SOURCE: McGrail, Mary Ann. “Richard III: That Excellent Grand Tyrant of the Earth.” In Tyranny in Shakespeare, pp. 47-76. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001.

[In the following essay, McGrail argues that Richard's belief that no one can love his deformed body is what drives him to seek vengeance against his world and the people in it.]

AND SET THE MURDEROUS MACHIAVEL TO SCHOOL

Richard III is the only play by Shakespeare that begins with the title character on stage speaking alone. Without the repeated insights into Richard's energetic malevolence, which this and his later soliloquies afford us, the play would make most sense as a straightforward dramatization of the Tudor myth.¹ Richard offers us just such an oversimplification of historical fact in the first few lines of the play: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.”² This is the official version of how the Henry VI plays might conclude had there been no Richard. The Yorkists have rightly recovered the throne. But in the fourteenth line the outrageous sarcasm of this panegyric becomes apparent as Richard turns to his most interesting subject, himself: “But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks.” He speaks of the action of the play being motivated and controlled from within him:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasure of these days.

(28-31)3

As critics of all persuasions have continually noted, the interest of this play lies mostly in the character of Richard. This interest depends on the contradiction of self with soul in Richard that surfaces, devastatingly, in his final soliloquy on the night before the battle of Bosworth Field. Richard reveals that he does not know whether to regard himself as having a soul (and therefore a conscience), which connects him with the cosmos, or as being a self—a material being without any responsibility to man, nature, or a divinity.

Richard's “schoolmarmish” soliloquizing (as Laurence Olivier termed it)³ suggests how much more self-aware he is than Macbeth. Macbeth depends on his relations to the supernatural (the witches) and to Lady Macbeth to reveal his quality and his destiny to him. Richard, by contrast, appears to understand himself fully and appreciate his deformities and limitations from the beginning. He even appears to accept being “Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature” (19). This acceptance, however, would seem to arise from the opinion out of Machiavelli which Shakespeare embodies in his character's every action: that it is possible to circumvent or conquer nature and achieve one's ends by bringing to perfection imperturbably a private villain and a public tyrant. This requires that he regard himself as a man without hidden or uncontrollable longings, without a soul. He must see clearly that the opinions (about conscience, guilt, and the watchfulness of some divinity) that restrain most men from complete criminality are false. He must possess a clinical understanding of how to get what he wants. This is what makes the courtship scene between Richard and Anne so chilling. It is not only that he woos her over the corpse of her father-in-law, but that he shows us afterwards that his success is all due to technique.

As a consequence of this realism, Richard has none of the sense of guilt or loss of Macbeth when he speaks of “mine eternal jewel / Given to the common Enemy of man” (III.i.67-68). Instead, in his final moment of supreme crisis Richard does not confess or express regret: he debates himself. He does not discover himself in a quagmire of guilt, but in what Machiavelli calls a “confusion of the brain.”⁴ After his murders of Duncan and Banquo, Macbeth finds himself “in blood / Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er” (III.iv.135-137). He resigns himself stoically to stand firm through what may be eternal torment (like a chained bear, V.vii.1-2). Richard, on the other hand, speaks knowingly of the unending cycle of crime that usurpation entails, just before he orders the murder of the young princes “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin; / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (IV.ii.63-65). Unlike Macbeth who has little foresight, less prudence, and only a few late glimpses of self-understanding, Richard, self-aware, always has a plan. We know already in Henry VI, Part 3 that he plots to ascend the throne.

Is Coleridge correct in classing Richard with Iago and Falstaff, as a consummate and perfectly unrepentant villain?⁵ Is he a poor draft of the later “mature” tragic heroes and so not psychologically real?⁶ Freud, by contrast, finds him convincing. His interpretation points up the internal conflict Richard faces. On the one hand, it is Richard's intellectual understanding that the world is there to be manipulated, that it regards human beings indifferently, that there is no such thing as either divine or natural right, and so there is no possibility that conscience is anything more than a “convenient scarecrow.”⁷ On the other hand, he finds in nature a deliberate malevolence towards himself that suggests that nature or divinity takes an interest in human affairs.⁸ In his last soliloquy, Richard understands that he may have made a mistake about his own nature and falls into confusion: Why do I feel in danger? Am I in danger from myself? Who loves me? Do I love myself? This soliloquy has been overlooked or ignored by critics fascinated with Richard's psyche, including the first to offer a psychological interpretation of him, Sigmund Freud. Freud rests his argument (about Richard's sexual perversion and power complex) on the opening soliloquy, concluding that he is “a figure in whose character the claim to be an exception is closely bound up with and is motivated by the circumstances of congenital disadvantage.”⁹ Freud rephrases this soliloquy as follows:

Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me.¹⁰

Freud's summary, with its reference to “right,” injects into Richard's speech a moralism, which it is not clear that he possesses. I will argue that what Freud overlooks in his insightful analysis is that Richard is actually struggling with the notions of “soul” and “right.” Richard's definitions are uncertain rather than static. Richard's determination to be a villain is not the same as a conviction of the “right to be an exception.” Instead, Richard attempts to move, as he believes Machiavelli teaches, beyond notions of moral right and wrong.

The psychoanalytical approach of Freud (and those who borrow from and interpret him¹¹) is particularly useful in pointing to a greater complexity in the protagonist than was earlier appreciated.¹² But because it does not consider that Richard calls into question the nature and existence of his psyche, it is incomplete. Freud does not discuss Richard's character in the light of his final tortured soliloquy on conscience, because the speech is a speech about the existence of soul. The question that should precede the psychoanalysis of Richard is: Does Richard have a conscience or even a soul? One indication that this is a concern of the play is that “soul” is spoken of more in Richard III than in any other Shakespearean play.

A version of Richard's project is to “set the murderous Machiavel to school” (Henry VI, Part 3, III.ii.193). Richard seems, for much of the play, to be a perfect machiavel. Machiavelli is referred to twice in the first tetralogy (Henry VI, Part 1, V.iv.74 in reference to the Duke of Alençon, and Richard's boast that he will “set the murderous Machiavel to school,” Henry VI, Part 3, III.ii.193).¹³ It is reasonable to suspect that Richard III represents a Shakespearean comment on whether it is possible for a man to be completely evil to further his own ends—for a man to be a true “machiavel.”¹⁴

In addition to the difference in characterization, Macbeth and Richard III contrast politically. Macbeth shows usurpation at an historically early point in the establishment of divine right, and Richard III shows usurpation at a time when the much abused myth of divine right begins to require radical revision or reinforcement. This accounts, in part, for the discrepancy between the carefully crafted arguments for legitimacy in Richard III and the simple assertion of a right to rule in Macbeth.

Richard is not, then, simply a “scourge,”¹⁵ nor is he dismissable as an example of an immature Shakespearean tragic hero. Does Richard have a conscience or even a soul? This overlooked question seems to be behind all critical debate about the play.

THY SELF IS SELF MISUS'D

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul.

Richard admonishes himself at the end of the opening soliloquy. He consigns “thoughts” of his fraternal treachery to the repository of his “soul” just before he is to encounter and sympathize with his doomed brother, Clarence. The “soul” that his thoughts inhabit is an unusual one. He speaks as though his soul were a place in which to hide what he does not wish known. This conception is the antithesis of the Christian conception of soul, which may always and everywhere be examined by God.¹⁶ This is not a theological error on Richard's part because, of course, he knows well how to profess belief and “clothe” his “naked villainy” with scripture (I.iii.336-7). Far from fearing divine scrutiny, Richard appears to regard his soul as like the body in that it gives him individuality and separates him from all other souls.¹⁷ Richard's final non-rhetorical reference to “soul” suggests, too, that the soul is like the body (V.iii.217), a separate entity, with no connection to anything outside itself. As he goes through his Protean changes, what he terms his “soul” (I.i.41) is where he keeps his self-consciousness and his own counsel. He notes that his “counsel” is his “shield” (IV.iii.56)—his intellect (rather than any divinity) protects him.

