's sustained engagement with paradoxical models of temporality attests to the need to rearticulate the question of teleology in terms of the movement of desire which, like signification, always runs behind the signifying production itself.¹ Of central importance is the concept of the ‘future anterior’ which is given its most succinct definition in Lacan's argument that ‘What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what it was, since it is no more, or the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming’ (Lacan 1977, 86).

If anamorphosis is the favoured Lacanian motif for the analysis of the retroactive dynamic of desire in the Imaginary, what can be called a temporal anamorphosis provides the topological model for the Symbolic. As early as 1953 Lacan argued that:

The past and the future correspond precisely to one another. And not any old how—not in the sense that you might believe that analysis indicates, namely from the past to the future. On the contrary, precisely in analysis because its technique works, it happens in the right order—from the future to the past.

(Lacan 1988, 157)

By reading events ‘backward’, so to speak, Lacan assented to this anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in retrospect, viewed from within the symbolic horizon. In a strictly Lacanian reading, subjectivity and its attendant ‘self-consciousness’ inheres at this decentring point of anamorphous discord: ‘normal reality’ is perceptible only at a point where ‘it thinks remains a formless stain’.

By drawing upon the theoretical problematic yielded by Lacan's investigation of anamorphosis, and how it relates to the cognate psychoanalytical domains of repetition, the uncanny and the gaze, this article seeks to argue that, in its ostensible production of history, Shakespeare's Richard III is besieged by similar problems that centre crucially around the ‘deformed figure’ of Richard. If being ‘sent into the world in a less than finished state’ indicates for Freud how prematurity is a founding condition of subjectivity, Richard's declaration that he was ‘sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up’ (I.i.20-21), is not the only occasion where his misshapen body is aligned with anxieties of origination. In III Henry VI he is called ‘an indigested and deformed lump’ (V.vi.51) by the king, a description echoed in Clifford's later depiction of Gloucester as a ‘foul indigested lump’ (ll. 157-58). The precise nature of Richard's deficiency becomes a confused affair when it is revealed that he had ‘Teeth … in thy head when thou wast born’ (ll.54), an image that is repeated by Queen Margaret in her vituperative assault in Richard III:

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;

(IV.iv.47-50)

As a ‘lump of foul deformity’ (I.ii.58), Richard is also imbued with this peculiar morphology of lack and surplus in John Rous' history, written in 1492, which relates how the royal birth was complicated by the fact that Richard remained in his mother's womb for five years and was born with teeth and hair down to his shoulders.²

As facilitator to the Tudor succession, Richard is not the only monster in Elizabethan tracts to have his epochal significance distinguished by a ‘birth that is, simultaneously, both too early and too late’. An account from 1600 relates how ‘A Strange and miraculous accident happened in the Cittie of Purmenent, on New yeare's even last past 1599, of a young child which was heard to cry in the Mothers wombe before it was borne’ (Wolfe 1599).

As a paradox of causation, the designation of Richard as a ‘monster’, I would like to suggest, attests to pervasive anxieties in the text's representation of history. Although frequently attributed to divine will, this proliferation of narratives in the sixteenth century, as Katherine Park and Lorraine J. Daston have argued, inevitably circulated around the difficult question of ‘how to tell which monsters arise in the course of nature and which are expressly produced as signs by God’ (Daston 1982, 34).³ Elevated to the status of a cultural milieu following the momentous upheavals of the Reformation, the study of monsters cathected a crisis of authority in narratives of historical progress. The doctrine of Aristotle, which provides the discursive frame for most early modern accounts, characterises the monster as a paradox of causation which accomplishes an erasure of filiation: ‘anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity’, later in the text he similarly avers that ‘monstrosities come under the class of offspring which is unlike its parents’ (Aristotle 1953, 402, 425).

This somewhat perplexing preoccupation with the question of Richard's origins has found its way into the text's critical history, paramount of which is E. M. W. Tillyard's discussion in Shakespeare's History Plays that reveals anxieties over the place that the text should be assigned in the Shakespeare canon. Attempts to adduce what should be considered ‘historical in the context of the play’ invariably confronts the issue of Richard's deviant morphology. The monster, qua diegetic form, is ultimately an agency within the text that holds the place of a certain formal disturbance in its fantasmatic field. Initially, Tillyard considers the question of authority in terms of an overarching telos of the artistic development of the author. If Richard is the victim of arrested development, he is, in fact, a dissimulated effect of his literary genitor's immaturity:

He Shakespeare was to do better when he matured, but in Richard III he delivered himself of what he was good for at that time. Not being the fully accomplished artist he had to labour prodigiously and could not conceal the effort.

(Tillyard 1981, 205)

In a text which Coppelia Kahn has correctly identified as suggesting ‘the importance of the mother, rather than the father, in the formation of masculine identity’ (Kahn 1981, 63), Tillyard's metaphors reveal a highly vexed relationship towards the question of authority in terms of a dispute over paternity. The claim that the text fails to ‘conceal the traces of its production’ not only encodes artistic impropriety as a peculiarly feminine vice, the putative failure of Richard III to successfully demarcate a space between the author and his work relocates Tillyard's ambivalence about the text's representation of history within a consideration of the masculinisation of Shakespeare himself. Assuming that Aristotle was correct in his argument that what makes the monster monstrous is that it serves as a reminder that paternity can never really be proven, Tillyard's remarks are similarly concerned with a recovery of the father's image.⁴ Indeed, such anxieties acquire considerable irony in connection with the text's bibliographical history. A speech by Richard in Q1 of III Henry VI, which is frequently offered as an apology for his subsequent villainy, is prefixed by a line that is not contained in the Folio text:

I had no father, I am like no father
I have no Brother, I am like no Brother:
And this word (love) which Gray-beards call pure,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me.

