SOURCE: Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “The Wooing of Elizabeth.” In Songs of Death: Performance, Interpretation, and the Text of Richard III, pp. 57-73. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Hassel asserts that Queen Elizabeth is smarter and less naive than some of her earlier critics have suggested, especially in her dealings with Richard.]

On this dialogue 'tis not necessary to bestow much criticism, part of it is ridiculous, and the whole improbable.—

Samuel Johnson

Dr. Johnson's opinion notwithstanding, its length, its placement, its carefully polished rhetoric and its concentration of ironies suggest that Shakespeare considered Richard's wooing of Elizabeth to be a fairly important scene.¹ It is all the more ironic that when critics have stooped to interpret it, they have disagreed so radically about what finally happens. E. K. Chambers states one view: “In his last bout [Richard] is palpably outwitted. … Elizabeth is the deeper dissembler. She is already far in the plot with Richmond, and although her daughter shall be a queen, she shall assuredly not be Richard's queen.” Tillyard completely disagrees: “Are we to think, with E. K. Chambers, that Elizabeth had outwitted Richard and had consented only to deceive? That is so contrary to the simple, almost negative character of Elizabeth and so heavily ironical at Richard's expense that I cannot believe it.”² Predictably, scores of critics, good readers and bad, have lined up on both sides.³ Despite Dr. Johnson's caveat, we obviously need to play more dexterously upon this scene, sound it from its lowest note to the top of its compass, the better to hear its contradictory music.

First, we need to test the stops of two of Tillyard's unproven assumptions about the scene. Does Elizabeth's deception make the scene “too heavily ironical at Richard's expense”? Can we agree that her character is “simple, almost negative”? Second, we might fret the sources again, Hall and Holinshed in particular, but also The true tragedie, to hear their music in consort with Shakespeare's. Elizabeth's line, “Shall I be tempted of the Divel thus” (3209; 4.4.418), coming as it does near the end of the scene, also deserves a better hearing.⁴ The rave reviews of Maggie Smith's and Lynne Porteous's enactments of the scene in 1977 and 1981 might further expand our sense of the possibilities of the scene, and its continuities with what precedes and follows.⁵ So should Olivier's decision to cut the scene entirely from his film. Listening to each of these tones might reveal that there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, even if we cannot pluck out the heart of its mystery.

ELIZABETH'S CHARACTERIZATION

First, Elizabeth's characterization is probably more complex than Tillyard is willing to concede. In her earlier scenes Elizabeth emerges as a tough, smart political creature. She holds her own fairly well in confrontations with Margaret and Richard. She is also clever enough to anticipate future events tending to the downfall of her house, and aggressive enough to try to manage them. The unusual malignancy and ruthlessness of Richard and Buckingham frustrate some of her efforts, but not all of them; she also survives Margaret's curses better than most, though obviously with major casualties. After all, Dorset escapes and her daughter will marry Richmond at play's end, keeping her family close to the center of political power for the next century. Finally, surrounded by many characters, Richard included, who either rationalize their relationship to divine providence or uncritically accept the old clichés about it, Elizabeth has the courage and the intellect to try to discover for herself what this God, this providence, must be like. Tempted by her own bitter experience to believe in Gloucester's sadistic gods in Lear, and by Margaret's apparently successful curses to believe in Shylock's ferocious God of judgment (three eyes for an eye, my daughter for a ducat), she finally chooses neither. Rather she either remains suspended in agnosticism, or settles on a god of “ignorant uncaring, of sleep.”⁶ The final music of her belief, or unbelief, is so muted it is not easy to hear. But the strenuous honesty of this woman who maintains a strong moral sensibility and powerful political ambitions for herself and her family, even after “all harmes” (472; 1.3.8) have befallen her, hardly suggests a “simple, almost negative character.” If there are negatives, they are the negatives of agnosticism, not of passivity or unimportance. In her is “most excellent music,” both before and during her duet with Richard.