The word “soul” is used more often in this play than in any other, a third again as many times as in Hamlet or Othello. And Richard speaks of it more often than any other character in the play.¹⁸ It is spoken of so much, I contend, because its existence is in constant doubt. Richard speaks of his own soul eight times, altogether. With two exceptions (the first and last usages, I.i.41 and V.iii.217), he makes reference to his soul only in the context of deceiving others, as to the court: “I do not know that Englishman alive / With whom my soul is any jot at odds,” II.i.71, also I.ii.180, III.v.27, III.vii.225, IV.iv.256, IV.iv.263. Elizabeth later catches him up on this rhetorical usage as he tries for the hand of her daughter in order to consolidate his power and unite the kingdom:

K. Rich.
Then know that from my soul I love thy daughter.
ELIZ.
My daughter's mother thinks it with her soul.
K. Rich.
What do you think?
ELIZ.
That thou dost love my daughter from thy soul;
So from thy soul's love didst thou love her brothers, [the slain Princes]
And from my heart's love I do thank thee for it.
K. Rich.
Be not so hasty to confound my meaning:
I mean that with my soul I love thy daughter,
And do intend to make her Queen of England.

(IV.ib.256-263)

Richard is forced to rephrase his profession: he does not love “from” his soul (in the sense of “apart from” or “at variance with”),¹⁹ but “with” his soul. His deceitful, pietistic language of love no longer works with the woman whose sons he has killed. He is reduced to speaking not of his “soul” but of his “self.” This scene is an inversion of the earlier wooing scene between Richard and Anne, where he draws her into his syntactic constructions and so gains her consent.²⁰ But here, Elizabeth reverses the linguistic game and forces Richard to use her formulations, challenging his every oath and finally asserting “Thy self is self-misus'd” (376). Richard realizes it would be too ambiguous for him to swear by his “soul” at this point, and so he begins to speak openly of his “self” and the “selves” he will produce with Elizabeth's daughter (425). He is willing to say anything to convince her, and he offers his most extreme pledge yet, if he does not fulfill his promises, “Myself myself confound” (399). Words are only words, but Richard's have turned on him.

Richard, in his manipulations of women, appears inhumanly frigid. He laments his incapacity to fully delight in romantic or sexual play (Henry VI, Part 3, III.ii.146-164 and Richard III, I.ii.16-31). As he sees it there are two alternative lives open to a noble: the life of the lover and the life of the politician. Given his enforced choice of a political life, it is particularly interesting that he is shown wooing two women in the play, Anne and Elizabeth. The women in the play, the Duchess of York, Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Anne, are all without political power, but Richard's three longest dialogues in the play are with Margaret, Elizabeth, and Anne. They alone confront him with his villainy (I.ii.70; I.iii.221, 330; IV.iv.144, 195-6). Unlike his male victims, they are permitted to survive and reflect on Richard because they pose no threat to him politically or militarily. His attitude towards the curses of women is simply reflected in his response to his mother's disowning him:

A flourish, trumpets! Strike alarum, drums!
Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women
Rail on the Lord's anointed. Strike, I say!
Either be patient and entreat me fair,
Or with clamorous report of war
Thus will I drown your exclamations.

(IV.iv.149-154)

For Richard the ultimate arbiter is war, which can silence all speech. Why then do the speeches of “tell-tale women” have such importance in this play? They are temporarily protected by their powerlessness and so able to observe Richard's machinations, learn from them, and comprehend them. It is through the women in the play, especially Elizabeth, that we can understand Richard's struggle to achieve selfhood and to void himself of soul. Coppelia Kahn argues in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare that “the patriarchal world of Shakespeare's history plays is emphatically masculine. Its few women are relatively insignificant, and a man's identity is determined by his relationship to his father, son, or brother.” She argues that the play emphasizes, negatively, the importance of the mother in the “formation of masculine identity” and that the entire tetralogy traces “the decline of the father-son bond.”²¹ This approach slights the importance of the women in the play, not as participants in the action of the plot, but as knowers of its significance.

The women in Richard III know Richard through their relations with him as mother, wife, mother-in-law, and tormentor more completely than any of his male allies or challengers. As Madonne M. Miner puts it, they represent a “humanity apparent nowhere else in the play.”²² Miner understands the increasing camaraderie of the women in the play as a “counterprocess, one that insists on the inherently positive value of women,” against Richard's destructive momentum.²³

Elizabeth is the only one of these women who, having understood Richard's ambitions and intentions, is able to act on this understanding. The second wooing scene of the play in act 4, scene 4 is a dramatic revision of the earlier courtship of Anne. Richard begins by attempting the same tricks with Elizabeth in seeking the hand of her daughter. But rather than slip into Richard's rhetoric she forces him into one of his most self-damning lines: “Myself myself confound.” How is she able to entangle him in his own rhetoric?

Elizabeth's conversation with Richard in act 4, scene 4 shows her drawn quickly into his rhetorical power, as Anne was:

K. Rich.
Wrong not her birth; she is a royal princess.
ELIZ.
To save her life I'll say she is not so.
K. Rich.
Her life is safest only in her birth.
ELIZ.
And only in that safety died her brothers.
K. Rich.
Lo, at their birth good stars were opposite.
ELIZ.
And only in that safety died her brothers.
K. Rich.
All unavoided is the doom of destiny.
ELIZ.
True, when avoided grace makes destiny.

(212-219)

She is soon trapped within Richard's language and syntax, just as Anne was (343-353). But she manages to escape his rhetorical stratagems. By speaking in Richard-like riddles of his professions of “soul's love,” she compels him to untangle his own verbal tropes.

The flow of Richard's repartee is interrupted, and he, having failed at the game of courtship in which he seduced Anne, speaks to Elizabeth more plainly than he does to anyone else in the play. If she has lost sons, she should welcome their replacement with grandchildren, and grandchildren are better since she will be spared the physical labor of children. Richard relies on his standard repertoire of oaths, which Elizabeth challenges one by one until he attempts to swear by his “self” and Elizabeth points out, “Thy self is self-misus'd.” She assumes mastery of the exchange by line 418.

It is indicative both of Richard's underestimation of women and his final hopefulness that he is confident at the end of Elizabeth's submission (“Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!”). But as is apparent in Richmond's speech after his victory at Bosworth, she has made other arrangements for her daughter as well (V.v.29-31). Elizabeth understands her weak position, unlike Anne, but does not rail against it, as Margaret does. She exposes Richard's appeals to her desire for security and political power and reduces him to the argument that his political survival coincides with hers. This is the only point in the play where a character understands the action better than Richard himself.

In the first courtship, Richard offers himself as a replacement for her father and her husband and she accepts. In the second courtship scene, Richard offers to replace Elizabeth's children with the promise of grandchildren who are, from the political perspective of lineage, just the same, he argues. His argument makes sense on the level of rational self-interest, but it makes no sense on the level of the heart (Elizabeth's “heart-love,” 261). Richard's soulless soul, the repository of his thoughts, is capable only of rational affiliation. He allies with Elizabeth and her daughter out of political necessity. Elizabeth, however, possesses not just “soul” in Richard's unchristian sense of the word, but also “heart.” She remains unpersuaded by the cold logic that substitutes grandchildren for children.

From the first we see of him, Richard is interested to separate himself from natural and conventional ties, which, for him, are most strongly represented by women. In Henry VI, Part 3, act 5, scene 6, after killing King Henry VI in cold blood (having become impatient with Edward's inconvenient and impolitic compunctions, V.v.49) Richard says that he has “neither pity, love, nor fear”—that he has “no brother”, and is “like no brother.”²⁴

He concludes the self-reflective part of the soliloquy “I am myself alone,” affirming his selfhood. He says he wins Anne with “dissembling looks” (Richard III, I.ii.241). The description is ironic, since his looks—how he appears physically—cannot be dissembled and exclude him from ladies' chambers. He has managed, through his art of speech, to disguise his true nature (both physical and mental), defeating “dissembling Nature” (I.i.19) itself. He describes how he foments civil strife: “And thus I clothe my naked villainy / With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ, / And seem a saint, when most I play the devil” (I.iv.336-8). And, finally, after the dialogue confusion of the nightmare in act 5, scene 3, he echoes his first self-revelatory speech in Henry VI, Part 3: “I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself” (203-204). What his remarks about himself all have in common is that they all state what Richard is not. He is most obviously not a saint, but neither is he a devil—he merely plays one. He is incapable of pity, love, or fear—rejecting love as beyond his natural capacities. He can also play comedian, tragedian, Mermaid, basilisk, Nestor, Ulysses, Sinon, chameleon, Proteus, and Machiavelli's master. Given that we know all he is capable of playing, all he is capable of metamorphosing into—son, brother, friend, lover, husband, father, king—we are led to ask who or what he is.