(Kahn 1981, 63)

Tillyard's contention that Shakespeare was ‘to do better’ attempts the solicitation of a paternal presence on behalf of a character noted for eloquent pronouncements on his own perceived alienation, ‘I am myself alone’ (III Henry VI V.vi.83). Redeemed retroactively the text will, presumably, come to recognise its origins through a procedure that is also, as Jacques Derrida has argued, a restitution of paternal rights with Shakespeare as ‘a father that is present, standing near it, behind it, within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person in his own name’ (Derrida 1991, 118).

It is, however, a more persistent failure of the text to satisfactorily recognise its origins that leads Tillyard to comment upon the ‘confused place that Richard III occupies in the tetralogy’. Articulated within a temporal frame that is simultaneously proleptic and retrospective, Tillyard negotiates this paradox in terms of an ostensible ‘working out of the traumatic civil wars’ in preparation for the Tudor succession: ‘the main business of the play is to complete the national tetralogy and to display the working out of God's plan to restore England to prosperity’ (Tillyard 1981, 205). What threatens to disrupt the fantasmatic consistency of this Elizabethan world picture on display, however, are points of discontinuity that betray a dangerous overproximity to the site of the text's own significations: ‘Richard III inevitably suffers as a detached unit … the play can never come into its own till acted as a sequel to the other three plays’ (ibid.). This fore-closure of self-reference, the putative failure of the text to ‘come into its own’, provides the title of an essay by Derrida⁵ who also locates the ‘monstrous precisely at this site of dehiscence between past and future’. History and anamorphosis co-operate in Richard III in terms of this radical asymmetry, unable to occlude the performance of its own historicity, the text shares a peculiar affinity with its protagonist in that both are, in the words of Linda Charnes, a ‘product of their own belatedness’ (Charnes 1993, 34). Derek Traversi also discusses the text in terms that can only be described as prenatal, arguing that Richard III is a ‘new type of drama at once the necessary conclusion of all that has gone before and the expression of a new conception of what the chronicle play implies’ (Traversi 1968, 46).⁶

Revealing Richard III as something of a misfit preventing the symbolic order from fully constituting itself, in an attempt to arrest this slippage in signification Tillyard confers ‘shape on the play through an invocation of the monologic authority of Shakespeare’ as the agency through which contingency is seamlessly reconstituted as necessity:

… at the end of the play Shakespeare comes out with his full declaration of the principle of order, thus giving final and unmistakable shape to what, though largely implicit, had been all along the animating principle of the tetralogy.

(Tillyard 1981, 207)

Such a totalising procedure discloses the text, and more particularly the figure of Richard, as the same kind of structural-dialectical paradox that Slavoj Zizek has characterised as ‘an effect which exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence’ (Zizek 1994, 100). This temporal loop which divides the coincidence of the text with itself is also the enabling condition of the putative working out of its traumatic past in terms of its retroactive inscription within providential determinism. At the close of his analysis Tillyard reinvokes this phrase in an attempt to harmonise the contradictory vectors of the text's signification: ‘Whereas the sins of other men had merely bred more sins, Richard's are so vast that they are absorptive, not contagious’ (Tillyard 1981, 216). Structural antagonisms which may contradict the historical design that Tillyard is attempting to adduce are obviated by the reintroduction of the character of Richard, thereby effecting a displacement of this preternatural excess onto a figure already conveniently encoded as deviant. Any attempt to retain an origin of meaning from which history can be measured is possible only if the process of ‘working out’ is complicit with a movement of ‘absorption’, of coming back. This double movement of the text's signification betrays what Jacques Derrida has called an uncomfortable athesis that is contagious in the sense that it repels any exegetic frame for the construction of secure binarisms. As Derrida has argued, what the construction of a tradition amounts to is an attempt to negotiate a ‘pathway out of tension between protensions and retensions, projections forward, and retainings of the past’ (Hobson 1987, 134).

As both symptom and cause of all that has gone before, Richard is ‘within the limits of the play’, as Tillyard remarks in the context of a discussion on the credibility of character, ‘both possible and impossible’ (Tillyard 1981, 216). We may read this invocation of ‘limits as suggestive of a structural duplicity’ that Slavoj Zizek has described as a ‘reflection-into-itself’ of the boundary which ‘emerges when the determinatedness which defines the identity of an object is reflected into this object itself and assumes the shape of its own unattainable limit, of what the object can never fully become … how its condition of possibility is simultaneously its condition of impossibility’ (Zizek 1994, 100). In other words, it is precisely because Richard is the embodiment of society's meaningless excess that he is also the locus for its return to harmonious consistency.

In what follows, I would like to develop some of the Lacanian implications of these issues in the service of an ideological analysis of the text. Working upon Ernesto Laclau's provocative hypothesis that ‘There is ideology whenever a particular content shows itself as more than itself’ (Laclau 1997, 303) the structural antagonisms cathected by the character of Richard are read not so much as symptomatic of ideology so much as the ideological effect strictu sensu. Arguing that the ‘dialectics between necessity and impossibility gives ideology its terrain of emergence’ Laclau's sophisticated account of ideology, at least at a heuristic level, is remarkably similar to the dialectical production of the object that we find in Lacan's model of anamorphosis:

On the one hand closure as such, being an impossible operation, cannot have a content of its own and only shows itself through its projection in an object which at some point assumes the role of incarnating the closure of an ideological horizon, will be deformed as a result of that incarnating function. Between the particularity of the object which attempts to fulfil the operation of closure and this operation, there is a relationship of mutual dependency in which each of the two poles is required, and at the same time, each partially limits the effects of the other.