Richard, albeit sarcastically, himself testifies to Elizabeth's political cunning and strength early in the play. She and Mistress Shore “Are mighty Gossips in our Monarchy” (87; 1.1.83). She may have engineered the imprisonment of Hastings (70-72; 1.1.66-68). She has definitely been a successful advocate for the political promotion of her family (99; 1.1.95). Most complimentary of all, she is perceived by Richard as a threat, however much he jokes about it. He honors her with his distrust, and with his frequent public confrontations. If he and Clarence are not “the Queenes abjects” (112; 1.1.106), they are also not as influential as they were before her accession to Edward's bed and the throne.

We first see Elizabeth in 1.3, lamenting the coming death of her husband: “If he were dead, what would betide on me?” These apparently pathetic, almost melodramatic words have done Elizabeth a disservice, for they establish in our minds a whimpering, weak Elizabeth we will not see again. A closer look reveals the depth of honesty behind her lament, which is brief by the play's standards. In political terms her power is her relationship to Edward. Thus, plainly, “The losse of such a Lord, includes all harmes.” The succession of her son to the throne guarantees little: “Ah! he is yong; and his minority / Is put unto the trust of Richard Glouster, / A man that loves not me, nor none of you” (469, 472, 475-77; 1.3.6, 8, 11-13). Always the realist, Elizabeth has seen and said the truth, no more, no less. She does so again, with clear political and philosophical wisdom, just thirty lines later: “Would all were well, but that will never be, / I feare our happinesse is at the height” (505-6; 1.3.40-41). She is too honest and too wise to rest on that tempting, false cliché. And so she corrects her note, and correctly perceives her precarious position at court and in this world of chance and change. Few around her are either as perceptive or as honest.

What else do we see of Elizabeth in this scene? She bristles under the insults of “the nobility,” people like Derby's haughty wife. She has “too long borne” Richard's “blunt upbraidings, and … bitter scoffes” (568-69; 1.3.102-3). She also stands up to Richard. No less than three times early in the scene she contradicts his baiting innuendoes (528-34, 539-41, 548-54; 1.3.62-68, 73-75, 82-88). The men in Henry VI's funeral procession showed far less courage. But the scene's major confrontation is between Richard and Margaret. Margaret, in fact, undercuts Richard's blatant lying here with an irony that nicely parallels Elizabeth's main weapon against him in her culminating scene.

When Elizabeth next appears, she is basically indistinguishable from the rest of the court. Richard appears and manipulates all of them equally well. But when Edward dies, and Elizabeth laments his death, we begin to hear neither pious platitudes nor thoughtless wailing but the beginning of what I submit is her serious questioning of transcendental things, particularly divine providence. Full of grief, she enters “with her haire about her ears,” threatening suicide: “Ile joyne with blacke dispaire against my Soule, / And to my selfe, become an enemie.” But if she will not “make an act of Tragicke violence,” not follow her Edward “To his new Kingdome of nere-changing night” (1306-20; 2.2.34-46, passim), she has in her own words given in to a theological despair that is suicide's close cousin. She has projected the dark night of her soul onto the Christian universe she has hitherto assumed, and found it dark indeed. “Nere-changing night,” not eternal life, is the kingdom she proclaims after death. The Duchess's comments, in contrast, are shallow, reserved for the affairs of this world only.

Elizabeth's son Dorset knows how close his mother is to the deeper grief of despair, and he tries to confront her lack of faith directly: “Comfort deere Mother, God is much displeas'd, / That you take with unthankfulnesse his doing.” It is much more “ungratefull, / … to be thus opposite with heaven, / For it requires the Royall debt it lent you” (1362-68; 2.2.89-95, passim). Elizabeth will no more respond to his attempted correction of her opposition to providence than she does to his attempted political and personal consolations which follow. “The dimming of [her] shining Starre” (1377; 2.2.102) is more than Edward's death. From that loss she will recover; from her loss of faith she will not. Her lack of response to Dorset, to Rivers, and to Richard henceforth in the scene is a crucial subtext, expressing a despair too deep for words. Elizabeth, in fact, will always distrust words; she will also never again completely trust providence.

We see Elizabeth only twice more until 4.4. In each scene small talk is interrupted by devastating news that provokes her brief but profound response. Learning of the imprisonment of Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey in 2.4 leads her to proclaim the amoral natural and political universe of an Edmund:

The Tyger now hath seiz'd the gentle Hinde,
Insulting Tiranny beginnes to Jutt
Upon the innocent and awelesse Throne:
Welcome Destruction, Blood, and Massacre,
I see (as in a Map) the end of all.