For a character who so frequently explains himself in soliloquy and asides, there is remarkable critical disagreement about just who he is. The problem behind this critical uncertainty is the questionable status of “soul” for Richard. Commentators such as Sir Thomas Whately and John Philip Kemble refer to his “character”;²⁵ E. M. W. Tillyard and Lily B. Campbell speak of symbolic accoutrements; Freud understands him as possessing a psychology;²⁶ David L. Frey refers to the “internal process”; and Robert N. Watson discusses the “internal logic” of Richard as a symbol.²⁷ But the difficulty is that they do not fully explore why Richard is at odds with himself—what the contradictions between his first and last soliloquies mean. Richard attempts to understand himself outside the Judeo-Christian framework, and outside the Aristotelian/Platonic framework, as a being who consists in self rather than soul. Unlike Marlowe's Faustus, he does not wait until his last desperate moments to ask, “Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?” (V.ii.182).²⁸ Richard tries, at least from the beginning of his ascent to the crown, to see himself as without soul in the classical or theological sense.

Richard, instead of understanding himself as possessing a soul, which can be watched over by an omnipotent, all-seeing dispenser of divine justice, views himself as in possession of a “self.”²⁹ He is a selfhood rather than a body and soul in tension with one another. The very existence of a soul implies a disjunction between material and spiritual being. Richard wishes to escape this notion, which brings along with it notions of love, pity, guilt, and conscience. To escape “soul” means that he must understand it as an externally imposed religious, or philosophical, construct and liberate himself from the notion. This means that there will be no constraints on his actions imposed from without.

A notable instance of this new, Machiavellian way³⁰ of looking at the world is his public denunciation of conscience just before the final battle in act 5, scene 3: “Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe” (310-311). This is quite a different notion from Hamlet's regretful, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” (III.i.83).³¹ For Hamlet conscience is an innate impediment to forceful action. Richard argues to his captains that it is an external construct imposed by the weak on the strong.³² If conscience exists, then to escape detection for a crime is not to escape punishment for it—this is what Richard, along with Machiavelli's prince, wishes to go beyond.³³

Given Richard's level of metaphysical competence, it is surprising to learn that he is subject to nightmares. Anne refers to his “timorous dreams,” which keep her awake (IV.i.82-84). And it is even more puzzling when Richard, on the eve of the decisive battle of his reign, is woken into his final soliloquy on conscience. His troops outnumber Richmond's three to one (V.iii.11). He is nearly certain of military triumph. Yet he finds himself in the throes of what is generally taken to be an attack of conscience, but what is actually confrontation with deep uncertainty.

Richard has a consistently clear view of himself, which is shattered only on his awakening from a nightmare of ghosts charging his “soul” to despair and die. The difficulty is that this clear view of himself includes a deep contradiction that Richard does not recognize until too late; it is one that he never resolves. We are not presented, as in Macbeth, with the destruction and loss of a soul, but with the rupture of a man's belief about who he is. Richard discovers a contradiction in his understanding of human nature and its relation to external nature.

Richard is even utterly indifferent to guilt, referred to more in this play than in any other. Whether or not guilt exists is a question central to the play. Guilt, Richard argues, need not necessarily exist. It is not necessary to feel guilty for assassinating a brother, a wife, a cousin, kings, small children, friends. In fact, the truly strong and successful man must dispense with such feelings, understanding them to be conventions built into men by rulers and priests and given support by religion or superstition. Richard is so good at adopting the appearance of piety to persuade others because he himself is not at all pious.

One instance in which our attention is drawn to this dramatically is in the quiet entry of Prince Edward and Richard into London. Richard, with typical convoluted but perfectly accurate logic, warns the Prince “Nor more can you distinguish of a man / Than of his outward show, which—God knows—/ Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart” (III.i.9-11). Hastings enters immediately after with the news that the Queen and the young Duke of York have taken sanctuary and Richard uses the same oath, “On what occasion God he knows, not I” (26). Richard explains himself—only God knows that a man's professions and his actual intentions are never the same. But, of course, Richard believes that he, rather than God, knows this of himself. The doomed Hastings repeats the oath sincerely and unthinkingly.

If Richard has succeeded in ridding himself of guilt, though, how does he understand himself? Only a soul (fearing some justice) is subject to guilt or attacks of conscience; a self is free of them. A self, unlike a soul, has no links with others—it can be hidden behind different masks (religious, romantic, loyal, patriotic).

My interpretation starts from the premise Richard gives us in the opening soliloquy: that guilt is unnecessary and that the soul, otherwise empty, is simply the private repository of thought or consciousness.³⁴ From this perspective the price for the success of Richard's project of usurpation is nothing; he has no “jewel” to lose like Macbeth.

Just before the summary execution of Hastings, Buckingham—the last to be betrayed—describes what is most dangerous about Richard:

We know each other's faces; for our hearts
He knows no more of mine than I of yours,
Or I of his, my lord, than you of mine.

(III.iv.10-12)

He means to cast aspersions on Hastings's loyalty, to make his execution seem less precipitous to the Bishop of Ely; but, like so many deliberately prophetic moral pronouncements in the play (Queen Margaret's curses), it falls back on the speaker. He can no more read Richard than Hastings can. His allusion to the masks of conspiracy comes very close to Machiavelli's advice in The Prince, chapter 18, “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes”:

Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are; and these few dare not oppose the opinions of many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end.³⁵

Most men never penetrate beyond appearances to the truth about another, or their motivations. Most men cannot “touch” Richard's essence, or see him for what he really is behind his various masks. Machiavelli concludes that because you cannot know the essential truth about motive you can only adequately judge the ends or results. Richard notes of Buckingham, after he has sounded him on the murder of the Princes, “none are for me / That look into me with considerate eyes” (IV.ii.29-30). He understands how rare and dangerous those who can “touch” are and accordingly dooms Buckingham. Richard is a master of appearances—of being seen rather than touched—as we learn when he first reveals his ambition in his first significant soliloquy in the tetralogy:³⁶

Why I can smile and murder while I smile,
And cry ‘Content!’ to that that grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut! Were it further off, I'll pluck it down

Henry VI, Part 3 (III.iii.182-195).

Richard claims he is capable of being anything, and makes here the one direct reference to the author of The Prince in all of Shakespeare. It is significant that he refers to the Florentine himself, rather than to the bastard creations that took his name on the Renaissance stage. Richard will not simply rival the followers of Machiavelli, but will strive to outdo Machiavelli himself. He is Shakespeare's version of a true student of Machiavelli, rather than the static stage machiavel of the period. He is a brilliant political and military strategist who understands Machiavellian policy and holds with Marlowe's Machevill “there is no sin but ignorance” (The Jew of Malta prologue, 15).³⁷

At one point, Richard is described by Buckingham as a “Christian Prince” (III.vii.95), one of three figures in Shakespeare's dramas to receive that honor (the other two are Henry V at I.ii.24.pr.6; and Henry VI pt. 1 at V.iii.172). The epithet might be chosen with the teachings of Machiavelli's Prince in mind since Richard uses the appearance of humility and charity to achieve power. Though this mask wears thin, it enables him to become Protector under his simplistically pious brother, King Edward IV. It is Machiavelli's understanding that the pretense of complete humility and virtue may be the most effective way to power—that Christianity has much to teach the modern prince. The tragedy is, on this level, a philosophical response to the implicit Machiavellian contention that such rare and wholly evil men must be politically successful.³⁸

John F. Danby speaks of the “prime significance of Machiavellianism” for the Elizabethans: “there is a new sense of the fissuring of man, of a gap between the external and the internal, a possible dichotomy between the social and the spiritual.” The man who is conscious of the mask of society “will be the hypocrite—a man superior in degree of consciousness to his fellows.” Danby sees Richard's final fit of guilt as a criticism of this type of new man.³⁹ In part, this is true, but the criticism is not that bad men will always have their comeuppance, despite Machiavelli's teaching. Instead, the criticism is directed at the forwardness of Machiavelli and the openness with which he teaches political realism. This openness invites imitation by those not suited to, or capable of, being fit princes. Machiavelli addresses his Prince to those who are princes and his Discourses to those who ought to be. This does not mean that he could not be understood and used by those who neither were nor ought to be princes. Harry V. Jaffa calls Richard “a nearly perfect symbol of Machiavellian modernity.”⁴⁰ He falls short of perfection because he is not a perfect student of Machiavelli.

He does, however, seem to have studied “policy.” He reminds himself to attend to the reality of the moment—not to count on tactical success until he is certain of it (I.i.120, “but yet I run before my horse to market,” I.i.160). He knows how to get the crown, how to foment civil strife, who to befriend, who to test, who to execute, who to marry, who to ally with and when to drop the alliance—all from the very beginning of the play, even before Edward is assured of the crown (Henry VI, Part 3, V.vi.61-93). It is as though he has heeded Machiavelli's admonition in his chapter “On Conspiracies” in Discourses on Livy:

But that lust for domination, which blinds men, blinds them yet again in the way they set about the business: for, if they knew but how to do their evil deeds with prudence, it would be impossible for them not to succeed.