(ibid., 303)

Similar to the anamorphic stain in a picture, where consistency is conferred only as a retroactive product brought about by a change in point of view, Laclau's discussion of ideology implicates this structural interdependence of meaning and non-meaning where the frame of view is always-already framed by a part of its content. It is at this anomalous juncture of the traumatic Real that Richard most assiduously solicits the gaze of his audience, retroactively redeeming past crimes only by paradoxically manifesting ‘cause’ as ‘remainder’. What the Real encodes is the radical impossibility of teleology: ‘cause is always produced, apres coup, in the symbolic space’. As an ‘indigested lump’ Richard shares a morphology similar to Lacan's definition of the Real as ‘the object that cannot be swallowed’, as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier (Lacan 1994, 270). Both the monster and the Real pertain to a certain limit that is always missed: they are either too early or too late. Taking seriously Traversi's suggestion that Richard succeeds in ‘gathering into his person the savagery which everywhere prevails around him’ (Traversi 1968, 54), then it is at this level of a metaphorical surplus-signification upon which the text's ‘literal signification’ and historic reality crucially depends. Retroactively sealing meaning, from a point in futurity, the monster is truly portentous. In a comment that succinctly encapsulates the paradoxical deixis of contingency and necessity that accompanies any discussion of monsters, Aristotle makes the claim that ‘The monstrosity though not necessary in regard of a final cause and an end, yet is necessary accidentally’ (Wilson 1993, 20).

II. WRITTEN BY PROPHECY

As recent critics have noted, both Richard III and Richard II disclose at a more obvious level a paradox that threatens to unmask the teleological project of the history plays: the first tetralogy was written earlier but chronicles events that occur in time after the events of the second. Both texts evince a paradoxical temporality that actively contest a notion of history in which events are serially disposed. Occupying contradictory and seemingly antagonistic polarities that frame the histories, the two Richards constitute a doppelganger logic which operates at the level of Freud's model of traumatic memory described by Jean Francois Lyotard as ‘a first moment of shock without affect and a second moment of affect without shock’ (Lyotard 1990, 12).

Unique in the context of the history plays, Richard III's title stages in advance that Gloucester is destined to be king. In a sense, the text reaches its destination even before it begins and conforms to a logic that Maurice Blanchot has identified specifically in relation to narration as that which is:

towards a point … that is strange but such that it seems to have no prior reality apart from this movement, yet is so compulsive that the narration's appeal depends on it to the extent that it cannot ‘begin before it has reached it.’

(Blanchot 1982, 62)

Richard III displays a similar compulsion to repeat which Freud has described in suitably theatrical terms when in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ he describes the analysand's relation to his past as one in which he ‘is obliged to stage a revival of an old piece, as though it were actually happening, instead of remembering it’ (Gay 1995, 678). Freud's metaphor is not merely fortuitous. A well known entry in John Manningham's diary of 13 March 1601 relates how an audience member was so enamoured of Burbage's portrayal of Richard that he arranged to meet her for what was, presumably, an illicit liaison. The entry continues that:

Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Rich. the 3.d was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Rich. the 3.

(Chambers 1930, 212)

Although frequently cited, what this entry ironically discloses is how the putative ‘duping of Burbage’ is inexorably tied to the problematic relation between theatre and history that is one of the issues negotiated by the text itself. Richard III regularly imparts a self-consciousness of its own theatricality in terms of the uncanny inhabitation of a space of repetition that is, like Burbage's rival, always already there. As soon as the text can be said to begin Richard, outlines the ‘plots I have laid’ (I.i.32) and provides a synopsis of subsequent events. Both the text and its protagonist engage in a preposterous logic that elicits from Richard the self reproach that he must not ‘run before my horse to market’ (I.ii.160). Richard occupies a traumatic place within the text because the text itself proffers what Geoffrey Hartman has called a ‘paraprophetic discourse, as prophecy after the event—an event constituted or reconstituted by it, and haunted by the idea of traumatic causation’ (Hartman 1980, 40). One particularly resonant example of this effect can be found in an episode which, significantly, also gestures toward an acknowledgement of the text's own derivative and supplementary identity. Announcing the indictment of Hastings, the scrivener is suspicious of its authenticity and invites the audience to:

… mark how well the sequel hangs together:
Eleven hours I have spent to write it over,
For yesternight by Catesby was it sent me;
The precedent was full as long a-doing:
And yet within these five hours Hastings lived,
Untainted, unexamined, free, at liberty.

(III.vi.5-10)

In More's account of Richard's reign, a putative source of Richard III, the publication of this defamatory proclamation moves one citizen to comment upon the sequence of events by sardonically observing that ‘it was written by prophecy’ (More 1963, 146). The uncanny aspect of this scene is compounded by the fact that Hastings, in a much remarked upon encounter, meets his own double in the person of the pursuivant who is also called Hastings. If Hastings is ‘fated’ it is because the subject's symbolic identification always has an anticipatory, hastening character that, to recall Richard's earlier predicament, is similar to the anticipatory recognition of self in the mirror where the subject is already preceded by its image.

It is Richard himself, however, who is most frequently identified as the site of this ‘traumatic causation’, locating him in a contestatory position in relation to the representations of history that compete for legitimacy throughout the text. At one point he interrupts Queen Margaret and appoints himself not only the adjudicator of matters relating to historical verisimilitude, but also the figure around which the collective memory should reconstruct itself:

Let me put in your minds, if you forget,
What you have been ere this, and what you are;
Withal, what I have been, and what I am.

(I.iii.131-33)

Effectively, what Richard does is to disarticulate the notion that memory is a strictly symbolic function, insisting that subjectivity inheres in a network of signifiers that constitute the relation to the real. As Laplanche and Leclaire have argued, the so called ‘return of the repressed’ should not be understood in terms of an element which, once recovered, will reactivate continuity, but ‘an interpretive elaboration or working through whose role is to weave around a rememorated element an entire network of meaningful relations that integrate it into the subject's explicit apprehension of himself’ (Laplanche 1972, 176). As the accomplished actor, Richard's diabolic force resides in his ability to reinterpret the relationship between subjectivity and memory in terms of improvisation:

ELIZABETH:
Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
RICHARD:
Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good.
ELIZABETH:
Shall I forget myself to be myself?
RICHARD:
Ay, if yourself's rememberance wrong yourself

(IV.iv.419-23)

Richard's theatrical notion of selfhood is conspicuously demonstrated in this application of his improvisational skills to successive writings and re-writings of history. Nowhere is this facility more deftly deployed than in the seduction of Lady Anne. Presenting himself as ‘the plain devil’ and dissembling looks he continues:

And yet to win her! all the world to nothing!
Ha? Hath she forgot already that brave prince,
Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since,
Stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?

(I.ii.230-35)

Commenting upon his own performance as one who has committed himself to resurrecting events that are ‘In the deep ocean buried’ (I.i.iv), Richard becomes the conduit through which the text regularly encounters its own forgetfulness. It is through his role as an agent of repetition that the text discloses this unheimliche effect of ‘something which is secretly familiar … which has undergone repression and then returned from it’ (Freud 1988, 113). Richard, in fact, regularly invokes his double, whether it is by becoming a spectator to his own ‘shadow’ (I.1.26; I.ii.230), or by christening Buckingham ‘my other self’ (II.ii.151). Commenting on Freud's frequent association of the diabolical with repetition, Jacques Derrida has suggestively argued that this appropriately titled ‘limping devil’ is:

The figure of the diabolical which simultaneously looks in the direction of Beyond … and in the direction of Das Unheimliche it upsets the appeasing order of representation. However, it does so not by reducing double effects but, on the contrary, by expanding them, by expanding the effect of duplicity without an original, which perhaps is what the diabolical consists of.

(Derrida 1987a, 270)

Crucially, the text's highly complicated rhetoric of forgetting is invoked in contradictory ways that serve, at times, to contest the protocols of linearity and tradition that legitimise absolutist ideology. Buckingham's protracted exhortation to Richard to become king, which is meticulously rehearsed in advance, explicitly locates theatrical representation in a deeply ironic politics of memory:

The noble isle doth want her proper limbs;
Her face defaced with scars of infamy,
Her royal stock graffed with ignoble plants,
And almost should'red in the swallowing gulf
Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion.

(III.vii.125-29)

Simultaneously soliciting Richard as the redeemer of England's memory and the embodiment of her identity, Buckingham's language is all the more remarkable for its morphological frame of reference which casts the deformed Richard as the reformer of national identity and historical continuity:

If not to bless us and the land withal,
Yet to draw forth your noble ancestry
From the corruption of abusing times
Unto a lineal true-derived course.

(11. 197-200)

Buckingham's speech occupies a contradictory space in the repertoire of representations associated with Richard in the text: waste is converted into transcendent value as the monster becomes the guarantor of identity and the previously ‘orphaned Richard’ is the very model of linearity and a ‘true-derived course’. How are we to understand this paradox, especially in relation to Richard's problematic position in the text's putatively ‘historical’ narrative?

At one level, we can once again approach this radical reorientation of perspective in terms of Lacan's comments on anamorphosis: the transformation of the indecipherable spot into the locus of meaning is, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, paradigmatic of the way in which, in the logic of the signifier, meaning and non-meaning coincide in terms of structural necessity. Lacan's theoretical elaboration of this dynamic is best exemplified by his notion of the point de capiton. Just as the anamorphic stain acquires consistency through alteration of perspective, simiarly no signifier is isolatable until a point is reached in the signifying chain which retroactively confers symbolic consistency on preceding events. The locus of this ‘quilting’ is the point de capiton which is in itself meaningless but which achieves its privilege by operating as the signifier through which other signifiers recognise themselves in their unity: ‘A signifying unit presupposes the completion of a certain circle that situates its different elements’ (Lacan 1993, 263). Sense emerges from nonsense only at a point which retroactively and provisionally seals the meaning of a sentence, such that notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ co-operate in terms of a structural, anamorphic tension.

In relation to Richard III's troubled encounter with its own teleological project, it is Richard that unwittingly reveals the contingent forces involved in the construction of subjectivity. Significantly, it is precisely when his own identity is under the most vigorous assault that he discloses the radical implications of Lacan's thesis: ‘identity’ emerges only at a point which ‘sews’ the meaning into the signifier:

QUEEN Margaret:
Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!
Thou slander of thy heavy mother's womb!
Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!
Thou rag of honour! thou detested—
GLOUCESTER:
Margaret.
QUEEN Margaret:
Richard!
GLOUCESTER:
Ha?
QUEEN Margaret:
I call thee not.

(I.iii.228-37)

In the domain proper to ideology interpolation consists in the subject's acceding to the ‘call of the Other’ in a way which also occludes its performative dimension. Richard's intervention just before his name is to become the ‘quilting’ point of Margaret's vitriolic speech, however, illustrates how signification retroactively seeks to produce identity. In other words, Richard discloses the illusion necessary to the conferring of a symbolic mandate where the subject must misrecognise that it is the very act of recognition which makes him what he has recognised himself as. The subversive aspect of this interruption achieves its impact precisely because Richard reveals the structural operation of this retroactive illusion where he is pinned to a signifier that represents him for the other and through which he is assigned a place in the intersubjective network. Disclosing the arbitrary nature of this mandate Richard refuses to accede to the call: ‘I cry thee mercy then, for I did think / Thou hadst called me all these bitter names’ (II. 238-39).

Queen Margaret is, we should recall, the only character to appear throughout the first tetralogy. At a diegetic level, her function in Richard III conforms precisely to the discourse of the Other which ‘is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which the subject is integrated’ (Lacan 1989, 89-90). Earlier in the scene Richard elicits from Margaret a comment that would appear to support this view:

GLOUCESTER:
Foul winkled witch, what mak'st thou in my sight?
MARGARET:
But repetition of what thou hast marred;
That will I make before I let thee go.