(Discourses, 404)

Richard seems to possess this complete prudence.

For Richard, there is a question as to the efficacy of the means, never the desirability of the end. Macbeth, by contrast, likens the murders that he must commit to secure his throne to the crossing of a river—a finite act (III.iv.135-7). Richard speaks more matter-of-factly. The chain of crimes to usurpation, once begun, continues on indefinitely—that is political realism. “Sin will pluck on sin” (IV.ii.63-65). He accepts assassination, execution, and private murder as a way of life. Macbeth is first concerned with the corruption/temptation of Macbeth to the crime of usurpation.⁴¹Richard III takes this for granted in the opening soliloquy.

Richard is always conscious of how he presents himself; he speaks in theatrical terms, and directs scenes with Buckingham. But this self-consciousness makes him self-aware rather than self-knowing. Richard's numerous revealing asides have the effect of making the audience co-conspirators in his project. Since he can confide his true plans to no other character, the silent audience, like the Scrivener, knows but says nothing. Despite all Richard's revelations, Macbeth is still more accessible to us as a moral being. Richard remains multiplicitous and ambiguous, yet nonetheless representative of the ambitions of modern political man (according to Machiavelli's account).

There is a dimension of self-consciousness that Richard does not have, and that is regard for his “fame”—a concept introduced by the young Prince Edward before he is imprisoned and killed in the Tower. He describes his royal aspirations to the Protector and questions him closely about the Tower and how it came to be believed that Julius Caesar built it:

PRINCE:
Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
BUCK.
Upon record, my gracious lord.
PRINCE:
But say, my lord, it were not register'd
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retail'd to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
RICH.
[Aside] So wise so young, they say, do never live long.
PRINCE:
What say you uncle?
RICH.
I say, without characters fame lives long
[Aside] Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.
PRINCE:
That Julius Caesar was a famous man:
With what his valour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live;
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

(III.i.69-88)

How is the fame of a great conqueror sustained? Does it depend on “character”? That is, does it depend on writing or, as Richard puns, on character—the moral substance of a leader? The Prince argues innocently that the truth lives on without writing—a political actor is rewarded with fame or infamy. History brings about justice.

Again, Machiavelli's Prince is helpful on this point. In chapter 8 “Of Those Who Have Attained a Principality through Crimes,” he tells the story of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse. Unfortunately, despite Agathocles' “virtu”—his military prowess and leadership—“his savage cruelty and inhumanity, together with his infinite crimes, do not allow him to be celebrated among the most excellent men.”⁴² It is not enough to gain fame: one must avoid infamy as well. This is the risk that a tyrant always runs, and is the point of the Prince's questioning concerning Julius Caesar.⁴³

This is the problem facing Richard as well. If he is concerned with glory (the highest goal for man in Machiavelli), he must be concerned with his reputation. The irony is that Shakespeare's presentation of this conversation keeps alive Richard's reputation as cruel murderer of the Princes. There has been much scholarship on whether Richard himself was actually responsible for having the princes killed, an event shrouded in mystery. Shakespeare seems unconcerned with keeping open the possibility of Richard's innocence or even obscuring his complicity—the point being that, whether or not Richard actually had the princes killed, he was widely believed to have killed them. In matters of historical record, written or oral, it is one's reputation rather than the unrecoverable or little known facts of accurate biography that should concern a man who aspires to greatness and glory, according to Machiavelli. The conversation between Richard and Prince Edward emphasizes this point nicely. It may not be the truth that lives from age to age (as the Prince somewhat naively asserts), but the report of what was believed or wished true that persists. The perfect criminal/prince commits a crime that is wholeheartedly believed to be someone else's doing. Richard obviously is not able to relieve himself of the burden of blame for what may have been (from the coldly political point of view of securing the crown for the House of York) entirely necessary murders. Richard, most pleased with his own cleverness, ignores the importance of the question of how fame is created, and fails historically. The full irony is, of course, that Shakespeare's record of Richard keeps alive his reputation as a tyrant and killer of innocents. Our attention is called to another aspect of Richard's imperfect machiavellianism.

Richard's debate with himself in act 5, scene 3 is closer to disputation than to moral dilemma. It raises again the implied question of the first soliloquy: Is nature indifferent to man? If nature is indifferent to man, then it provides no guidance for human beings, no natural foundation for constraints on man's treatment of man, no necessity that all men have consciences. If nature, however, can be shown to provide guidance in human affairs, then there is a possibility of a moral standard available to all. Every man might then possess a conscience and Richard might merely have suppressed his. Given Richard's bravado after his nightmares (“Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe,” 310-311), he seems to have concluded on the side of nature's indifference.

But Richard answers the question differently in his first soliloquy. There is a rationale behind nature—it may be malevolent (as in his case), but nature knows what she is doing and why. If nature is “dissembling,” she possesses a deliberate intention to mislead. This unresolved contradiction between the first and last soliloquies explains why Richard finally fails, and why he is a less than perfect student of Machiavelli.

THE DREGS OF CONSCIENCE

Richard boasts at the end of act 5, scene 6 in King Henry VI, Part 3 that he has “neither pity, love, nor fear” (68). In his final soliloquy, he comes to experience all three when he is afflicted by “coward conscience” (V.iii.178-207).⁴⁴ By placing this scene at the end of the play, Shakespeare has tempted us to consider that Richard's first accounts of himself are complete and true. The soliloquy is his attempt, intellectually, to convince himself that he has no conscience. If we have allowed ourselves to believe that Shakespeare's most villainous protagonist is a man without guilt or fear of retribution (discounting Anne's reference to Richard's “timorous dreams” [IV.i.84]), we must now rethink his character.

At first, Richard tries to explain away his fear and dismiss it as groundless. The only justifiable reason for fear is imminent physical danger. From whom is he in danger? Himself? He is after all a murderer. That cannot be, unless he seeks revenge against himself. But, though he is moved to revenge himself for wrongs done him by nature (I.i.30), his desire for revenge is limited by self-love. “Richard loves Richard.” He is no suicide. In another sense, he is in danger of himself; his fears may cause him to betray himself, lose heart. “Alack, I love myself” (188). But this directly contradicts the claim on which he has built his usurping and tyrannical career—that he does not possess the capacity to love.

Richard has believed himself totally devoid of love or any human attachments, but in the dream sequence he is brought to face his experience of the emotions that attach men to other human beings (love, pity, and fear) as they all surface. His unconcern with the consequences of his crimes has been based on his conviction that he is altogether indifferent to others. But, if he is self-loving and therefore sensitive to injustices done to himself (the wrongs done him by nature), he cannot be entirely indifferent to injustices done to others. Can one feel these emotions about oneself and be completely unmoved by what happens to others? To feel the injustice of the world strongly is to expect justice from it. If nature owes something to him, then nature must owe something to others. His ability to harm others and his cruelty (an example of which is his request that Tyrrel give him details of the princes' deaths, IV.iii.31-32) suggest that he is emotionally attached to other men in an important way. To be concerned with harming others is to be concerned with them, however perversely. In a sense, Richard must go out of his way to emphasize the injustice done him by nature in order to motivate and justify cruel actions.

Richard, unlike Clarence, is not consumed with guilt, but with the debate about guilt and conscience.⁴⁵ He acts on the erroneous belief that he is a creature solely of intellect,⁴⁶ capable of making himself entirely into a selfhood with no human attachments. He tries to debate his way out of a self-contradiction—to dismiss his very real nightmares, tangible evidence of his guilt. Shakespeare stages Richard's dreams, not Clarence's, to emphasize that the emotional experience (of someone who claims to have no such emotions) has substance, and that, for a human being who does not acknowledge inner struggle, the dilemma must be displaced to the outside. For Richard to be able to dismiss this experience he must believe that there is no natural reason that a human being may not, as Proteus, recreate himself into anything he pleases. Men need not necessarily feel love, pity, or fear—men may be creatures solely of intellect. In fact, Richard believes such men are by far superior, as is suggested by his contempt for all those (particularly women), who do not operate exclusively on this level. He, unlike the rest of mankind, claims to have seen through the superstitions governing men, and freed himself from the fear of divine justice, and so from conscience. Why then is he troubled with these dreams? Afterwards he says that these shadows have struck terror to his “soul.” Has Richard discovered that he has a soul?