(II. 164-68)

‘The meaning of repetition’, argues Lacan, ‘has all to do with the intrusion of the symbolic register’ (ibid. Lacan, 88). Richard's defiant rhetorical intervention reveals how this repetition operates as the agency through which the symbolic order hails the individual into a space that is, in a sense, always already there. This is the effect, irreducibly theatrical, that Lacan discerns in the story of Oedipus where the oracle also embodies the discourse of the Other:

Oedipus' unconscious is nothing other than this fundamental discourse whereby, long since, for all time, Oedipus' history is out there—written, and we know it, but Oedipus is ignorant of it, even as he is played out by it since the beginning … Everything takes place in the function of the Oracle and of the fact that Oedipus is truly other than what he realises as his history. The whole pulsation of the drama of his destiny, from the beginning to the end, hinges on the veiling of this discourse, which is his reality without his knowing it.

(Lacan 1989, 245)

Richard's ‘history’, like that of Oedipus, is ‘played out’ only insofar as the text ‘embodies its own forgetting’ (Felman 1985, 1050). One particularly notable case of amnesia occurs when the young Duke of York repeats the mythic account of his uncle's birth where Richard ‘could gnaw a crust at two hours old’ (II.iv.28). The inquiry as to how the Duke came to be in possession of this knowledge is the cause of some dispute:

DUCHESS:
His nurse! Why, she was dead ere thou wast born.
YORK:
If 'twere not she, I cannot tell who told me.

(II.iv.27-35)

What this bizarre episode highlights is precisely the Oedipal maxim that knowledge is nothing other than the crystallisation of symbolical activity which it forgets, once constituted. Again, though in a displaced form, Richard stands in an antagonistic relationship to the text's traumatic return to the question of ‘birth’. If history conforms to a repetitive logic which eschews recourse to an act of simple remembrance, through its eponymous anti-hero Richard III alludes to an awareness of its own inscription within a symbolic horizon that contradicts and anamorphically disfigures its status as a ‘chronicle’ or non-problematic repository of past events. An episode which centres around a dialogue on the origins of the Tower of London explicitly disengages the function of memory from the procedure of merely presencing that which is absent:

PRINCE:
Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?
BUCKINGHAM:
He did my gracious lord, begin that place;
Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified.
PRINCE:
Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
BUCKINGHAM:
Upon record, my gracious lord.
PRINCE:
But say, my lord, it were not regist'red,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.

(III.i.69-79)

What the Prince refers to is nothing other than the logic of repetition that characterises the intersubjective network, an ‘always-already there’ which, in Derrida's words, ‘no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence’. What I also want to suggest is that it is also possible to read the Prince's comments in the light of the Elizabethan theatre's own complicity in, literally, retailing truths in a way that is irreducibly repetitive: where the practices of ‘retelling’ and ‘retailing’ become inextricably linked. This connection is made explicit in The Gull's Hornbook, Dekker's parodic consumer guide to London life, where the author identifies ‘The theatre as the poets Royal Exchange … when your groundling and gallery commoner buys his sports by the penny and like a haggler is glad to utter it again by retailing’ (Dekker 1967, 98). Indeed, what the theatre reveals is the essential impossibility of any absolute synchronisation. In a passage that has manifold implications for any discussion of the history plays, Derrida has argued that repetition is the modus operandi of theatre as event:

Disjunction, dislocation, separation of places, deployment of spacing of a story … could there be any theatre without that? The survival of a theatrical work implies that, theatrically, it is saying something about theatre itself, about its essential possibility. And that it does so, theatrically, then, through the play of uniqueness and repetition …

(Derrida 1993, 419)

It is this ‘play of uniqueness and repetition’ that has so perturbed critics; a perceived failing of the text is that it either lets the ‘audience know too much too soon’ (Driver 1967, 88) or, alternatively, that it is ‘possessed of a much too anticipatable conclusion’ (Auchincloss 1970, 46). Rather, what this self-subversion amounts to is a drama of dispossession, an expropriation of the text by itself as it seeks to enact the performance of its own historicity. With its cast of monsters, dreams, ghosts and prohecies, Richard III resembles a psychoanalytic case study, yet what also emerges is how this phantasmatic space traces its trajectory in explicitly theatrical terms. A consideration of how the scopic register of the text participates in what I have been discussing as an anamorphous logic of repetition relies upon Lacan's account of the gaze which is also inexorably tied to the domination of the subject by the symbolic order. The last section will focus upon this theoretical conjuncture by expanding upon Lacan's crucial argument that ‘it is within the explanation of repetition that … the scopic function is situated’ (Lacan 1994, 79).

III. FATAL ATTRACTIONS

In some respects then, Richard III can be said to articulate a relationship between theatre and history in terms of repeated encounters with its own ‘blind spots’. A particularly resonant example can be found in the insistent anxieties relating to blindness recounted in Clarence's dream, although on this occasion it is associated with a surplus visuality over which he can exercise little control: ‘What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! / What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!’ (I.iv.22-23). This figurative alignment of drowning with an over abundance of vision becomes increasingly complex as Clarence relates the details of his nightmare:

Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great ingots, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit these were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt'red by.

(ll. 24-33)

If, as Christopher Pye has suggested, Clarence indicates his awareness that he exists in the play solely in order to die (Pye 1992, 80), this speech is the most explicit example of how the play ‘shows itself showing itself’ by returning its gaze upon the audience. At a psychoanalytical level, the speech itself indexes this radical alterity of the gaze in a way that conforms to Lacan's account of the scopic register of the dream. ‘In the so called waking state’, Lacan argues, ‘there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look it also shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterises the images is that it shows’ (Lacan 1994, 75). A field of pure monstrance, the exhibitionist dimension of dreams, for Lacan, acts as a compelling example of the subject's inability to master the field of vision in the way typified by the Cartesian cogito. Clarence responds to Brakenbury's teasing enquiry as to whether he had time ‘To gaze upon the secrets of the deep’, by insisting that.

Methoughts I had, and often did I strive
To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood
Stopped in my soul, and would not let it forth
To find the empty, vast, and wand'ring air.

(ll. 35-39)

The dream involves submission to an excessive and oppressive visuality so that ‘the subject does not see where it is leading, he follows’. Blindness and vision regularly supplant each other in Clarence's dream, climaxing in the image of the jewels which act as prosthetic eyes of ‘dead men's skulls’. It is no coincidence that, for Lacan, the jewel acts as a metaphor for the disarming proximity of the gaze of the Other: ‘The point of the gaze participates in the ambiguity of the jewel’ (Lacan 1994, 96). The diffuse irradiating power of the jewel's reflection lures the viewing subject and transfixes him as object in the sight of the world. This excess vision is comparable to drowning in the overflowing and inapprehensible function of the gaze where ‘Light may travel in a straight line, but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills—the eye is a sort of bowl—it flows over too’. Similar to that other favoured Lacanian motif for the annihilating power of the gaze, Holbein's Ambassadors, the skull in Clarence's dream finds mortality inextricably linked to entrapment within a scopic field that cannot be mastered. Just as Holbein teaches how the subject is inscribed in the scopic field, Clarence's portentous dream also evokes an uncanny sense of his own inscription within the larger symbolic space of the text. When it inevitably comes, Clarence's death not only involves his drowning in a ‘malmsey-butt’ but, in a bitterly ironic gesture, his demise is hastened by a naive faith in his powers of perception:

CLARENCE:
My friend, to
2 MURDERER
I spy some pity in thy looks
O, if thine eye be not a flatterer,
Come thou on my side, and entreat for me.
A begging prince what beggar pities not?
2 MURDERER:
Look behind you, my lord
1 MURDERER:
stabs him

(ll.264-69)

Although to a modern audience the warning to ‘Look behind you’ is a refrain commonly associated with pantomime, it also serves as an aphorism which encapsulates the fate of the subject caught in the trap of the gaze that ‘circumscribes us … makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this’ (Lacan 1994, 75).

This complex relationship between death and the scopic drive is most commonly associated with Richard who, we should recall, is frequently aligned with the myth of ‘the evil eye’. In III Henry VI, he commits himself to ‘slaying more gazers than the Basiliskes’ (III.iii.187). In Richard III he is similarly endowed with a deadly power of fascination: the possessor of a ‘deadly eye’ (I.iii.225) he is also, for the Duchess a ‘cockatrice … whose unavoided eye is murderous’ (IV.i.56). For Lacan, what the ubiquity of this myth alludes to is a ‘fatal function’ that resides in its ‘power to separate’ (Lacan 1994, 115), a ‘power that is strictly correlative to a reproduction of the split between the eye and the gaze’. In the scopic field, Lacan argues, ‘The subject is strictly speaking determined by the very separation that determines the break of the a, that is to say, the fascinatory element introduced by the gaze’ (Lacan 1994, 118). The evil eye is what Lacan calls the fascinum, the dimension in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly, acting as the fatal lure which has a mortifying effect on the subject by its ‘captivation’ in the sight of the Other. Richard's description of Anne's beauty proceeds in terms of an encounter with her gaze which produces a feeling of shame:

For now they kill me with a living death.
Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears,
Shamed their aspects with store of childish drops:
These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear,
No, when my father York and Edward wept,
To hear the piteous moan that Rutland made
When black-faced Clifford shook his sword at him;
Nor when thy warlike father, like a child,
Told the sad story of my father's death,
And twenty times made pause to sob and weep
That all the standers-by had wet their cheeks
Like trees bedashed with rain—in that sad time
My manly eyes did scorn an humble tear.

(I.ii.153-64)

This lament, which offers a complex juxtaposition of masculine aggression with the death dealing effect of female beauty, now substitutes Anne as the bearer of the ‘evil eye’. In a comment that inevitably recalls Richard's speech in III Henry VI, Anne tries to repel Richard's advances by wishing that her eyes ‘were basilisks to strike thee dead!’ (ll. 150). The ‘evil eye’, in its role as ‘that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life’, (Lacan 1994, 118) introduces the death drive into the scopic field. This scene, however, elaborates a complicated relationship between death, subjectivity and the scopic drive which entails a dialectic of desire between Richard and Anne that locates ‘hell’ and the ‘bed-chamber’ as its discursive frame. In a discussion that makes no direct reference to the scopic politics of the text, but which, nevertheless, addresses some of the epistemological problems that arise from the question of deformity, Marjorie Garber has argued that ‘The very fascination exerted by Richard seems to grow in direct proportion to an increase in emphasis on his deformity’ (Garber 1986, 81; emphasis added). What Garber gestures toward is a structural complicity between the text's strange circuit of desire and the seductive appeal of Richard. The fascinating, if albeit disconcerting, eroticism of this scene is negotiated around the deformed Richard's success in surmounting his initial unsuitability as the object of desire by disclosing the precarious border that separates beauty from disgust. In the event, Anne and Richard exchange subject positions:

ANNE:
Out of my sight! thou dost infect mine eyes.
GLOUCESTER:
Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine.
ANNE:
Would they were basilisks to strike thee dead!
GLOUCESTER:
I would they were, that I might die at once;

(ll. 148-52)

To an Elizabethan audience, this displacement of diabolic power from Richard to Anne would not have gone unnoticed. According to the accepted Renaissance physiology of vision, the eye operates as the organ by which ‘infected spirits’ are transmitted from the body of the harlot to that of the observer. As the agent of infection or bewitchment, the eye forms the point at which sight transforms from passivity to activity, and where subject and object exchange places. An entire pathology of an erotics of vision were in part indebted to the influence of Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. In 1588 Valleriola developed a thesis on the origins of erotic love in Observationum medicinalium libri sex which discusses love-sickness in terms of a fascination that enters through the eye, as an alien vapour that spreads contagion throughout the body (Beecher 1988, 7). By the seventeenth century Burton was still persuaded by this specular pathogenesis which made the fascinatio crucial to seduction:

the manner of the fascination, as Ficinus declares it, is this: Mortal men are then especially bewitched, when as by often gazing one to the other, they direct sight to sight, join eye to eye, and so drink and suck in Love between them; for the beginning of this disease is the Eye.