The Murderers of Clarence (I.iv) provide the best anticipatory commentary on Richard's final soliloquy (V.iii.178-207). They puzzle over whether there exists such a thing as conscience, what its origins are, and whether it can be escaped, avoided, or circumvented. Each takes a side of the debate Richard has with himself later on.⁴⁷

The Second Murderer feels some pangs of conscience—he is worried by the “urging of that word, ‘Judgment’” (104), but at the mention of a reward he theorizes:

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, shamefaced 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 turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself, and live without it.

(I.iv.128-138)

Conscience is an unnecessary impediment to self-interest. He concludes by advising that man should “trust to himself”—serve his own ends, rather than heed conscience. Conscience is, then, another voice, one not governed by self-interest. The Second Murderer describes it as a separate individual. This is true of the experience of conscience. It is external to the individual in some way. It links man to standards beyond himself. Conscience relates man to given political or natural or theological standards.

The murderers continue accusing conscience; the Second Murderer perverts proverbial wisdom, likening conscience to the devil: “he would insinuate with thee but to make thee sigh” (I.iv.142)—it deceives men against their own best interest. Caught in this exchange of witticisms when Clarence wakes, they “reason” with him, in order to justify to themselves his execution.

Clarence, in response, appeals to divine law over human law: “The great King of kings / Hath in the table of His law commanded / That thou shalt do no murder” (184-186). This sentiment is echoed, to as little effect, in the next scene as King Edward IV attempts to reconcile his Court: “Lest He that is the supreme King of kings / Confound your hidden falsehood, and award / Either of you to be the other's end” (II.i.13-15). The idea is repeated again in the next scene (just after Clarence's murder), by Clarence's son: “God will revenge it, whom I will importune / With earnest prayers, all to that effect” (II.ii.14-15). The argument for divine vengeance is put in the mouths of the weak who seek protection, ineffectually, from the strong.

The Second Murderer has second thoughts, having failed to rid himself of conscience.⁴⁸ He does little to prevent the assassination, though, and afterwards compares himself to Pilate—another guilty bystander. He is termed a “coward” by his companion (269), echoed later by Richard's denouncement of coward conscience at Bosworth. How can cowardice be distinguished from conscience by an onlooker?

Can one completely rid oneself of conscience? The argument between the murderers represents two opposing ideas about conscience and divine justice presented in the play. Either conscience is the reasonable fear of punishment from a just God (or gods), or it is merely timidity in the face of convention, based on the incorrect opinion that justice is at work in this world or another. These are the positions of Clarence and Edward on the one hand, and Richard on the other.

Queen Margaret's cursing refrains remind us, if we had forgotten, of the murders committed by all three in order to establish the House of York on the throne. From the moral perspective, they deserve the torments of conscience. Clarence and Edward do experience these as they near death, but Richard strives, with near success, to escape them up until his nightmares in act 5, scene 3.

Clarence, sensible of the dangers of his imprisonment, ultimately comes to the belief that God does punish villains, however successful. He describes to the Keeper a complex dream in which he envisions being called to account by his victims and punished by Furies (pagan exacters of vengeance). The experience of conscience has, for him, a psychological complexity. In Edward, by contrast, conscience shows itself as simple fear of divine retribution. Worried by the thought of imminent death and judgment, Edward spends his last days arranging artificial reconciliations between nobles, for the more certain salvation of his soul. Later, he fears God's wrath for his part in Clarence's death (II.i.132-3).⁴⁹

Richard, however, does not evince belief in a deity who concerns himself with punishing human evil. Guilt and conscience have their roots in groundless superstitions. The only punishment he understands is failure, and failure is the avoidable consequence of imprudence. What, then, are the roots of his apparent attack of conscience in act 5, scene 3? Why is he able to ignore the concerns that afflict his brothers about the usurpation of Henry VI? Either conscience is innate, an immutable part of us that connects us with the world (human and divine) beyond ourselves, or it is a convention (like divine right), carefully contrived by men to discourage questioning of political or religious authority.

Unlike Clarence's “unfelt imaginations” (I.iv.80), Richard's torments are externalized and staged. Despite these tangible manifestations (the ghosts that burden his “soul” and charge him to “despair and die”), Richard publicly denies the power of conscience (V.iii.310). But his debate with himself remains precariously unresolved. This lack of resolution is due to his conflicting views of nature, which cause him confusion about whether there is some natural standard for human behavior.

DISSEMBLING NATURE

The murderers show the terms of the debate, but this does not explain why Richard, so apparently unconcerned with moral right and wrong, is divided before the decisive battle of his reign. This division is rooted in his conflicting views about nature. Richard believes he has been “cheated of feature by dissembling Nature” (I.i.19):⁵⁰

Why, Love forswore me in my mother's womb:
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail Nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sit Deformity to mock my body.

(III.ii.153-163)

To explain his misshapenness, Richard says that nature has been corrupted by love. Consequently, he believes that nature has done him an injustice. To believe in the injustice of nature implies the attribution of intention to nature. How can a nature indifferent to man be spiteful, envious, dishonest, and dissembling? How can it intend anything towards an individual man?

Richard's egocentric view of nature requires that there be some rationale behind nature that gives men different physical natures for different ends. There must be some motivating intelligence behind it all, however malicious, or incomprehensible to human reason. According to Richard, nature gives lovers beautiful shapes. Since it has deprived him of beauty, he cannot be a lover and must pursue villainy—nature has indirectly determined his course of action. There are three choices, as he sees it in this soliloquy. He might have been a lover, but nature has precluded that (I.i.14-24). He might become philosophic or poetic, gazing at his “shadow” or attempting to describe his “deformity” (I.i.26-27), but there is no satisfaction in this. Finally, he might become what society would call a “villain” (I.i.30-31). Richard, then, is not entirely a creature of his own creation. He cannot simply make what he wants out of himself: nature has imposed certain limitations on him—limitations that he understands as guiding him, negatively, to villainy. There is some kind of natural standard, then, even if it is only as crude as beauty of form.

The other outstanding Shakespearean villain who contemplates nature as a supreme power is Edmund in King Lear:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true;
As honest madam's issue?

(I.ii.1-9)⁵¹

Edmund stands in the “plague of custom,” and so vows to serve nature instead,⁵² which has given him all her gifts: dimension, mind, and shape. He will worship her as a goddess, because he recognizes in nature rational standards by which to judge men: quality of form and mind.

Edmund is society's bastard while Richard is the bastard of nature. Edmund is deprived only by custom of the status that he might naturally claim. He intends to circumvent with his “invention” (20). He is the thrall of “custom,” Richard is “the slave of nature” (I.iii.230). He notes the superiority of others in this respect: Edward, Prince of Wales is “Fram'd in the prodigality of Nature” (I.ii.248). In Richard's case nature does not reveal his true qualities in his outward form. The truth about him and his capacities is hidden. In Edmund's case custom obscures his excellent nature, his form and mind. Both attribute their misfortunes to forces external to themselves, forces they believe may be overcome by “invention” or “villainy.”

Edmund decides to take nature alone as his standard for action—he is superior, therefore he deserves all the honors and opportunities appropriate to that superiority. We might suspect that, like Richard, he seeks a kind of revenge—but against custom, rather than nature—for instance, by engaging himself to both Goneril and Regan. Richard's alternatives are, first, to create a “self” in opposition to, or apart from, nature, which will enable him to achieve happiness through conquering nature. Second, to fulfill the purpose nature has given him: he is ugly, therefore he must be villainous. He vacillates between these two opinions. Richard desires to revenge himself for what nature has done to him and finds that nature has given him a form that instructs him in this desire for vengeance. He reflects on accounts of his birth:

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.
I have no brother, I am like no brother.

(V.vi.71-80)

But can one be revenged on nature from within nature? Richard wants both to discover that nature determines that he will seek vengeance and to believe that he is capable of triumphing over nature by revenging himself in some way. His quest for such revenge raises the question: How should one regard one's own natural deficiencies?

Richard finds biblical guidance on this subject from St. Paul. He is the only character in all of Shakespeare to swear by this saint (six times: I.i.138, I.ii.36, I.ii.41, I.iii.45, III.iv.76, V.iii.277).⁵³ It is a highly unusual oath. Paul, too, suffered from imperfection of physical form and was an outsider (a Pharisee and Roman citizen converted to Christianity). Paul writes in his letters of having an invisible ailment (“a thorn in the flesh,” 2 Cor. 12:7), which afflicts him terribly. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul speaks to Richard's problem:

Do ye look on things after the outward appearance? If any man trust to himself that he is Christ's, let him of himself think this again, that, as he is Christ's, even so are we Christ's. For though I should boast somewhat more of our authority, which the Lord hath given us for edification, and not for your destruction, I should not be ashamed: That I may not seem as if I would terrify you by letters. For his letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible. Let such an one think this, that, such as we are in word by letters when we are absent, such will we be also in deed when we are present.