(Beecher 1988, 9)

The libidinal economy of the scene also locates the monstrous at that point where knowing and desiring reach a traumatic point of deadlock. The entire seduction is played out in a scopic register which serves to block desire and, paradoxically, open desire to circumvent the blockage. Richard captivates Anne at precisely this site of antagonism:

ANNE:
I wish I knew thy heart
GLOUCESTER:
'Tis figured in my tongue
ANNE:
I fear me both are false

(ll. 192-94)

Here, desire is produced not as a striving for something, but only for something else or something more: it has no determinate object that is not, as Richard homophonically suggests, ‘dis-figured’. The apparent opacity of Richard's language is perceived by Anne as, in Jean Copjec's words, ‘a veil which cuts off from view a reality that is other than what the subject is allowed to see’ (Copjec 1989, 237). Desire, here, pertains precisely to the Lacanian formulation that ‘desire is the desire of the Other’. The subject may fashion itself in the image of the Other's desire, but only at a point of lack as there is no determinate image of this desire. Richard's strategy of counter-identification, of ‘rendering good for bad, blessings for curses’ (ll. 69), is seductive precisely because it relies upon the fact that truth is not demonstrable and implicitly cathects his monstrous body as that which also acts at the level of failed phenomenalisation. Contesting the pronounced scopophilia of the scene Richard parodies the interiorising subject of modernity: here ‘depth’ is literally generated by the monstrous distortion of the surface.

It is, however, around the wounds of Henry's corpse that the most insistent exhortations to see are made and where desire produces distortion in the scopic field. The body presents a hole in the Other which Anne, metaphorically, seeks to occupy:

Lo, in these windows that let forth thy life
I pour the helpless balm of my poor eyes.
O cursed be the hand that made these holes!

(I.ii.12-14)

A site of pure monstrance, the holes encode the corpse as an object that cannot look back but which, nevertheless, provokes the gaze of its spectators. Anne's substitution of the eyes for the holes locates a lack in the Other, a split between eye and gaze in terms of a failed encounter: ‘You never look at me from the place from which I see you’. The gaze indexes a hole in the symbolic order, and Anne's subsequent exclamation in which the holes become ‘mouths’ emphasises how the scopic drive circulates, literally, around a point of failed symbolisation:

If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this patterns of thy butcheries.
O, gentleman, see, see! dead Henry's wounds
Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh.

(ll. 54-57)

It is within this libidinal economy that Richard orchestrates his seduction of Anne. Unable to elicit a confession that he murdered Henry and Edward, Anne accuses Richard of being ‘the cause of that accursed effect’. Richard's response, characteristically, is to complicate such a causal logic. He does so, however, by relocating death on an axis of desire where it is the power of fascination exerted by the sublime image of Anne that assumes a lethal dimension:

Your beauty was the cause of that effect;
Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.

(I.ii.117-25)

The scene's seemingly incongruous engagement with the central motifs of courtly love has been a recurrent source of incredulity for critics who tend to view Richard's unlikely role as courtier solely in terms of pastiche. For Lacan, however, the encounter between beauty and the beast is paradigmatic of the libidinal economy of courtly love. It is precisely a crisis in symbolic authority, manifested in what Lacan defines as the Thing, which leads to an irruption of the monstrous in the feminine:

The poetry of courtly love, in effect, tends to locate in the place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture. And it does so at a time when the historical circumstances bear witness to a disparity between the especially harsh conditions of reality and certain fundamental demands. By means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner.

(Lacan 1992, 150)

Richard rehearses the Lacanian thesis that the power of fascination exerted by a sublime image always announces the proximity of the death drive. The haunting image of a dream, sublimation in Richard's account has nothing to do with the object of desire but, rather, with the primordial void around which the drive circulates. Both Richard's aggression and the question of his culpability become inseparable, as he claims, from ‘the beauty that provoked me’ (ll. 180). In his increasingly rhapsodic meditations he represents Anne as the subliminal object, the ‘angel’ that is a ‘divine perfection of a woman’ (ll. 75). Offering a definition of the sublime as ‘an object elevated to the level of the Thing’, Lacan again relies on anamorphosis as the favoured heuristic device to demonstrate how the conventions of courtly love attempt to inscribe the Real of desire. It is in relation to Lacan's contention that ‘If beyond appearance there is nothing in itself, there is the gaze’, that this idealisation of the woman is situated. It is, of course, a narcissistic move, but it is precisely because vision falters that desire is possible:

It is only by chance that beyond the mirror in question the subject's ideal is projected. The mirror may on occasion imply the mechanisms of narcissism, and especially the diminution of destruction or aggression that we will encounter subsequently. But it also fulfils another role, a role as limit. It is that which cannot be crossed. And the only organisation in which it participates is that of the inaccessibility of the object.

(Lacan 1993, 151).

The anamorphic glance teaches that an object is discernible only by viewing it awry; that is, that a disinterested gaze reveals a void. So too in the conventions of courtly love the object is revealed as something graspable only at the site of its own erasure. This is the ‘vacuole’ whose positive substance consists solely in the network of ‘detours and obstacles which are organised so as to make the domain of the vacuole stand out as such’ (Lacan 1993, 152). The ring that Richard gives to Anne may be read as an indication of how the ‘gift functions in this exchange as an attempted embodiment of the impossible’ Thing: i.e. as materialised Nothingness.

To begin again. Subjectivity is ultimately a question of this non-substantial self-relating, where self-consciousness is literally decentred in an anamorphic stain. That archetypal scene of Richard's infantile ‘jubilation’ captures fleetingly what kind of specular seduction is involved:

Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,
Myself to be a marv'llous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favour with myself

(ll. 253-58).

By presenting himself as the negative image of his monstrous body, as a ‘proper man’, Richard discloses the fact the Thing is nothing other than the subject's impossible equivalent, the very negativity that defines the subject. At a purely etymological level, of course, the term ‘monster’ indicates a gratuitous showing, yet it is also that phantasmatic locus for the inequality of form to itself qua the non-coincidence of the eye and the gaze. As Derrida has argued, ‘an object is monstrous when by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept’ (Derrida 1987b, 143). Richard's de-formity pertains to that other paradoxical object cause of desire which Lacan has called the objet petit a; that remainder of matter which bears witness to the fact that form is not yet fully realised, that it remains a mere anticipation of itself. Temporally, it is an object which exists only as that which is either too early or too late, a temporal loop that short circuits from the ‘not yet’ to the ‘always already’.⁷ In relation to the text's ambivalent relationship towards its teleological project, Richard is nothing other than this anamorphic expression of the constitutive antagonism between ‘incarnation and deformation’ that Laclau maintains ‘is at the root of all ideological process’ (Laclau 1997, 315). The anamorphic logic of the gaze not only teaches how an object can become the retroactive product of its own effects, but also how without this deformed residue of matter the formal consistency of the field of so called ‘reality’ collapses. Perhaps the example of Richard provides the possibility for a model of ideological critique that is not so much concerned to analyse anamorphosis, as to suggest along with Althusser that analysis itself may profitably assume greater sensitivity to the anamorphic glance which accompanies the production of all objects of knowledge:

To see … ‘oversights’, to identify the lacunae in the fullness of discourse, the blanks in the crowded text, we need something quite different from an acute or attentive gaze; we need an informed gaze, a new gaze, itself produced by a reflection of the change of terrain on the exercise of vision, in which Marx pictures the transformation of the problematic.

(Althusser 1990, 27).

Notes

1. Lacan's most considered excursus on this relation is elaborated in the seminar ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious (Lacan 1977, 292-325).

2. For a useful, although brief, summary of the mythologising of Richard see Warwicke 1986.

3. A recent study by Kathryn M. Brammall has identified a trend in how the appellation of ‘monster’ was increasingly employed as a rhetorical trope from 1570 (Brammall 1996).

   As will become clear, what I am principally attempting to elaborate here is an account of the monstrous which makes use of Lacan's complex association between spatial and temporal anamorphoses. Although arguably writing from a more emphatically structuralist perspective, Michel Foucault makes some characteristically subtle comments on the emergence of the study of monsters in the human sciences that are particularly apposite. Critiquing theories of evolutionism Foucault argues that:

   continuity is not the visible wake of a fundamental history in which one same living principle struggles with a variable environment. For continuity precedes time. It is its condition … First, the necessity of introducing monsters into the scheme … The monster ensures in time, and for our theoretical knowledge, a continuity that, for our everyday experience, floods, volcanoes, and subsiding continents confuse in space. The other consequence is that the signs of continuity throughout such a history can no longer be of any order other than that of resemblance … On the basis of the power of the continuum held by nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference. This difference is still without law and without any well-defined structure; the monster is the root stock of specification, but it is only a sub-species itself in the stubbornly slow stream of history.

   (Foucault 1990, 155-56).

4. I am particularly indebted to Marie-Helene Huet who, in a brilliant essay, has argued that ‘if resemblance creates a visible connection between father and child, it also conceals the questionable character of all paternities. At the same time that it suggests filiation, by instituting a “natural,” visible link between the genitor and his child, resemblance, used as a criterion for establishing paternity, elides the fact that this filiation can never be certain. Thus, resemblance masks a fundamental, primordial disorder. And what resemblance conceals, the monster unmasks’ (Huet 1991, 77). This question of Richard's self-proclaimed autogenesis finds a wider resonance in the way that early modern culture sought to create an identity for the processes of literary production itself. In a comment that inevitably recalls Richard, both in its use of metaphor and in its aggressive claims for autonomy, Thomas Nashe contests his status as an ‘outsider’ to ‘proudly’ boast:

   that the vaine which I have (be it median vaine or a madde man) is of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe.

   (Kastan 1987)

   Philip Sidney, however, provides a more complex example of how questions of literary creativity inevitably confront the issue of masculine identity. In a prefatory letter which dedicates The Countess Of Pembroke's Arcadia to his (then pregnant) sister, Sidney offers a disclaimer that deploys multivalent levels of displacement as he seeks to negotiate the claims of literary patrimony under the aspect of the prodigious:

   I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities … In sum, a young head not so well stayed as I would it were … having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in than that they gat out. But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name.

   (Sidney 1985, 13).

5. Arguing how ‘every speculation implies the frightening possibility of the Hysteron Proteron of the generations’, Derrida undertakes a brilliant rereading of the Freudian account of repetition which includes biographical details of how neither Freud or his wife ‘got over’ the monstrous fact of children dying before their parents (Derrida 1978, 144).

6. The notion that Richard III can be considered a ‘seminal moment in the artistic maturity of Shakespeare’ can still be found in more recent discussions of the text. E. Pearlman, for example, argues that ‘The differentiation of Richard from the comparatively colourless orators and warriors who populate the Henry VI plays marks a turning point—perhaps the turning point—in Shakespeare's development into a dramatist of more than ordinary excellence’ (Pearlman 1992, 411).

7. In a discussion that also attempts to analyse the relations between the monster and anamorphosis, Slavoj Zizek has characterised the emergence of the monster as signalling nothing less than the passage to modernity:

   This empty form, this black stain in the very heart of reality, is ultimately the ‘objective correlative’ of the subject himself … by means of anamorphotic stains, ‘reality’ indexes the presence of the subject. The emergence of the empty surface on which phantasmagorical monsters appear is therefore strictly correlative to what Heidegger calls ‘the advent of the Modern-Age subjectivity’, i.e., to the epoch in which the symbolic ‘substance’ (the ‘big Other qua texture’ of symbolic tradition) can no longer contain the subject, can no longer bind him to his symbolic mandate … the monster is the subject of the Enlightenment, that is to say, the mode in which the subject of the Enlightenment acquires his impossible positive existence.

   (Zizek 1992, 134).

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