(2 Corinthians 10:7-11)⁵⁴

Outward appearances are deceptive, so we should not look to outward form as an indicator of inner power. Nature dissembles the truth. Richard's motto might be Paul's defiance about his infirmity in 2 Corinthians 12:10: “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I most strong.”

This is true, in caricature, for Richard; his pretense of humility carries him far with Edward IV who makes him Lord Protector; with Clarence, who trusts him to gain his freedom; with Anne, who refuses to kill him when he is most vulnerable; and with the people of London who quietly watch him refuse and then accept the crown (echoes of Julius Caesar). It is the case with Richard that, when he appears most weak, he is most strong and most dangerous. Like Machiavelli he understands the power of seeming weakness in the political arena.

Richard twice refers to himself as “ordain'd” for his political role. Both times in King Henry VI, Part 3, V.vi.58—as he kills Henry—and V.vii.23; “This shoulder was ordain'd”. Richard uses the word in the sense of being chosen by the superior power that has deformed his shoulder, so Paul is chosen by a higher power, Acts 26.

Nature, by deforming Richard, has suited him for the role of “That excellent grand tyrant of the earth / That reigns in galled eyes of weeping souls” (Margaret's epithet, IV.iv.51). According to the Queen, Richard has achieved his revenge. He tyrannizes or “reigns” in the tears of those he has injured; his victory is in their pain. More simply, he is in the “eyes of weeping souls” because he is reflected in their eyes as they look at him, fixing on the source of all their unhappiness.

Nature has taken away from Richard the possibility of private pleasures, and so he retreats into public life. Richard's political and public stance is that Nature does not determine political success or failure. One's nature (physical form, mental endowments) may always be used to advantage—as Edmund perceives.

Anne's submission to Richard (I.ii) gives him the thought that he may recast (clothe) his natural deformity with convention (tailoring) in such a way that others do not notice it. He will “entertain a score or two of tailors / To study fashions to adorn my body” (I.ii.261-2). This suggests how hopeful Richard is that man may conquer or circumvent nature. Just as deformity may be disguised by clever tailors, so the highest political ambitions may be hidden underneath the appearance of piety or weakness: “And thus I clothe my naked villainy / With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,” I.iii.336-7.

SELF AGAINST SOUL

Why is Richard interested in creating a “self”? He is trying to find a point outside of nature from which to revenge himself on it. On the one hand, he cannot escape his natural deformity, and so takes it as indicative of his purpose in life—to be as hideous in thought and action (“let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it,” King Henry VI, Part 3, V.vi.79) as in form. On the other, nature has cheated him and so he must get beyond nature (“clothe” his natural deformity), in order to gain happiness. But to go beyond nature requires that he not look to nature for an end or purpose in life.

Macbeth resolves to “jump the life to come” (I.vii.7). Richard is beyond or, alternatively, below, such a concern with divine retribution. His concern in act 5, scene 3 is with whether conscience, a thing intangible, and existing only in the soul or mind (Macbeth's “dagger of the mind”), does or ought to have any effect on his actions. His debate is interrupted by preparations for battle and we never learn that he resolves it satisfactorily. One form of this debate over conscience asks whether it is possible to be entirely evil.⁵⁵ Richard's first understanding is that, if there is no natural standard for right or justice, conscience or guilt is merely conventional. Even an individual brought up in a religious society might be able to liberate himself from such conventions, by seeing them as merely imposed by a particular society in a particular historical period. If, however, there is reason to suspect that nature is not simply indifferent to man, (either that there is some divine plan, though we may not comprehend it, or that there is a natural order), then there may be more solid grounds for believing in the existence of conscience or the experience of guilt. Richard fails, in part, at what he tries to become (a self rather than a soul), because he cannot resolve himself as to whether his final pangs of conscience over those he has slain are merely the shadows of an externally imposed social morality, or whether they are rooted in some kind of natural law. Is there natural right or no?

A simple moral reading of the play would interpret it as Shakespeare's assertion that everyone has a conscience, no matter how villainous he may appear. But, as Richard's imperfect self-understanding shows, he is not the perfect villain. His flaw points to a possibility beyond himself—a tyrant who is not simply excellent, but perfect. Such a tyrant would have no nightmares.

Richard's motivation, to revenge himself for wrongs done him by nature, is based on a sense of injustice—nature has cheated him. Desire for such vengeance presupposes that the affliction is deliberate. Richard's anger against nature is rooted in an unarticulated belief that nature is not indifferent to man. Consequently, he cannot avoid entertaining the suspicion that there is a standard for human behavior. Richard, after all, acknowledges the natural standard by which he is considered deformed, by which his end (villainy rather than love) is determined.

Richard is the prototypical modern man in this sense: he believes he can conquer nature entirely by means of his intellect, forcing everyone to acknowledge him as most powerful (even imperial), despite his natural disadvantage. But by the end of the play, Richard actually believes that he “may despair” (V.iii.201). To despair in the religious sense is utterly to doubt God. For Richard, despair is the discovery that his hopes for the crown, for the House of York, and above all for revenge are utterly unrealizable. This hope ignores the fact that he believes intermittently that nature has determined his end to be that of villain rather than lover.

On a political level, an answer to the general question of whether nature provides standards for human action would influence an answer to the question posed in act 4, scene 3 of Macbeth: Is formal legitimacy the most important aspect of political rule, or is justice necessary as well? Malcolm argues that the tyrant is tyrannical because of his injustice rather than because of his illegitimacy. Richard, like Macduff in that scene, limits the question of rule to the question of legitimacy. By slandering his parents and removing everyone between him and the throne, he can provide himself with formal legitimacy. In this sense he is the prototypical modern tyrant and a good student of Machiavelli. He is that political gambler, offering a kingdom for a horse: “I have set my life upon a cast / And I will stand the hazard of the die” (V.iv.9-10).⁵⁶

Xenophon, in his Hiero and Education of Cyrus, sets forth two classical models of tyranny. Respectively, they are the tyrant who pursues unlimited private pleasure and the tyrant who pursues unlimited honor and glory. In Macbeth, we have a usurper motivated by the desire for the highest honor (the Scottish throne), and he, like Cyrus, knows that he deserves it. In The Winter's Tale, Leontes, like Hiero, is tyrannical in the realm of private desires—especially love. He desires to be loved absolutely and provably by Hermione. Richard III follows neither classical model of tyranny: he does not seek honor or love, but revenge.

This play is the core of Shakespeare's criticism of Machiavelli, or Machiavellianism. The deformed Richard parodies Machiavelli's favorite examples of potential and actual princes—those who are not favored by nature or society (bastards, for example, Cesare Borgia). Shakespeare sees the possibility of a new species of tyrant arising from the teachings of the Prince and Discourses. Machiavelli's openness invites imitation by all sorts of brilliant but perverted minds. He may even have particular appeal to a man, like Richard, who desires to revenge himself on the world. Shakespeare's character demonstrates how an aspiring tyrant of this sort, using Machiavelli's “new modes and orders,” goes very far towards achieving his ends, without understanding them.

But what does Richard want? Is it that his nature impels him towards villainy? Unlike Macbeth, Richard does not regard himself as deserving of the high honors of kingship, but only as clever enough to get them, and he has contempt for those who will not try. He desires revenge against nature because of his deformity. Yet he believes he has freed himself from the notion that there is a natural standard (natural law, natural right)—freed himself from the ferocity of conscience—which distinguishes good and evil. It emerges that Richard is driven by an unacknowledged sense of injustice: nature has injured him. As it turns out, Richard's new way of looking at the world ruptures when he cannot decide whether he is within nature or able to be outside it. This rupture occurs as he faces death.

If Richard's actions are not inspired by some belief in his natural right as a superior intellect, what moves him? It could be said that he simply wants mastery over others and over nature. It appears that he desires power for its own sake. But how is this desire for power to be distinguished from a desire for revenge, a hatred of the world? That distinction cannot be made from outside a person: no one can “touch” what another is.

If Richard does not acknowledge a standard in nature which, well understood, may offer guidance on human action, is there some other guide? Another such standard might be history. Does Richard wish to be judged by history as the unifier of England, the originator of empire, like the builder of the Tower, Julius Caesar? If so, and there is some reason to credit him on these grounds, he fails utterly, attracting instead the reputation of cruel tyrant (ironically reinforced by the surface presentation of Richard in this play).

Richard and Macbeth are not so far apart finally. There is a connection between the desire for vengeance and a love of honor (most fully explored in Coriolanus). Richard's desire to be revenged on nature comes out of his sense that nature owed him something in particular that he has been forced to obtain in another way: by perfect manipulation of his world, by science. But already, in his drive for mastery, Richard concedes that his invented “self” is incomplete: he needs something from the rest of the world, even if that something is infamy. For Machiavelli the desire for power is coeval or identical with the desire to conquer fortune. But Shakespeare probes this desire in order to expose the human anger at natural deficiencies—a power-seeking anger which, because he underestimates it, Machiavelli guides recklessly.

Notes

1. Both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry James registered dissatisfaction with the play on this account. H. C. Robinson's Diary records that Coleridge believed Shakespeare “wrote hardly anything of this play except the character of Richard: he found the piece a stock play and re-wrote the parts which developed the hero's character,” from Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell & Sons, 1900), 27. The play was for James “a loose, violent, straddling romance …—a chronicle for the market-place, a portrait for the house wall.” From a review in Harper's Weekly quoted in Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare, ed. Gamini Salgado (Sussex: Sussex University Press, 1975), 104.

2. All citations from Richard III will be taken from the Arden Shakespeare, ed. Antony Hammond (New York: Methuen, 1981) and noted in the text. This edition will be cited in notes as Hammond.

3. “Ronald Berman remarked after a screening of Richard III on Public Television that Richard is the only character in the play who thinks very much. At times he seems to be thinking about his own double performance (one for characters, one for us),” Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 143. This running self-conscious commentary accounts, in part I believe, for the attraction/obsession of this part for contemporary actors. Antony Sher records this in Year of the King (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985).

4. In Discourses III.6. Translated by Bernard Crick (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 414.

5. Coleridge, 487.

6. Michael Neill cites E. A. J. Honigmann in “Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III,” in Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 99. This is also argued by L. C. Knights in Shakespeare, The Histories (Essex, Longman Group Ltd., 1965); and Norman Rabkin in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967); and Bridget Gellert Lyons, “’King's Games’: Stage Imagery and Political Symbolism in Richard III” in Criticism 20.1 (Winter 1978): 17-30.

7. Colley Cibber, “Richard III. a Tragedy” in The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Vol. 2 (New York: AMC Press, Inc., 1966), 322. Cibber introduces the association of conscience and cowardice early on in his revision of Richard III and abbreviates the speech on remorse from act 5, scene 3. In his version, interestingly, Gloucester complains of “tyrant Conscience” but believes himself too evil to be capable of repentance (much like Marlowe's Faustus). Cibber creates a safer Richard, more cowardly and less ruthlessly competent.

8. Francis Bacon's Essay XLIII “Of Deformity” states this view of nature as follows: “Deformed Persons are commonly euen with Nature: For as Nature hath done ill by them; So doe they by Nature: Being for the most part, (as Scripture saith) void of Naturall Affection; And so they have their Reuenge of Nature.” Essays, (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

9. “Richard III” in The Design Within, ed. M. D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970). Afterwards cited as Faber.

10. Faber, 345.

11. Examples of such criticisms are: James T. Henke's The Ego-King: An Archetype Approach to Elizabethan Political Thought and Shakespeare's Henry VI Plays; Marjorie Garber's Dreams in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, pp. 15-25; Murray Krieger's “The Dark Generations of Richard III” in Faber; and Michael Neill's “Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III,” in Shakespeare's Studies 8 (1975): 99-129.

12. For example, Sir Thomas Whately, in his excellent essay, “Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare” overlooks entirely the effect of Richard's deformity on him. In Shakespeare Criticism: 1623-1840, ed. D. Nichol Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 125-126. Freud recognizes the force of Richard's resentment and its connection with his misshapenness.

13. The first reference is particularly interesting since it suggests one source of Shakespeare's knowledge of Machiavelli, as Edward Meyer points out in Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (1897; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 58. The Duke of Alençon was the noble to whom Gentillet dedicated his famous commentary on Machiavellian thought in Discours Contre Machiavelli [eds. A. D'Andrea and P. D. Stewart (Firenze: Casalini Libri, 1974)]. Meyer notes no less than 395 references to Machiavelli in all of Elizabethan literature. There are three in Shakespeare. The third instance is in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the Host of the Garter asks “Am I too politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?” III.i.92-93, just before undeceiving two potential combatants. Gentillet's diatribe against Machiavelli ironically did much to popularize his thought in England before the first published English translation of The Prince in 1666. But Felix Raab completely dispels the myth of Gentillet's version of Machiavelli as the definitive English Machiavelli in The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964): “The common form of this myth is that those who manufactured these masters [stage machiavels] had not read Machiavelli at all and had created their villains on the basis of Gentillet's hostile distortion of his writings. … In the first place, although Simon Patericke translated the Contre-Machiavel in 1577, only a year after it was written, the translation was not printed until 1602, by which time the Machiavellian villain had been a stock figure for some time. To argue that Patericke's translation exerted this tremendous influence in manuscript is clearly ridiculous in view of the proliferation of Machiavelli's work in England, nor is there any evidence that the French edition of Gentillet was being more widely read than Machiavelli in Italian, Latin, and English before 1602 or, for that matter, afterwards” (56). For another discussion of how Shakespeare might have known Machiavelli, see Hardin Craig's introduction to Machiavelli's The Prince: An Elizabethan Translation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944). There were manuscript translations of The Prince available before 1666 (the date of the first published English translation). Wyndham Lewis bases his otherwise interesting discussion in The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare on the assumption that Shakespeare knew Machiavelli exclusively through Gentillet (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, n.d.). See also chapter 1, note 46. The comprehension of Machiavelli's new political science in Richard III suggests that, one way or another, Shakespeare knew more than a caricatured version of Machiavelli.

14. David L. Frey argues similarly in The First Tetralogy: Shakespeare's Scrutiny of the Tudor Myth (Paris: Mouton, 1976), 139-154. Citing Coleridge, he concludes that Shakespeare “has carefully built up the successful Machiavellian, and removed all the external causes of his defeat, in order to show us the internal process that points to the real flaw in the writings of the crafty Italian” (174). But Frey, too, stops short of explaining adequately what this “real flaw” is.

15. This interpretation is supported and elaborated by Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938) and E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Collier Books, 1944) as well as by an editor of the Arden edition, Antony Hammond. Frey argues against the thesis and then, inadvertently, affirms it.

16. See St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica questions 75-87, especially question 75, which is a refutation of the objections that the soul is corporeal, in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, Inc., 1948), 280-428. Also St. Augustine in The City of God makes a good point, pertinent to Richard's case, that the cause of evil in the fallen angels was “their turning away from him who supremely is, and their turning toward themselves, who do not exist in that supreme degree” Book XII, chapter 6, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Pelican Books, 1972), 477.

17. See Matthew 16:24-25 for the biblical use of self and soul synonymously. Richard is caught between trying to escape the strong Christian division between body and soul, coyly expressed by Andrew Marvell in “A Dialogue Between Body and Soul,” and recoiling from viewing himself in solely material terms. The former view he believes deluded and the latter places him in a very unattractive light (his deformity). He relies on the concept “self” to accommodate his new view of individuality.

18. Richard refers to soul seventeen times (I.i.11, 41, 119; I.ii.180; I.iii.179; II.i.71; III.v.27; III.vii.225; IV.iv.251, 256, 263, 311, 408; V.iii.202, 204, 218, 309). The question of his soul's existence is most at issue when he tries to persuade Elizabeth (IV.iv) and then when he faces death in battle (V.iii). Clarence refers to soul eight times (I.iv.38, 44, 48, 67, 74, 240, 242, 246) as he wrestles with the issue just before his murder. Elizabeth, Anne, King Edward, and, notably, Richmond all speak of “soul.” Richard's soul is referred to sixteen times in the play. The word is used sixty-one times altogether.

19. Hammond, 287, n. 259.

20. As the wooing scene progresses, Anne begins using Richard's syntactic constructions. Richard controls the structural power of her language, that is, her phraseology, and so controls her responses. This situation is reversed in act 4, scene 4 as Richard comes to use Elizabeth's rhetorical structures.

21. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 47, 63-64, 49. See also Marguerite Waller's illuminating attempt to synthesize deconstructive and feminist readings of Richard's courtship of Anne in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 159-174.

22. Madonne M. Miner, “Neither Mother, Wife, nor England's Queen: The Role of Women in Richard III,” Lenz, 45. One would have to except from this remark the Scrivener (III.vi), the citizens (II.iii), and even Tyrrel (IV.iii).

23. Lenz, 52.

24. Andrew S. Cairncross, ed. King Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. [parts 1 and 2], 1962, [part 3] 1964). All citations from the plays will be taken from this edition.

25. See Whately, 125-126. John Philip Kemble responded spiritedly in defense of Macbeth in Macbeth and King Richard III: An Essay (London: John Murray, 1817).

26. See above, n. 15. J. Leeds Barroll in the first chapter of his book Artificial Persons is helpful: “Even if Hamlet does strike us as ‘Freudian,’ Shakespeare nevertheless had not read Freud; and while Shakespeare may have observed traits that modern psychology generally accepts as extant in human nature, the structure of ideas by which he sought to account for such phenomena would have been quite importantly different” (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 21.

27. Robert N. Watson, The Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 20.

28. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 337. Future references to this edition will be to Marlowe.

29. Richard refers to “self” generally three times (II.ii.151; III.i.63; IV.iv.425) and his “self” is referred to five times by Anne, Richard, Buckingham, and Elizabeth (I.ii.80; II.ii.151; III.vii.131; III.vii.194; IV.iv.376). But Richard speaks of “myself” twenty-seven times, far more than any other character in the play (I.ii.77, 82, 85, 190, 259, 263; I.iii.79, 319; III.i.137; III.vii.52; IV.iv.249, 376, 399 [2x], 407; V.iii.183, 186, 187 [2x], 188, 189 [2x], 190, 191, 203, 204 [2x]). It is easy to see that the question of his “selfhood” is most at issue when he faces death in act 5, scene 3. There are more references to the self in Richard III (85) than in any other of Shakespeare's plays.

30. Machiavelli never uses the word anima (soul) in either The Prince. or Discourses on Livy.

31. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (New York: Methuen, 1982).

32. This argument is made by Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, 482c-486c. Translated by Terrence Irwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

33. As Machiavelli says in the Discourses: “To threaten to shed blood is, in fact, extremely dangerous: whereas to shed it is attended with no danger at all, for a dead man cannot contemplate vengeance and those that remain alive usually leave you to do the contemplating” (40).

34. When Richard refers to “conscience,” it has the sense of “consciousness” as well as the modern sense of “knowledge or feeling of right and wrong.” Jonathan Goldberg observes with reference to the writings of King James I: “The questions raised by James's language thus bifurcate into a complex set of relationships between self-perception and other perception. In the Jacobean period the area in which these conflicts occur was conveniently housed in a single word, “conscience,” a word that contains both the idea of the knowledge of self and the knowledge of others (“conscious” in a modern vocabulary). The unity between conscience and consciousness that the word conscience declares is in James's thinking divided—both in himself and his audience,” James I and the Politics of Literature (115). Richard is profoundly aware that the word “conscience” unites a moral and a metaphysical meaning. To have a conscience is to be aware of the opinions of others, most importantly to be conscious of the opinion of God on one's actions. This “consciousness,” the root of moral restraint, he believes to be wholly artificial and unnecessary. See part 3 of this chapter, “The Dregs of Conscience.”

35. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 71. Hereafter referred to as Prince. Compare this excerpt, too, with the Scrivener's speech two scenes later:

    Here is a good world the while! Who is so gross

    That cannot see this palpable device?

    Yet who's so bold but says he sees it not?

    Bad is the world and all will come to naught

    When such ill-dealing must be seen in thought.

    (III.vi.10-14)

36. Soliloquies and asides of Richard III throughout the tetralogy. Soliloquies: 2H6 V.ii.66-71; 3H6 III.ii.124-195, V.vi.61-93; R3 I.i.1-41, I.i.117-121, I.i.145-162, I.ii.232-268, I.iii.324-338, V.iii.178-207. Asides: 3H6 IV.i.82, IV.i.123, IV.vii.25-26, V.vii.21-25, V.vii.33-34; R3 I.iii.318-319, II.ii.110-111, III.i.79, III.i.82-83, III.i.94, IV.iv.431.

37. Marlowe, 347.

38. See especially Discourses I.27 and III.6.

39. Danby, 61-62, 66.

40. Harry V. Jaffa, “The Unity of Tragedy, Comedy, and History: An Interpretation of the Shakespearean Universe,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 287.

41. Interestingly, although it is a play about the corruption of Macbeth's soul, the word “soul” is used only four times in this play. This is because the existence of soul is not in question in Macbeth.

42. Prince, 35.

43. The question of the importance of establishing reputation for a great political man is a main concern of Julius Caesar, a play in which the titular character has few lines and is killed a third of the way through. The play is more about the reputation of Julius Caesar than the man.

44. Again, a problem word in the play, used thirteen times, Richard himself uses it most, six times: I.i.239; III.vii.225; V.iii.179, 194, 310, 312. The word most closely associated with “conscience” in the play is “guilt,” referred to seventeen times, six times by Richard: I.ii.100 (2x); II.i.137; III.v.30; V.iii.200 (2x). He is referred to as guilty six times.

45. See note 34.

46. Coleridge speaks of Richard as a man who depends on his “superiority of intellect”—who has placed “the moral in subordination to the mere intellectual being,” Lectures, 147, 273.

47. As Jan Kott notes, “Only two people in this tragedy reflect on the order of the world: King Richard III, and a hired assassin. The one who is at the top of the feudal ladder, and one placed at its very bottom.” In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1964), 26-27. This scene in the Tower is the one in the play that comes closest to the clown scenes in the later tragedies, such as the Porter scene in Macbeth—grisly, comic relief.

48. “‘A very bad murderer,’ I said, ‘like Shakespeare's Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience, but still wanted the money, and in the end didn't do the job at all because he couldn't make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. The have to be removed—sometimes with blackjacks.’” From Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.

49. H. M. Richmond in Shakespeare's Political Plays misreads this speech and suggests that Edward, of all the characters, comes closest to the “heroic self-recognition that is to mark such characters as Othello and Lear” (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1977), 91. This ignores the fact that Edward (portrayed as pleasure-loving and impolitic throughout the tetralogy) begins by blaming everyone but himself for Clarence's death. He fears God's wrath for his injustice to Clarence (along lines suggested to him by Richard), blames everyone in his court (except Richard), and then laments: “O God, I fear Thy justice will take hold / On me, and you, and mine and yours for this” (II.i.132-133). His deathbed remorse, given his actions earlier in the tetralogy, is hard to regard as “heroic.”

50. There were many versions of Richard's reign from which Shakespeare could have chosen in constructing his villain-king. He preferred an account that included Richard's deformity, a detail introduced by St. Thomas More in his History of King Richard III. There is no factual evidence for it. “Richard, the third son, of whom we now entreat, was in wit and courage equal with either of them, in body and prowess far under them both; little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favored of visage, and such as in states called warly, in other men otherwise,” ed. Richard Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 8. Shakespeare, like More, uses physical deformity to symbolize a flawed nature. See Richard's comments, especially King Henry VI, Part 3, III.ii.153-163, V.vi.71-80, and Richard III, I.i.14-27.

51. All citations to Lear are from the Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1975).

52. Note the classical distinction (taken from Greek philosophy) made here, between nomos (convention/law) and physis (nature). Richard makes the same distinction.

53. I follow the Quarto readings of Richard's oath as “by Saint Paul” at I.i.138, rather than the Folio “by Saint John,” which is Hammond's choice in the Arden edition. Richard is very consistent in his oaths. The rare exception being his “by God's holy mother” (I.iii.306), which is spoken, appropriately enough, of a woman—Queen Margaret.

54. See also Romans 7:18-19: “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Richard perversely interprets Paul's teaching of the limitations of the body. All citations of the Bible are from the King James Version. For a different take on the dichotomy between soul and body which Richard, with Paul, wishes to escape, see Andrew Marvell's poem, “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” where the body complains: “O who shall me deliver whole, / From bonds of this tyrannic soul?” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 15.

55. “But, as has already been remarked, men know not how to be either wholly bad or wholly good,” Discourses, 185.

56. See the end of Prince, chapter 25, “How Much Fortune Can Do in Human Affairs, and in What Mode It May Be Opposed”: “I judge this indeed, that it is better to be impetuous then cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity,” 101.

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