(1542-46; 2.4.50-54)

Apocalypse now, where innocents are ravaged by tyrants and beasts, tooth and claw. She has not moved far from the “nere-changing night” of her recent despair. In response to this vision, however, Elizabeth is not frozen. She immediately resolves upon sanctuary. She will try to remove herself and her other son from this world.

But the world affords her no sanctuary. Barred just a few scenes later from the Tower by the Lord Protector, a particularly apt political title given her present theological despair, Elizabeth knows the news to be “dead-killing,” to her sons and possibly also to her remnants of faith. England is truly a “slaughter-house,” and she is about to become “thrall of Margarets Curse, / Nor Mother, Wife, nor Englands counted Queene” (2514-26; 4.1.35-46, passim). This time she has more words, words of compassion for Anne, and a mother's desperate words of prayer. Desperate? She prays not to God, but to the Tower for her sons:

Pitty, you ancient Stones, those tender Babes,
Whom Envie hath immur'd within your Walls,
Rough Cradle for such little prettie ones,
Rude ragged Nurse, old sullen Play-fellow,
For tender Princes: use my Babies well;
So foolish Sorrowes bids your Stones farewell.

(2580-85; 4.1.98-103)

Prayers to stones could only be provoked by “foolish Sorrowes.” In Elizabeth's universe they are not likely to be heard, or heeded. They do suggest how long the impulse to pray, to something, anything, endures, even in a woman as disillusioned and as honest as Elizabeth.

And then “The tyrannous and bloodie Act is done.” How else could this Elizabeth respond to “The most arch deed of pittious massacre / That ever yet this Land was guilty of” (2705-7; 4.3.1-3) but by doubting again God's providence:

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

(2793-95; 4.4.22-24)

God, providence, not content with sleeping during this atrocity, seems to Elizabeth to have participated in it. Why? When? “Ah who hath any cause to mourne but wee?” (2805; 4.4.34). Such questions would be inescapable for anyone at such a moment, but for Elizabeth they have become characteristic. She has voiced such doubt since Edward's death. If “God is much displeas'd” with such unthankfulness, as Dorset earlier admonished her, so be it.

With Margaret continually gloating over the downfall of Elizabeth's house and the fulfillment of most of her own curses, Elizabeth must also confront her possible “thralldom” to Margaret's curses. She does concede an apparent potency to these curses, and evidences a certain curiosity about their power:

O thou did'st prophesie, the time would come,
That I should wish for thee to helpe me curse
That bottel'd Spider, that foule bunch-back'd Toad.

(2850-52; 4.4.79-81)

Unlike the other victims of Margaret's curses, however, Elizabeth concedes nothing about their efficacy in the destruction of her family. Her request, “Teach me how to curse mine enemies” (2888; 4.4.117) is as close as she comes to such a confirmation. Perhaps her pride refuses such a concession, such a further humiliation as Margaret's victory. Perhaps her silence transcends pride, and relates again to her continuing agnosticism about supernatural agency in human affairs. In such a world as this, where prayers for innocents are apparently denied, where beasts and tyrants destroy lambs and children, could curses really work?

Elizabeth directly confronts this question just before Richard enters the scene, and her answer is a resounding “No.” What are these words provoked by calamities, these curses, prayers, and lamentations?

Windy Atturnies to their Clients Woes,
Ayery succeeders of intestine joyes,
Poore breathing Orators of miseries,
Let them have scope, though what they will impart,
Helpe nothing els, yet do they ease the hart.

(2899-2903; 4.4.127-31)

Prayers, curses, lamentations have no supernatural power. They are air, wind, breath, insubstantial expressions of misery. They may “ease the hart,” but they “helpe nothing els.” Faced with all this evidence of the accuracy of Margaret's curses, Elizabeth will not concede their potency. Perhaps that is why she has no “spirit to curse” Richard in the sequence that follows. She has plenty of spirit to devastate him in debate. The Duchess of York gives cursing a try. Elizabeth remains “Tongue-tyed,” though she has “far more cause” to curse than Richard's mother (2904, 2976; 4.4.132, 197). She can hardly believe in the efficacy of curses when she has lost her faith in divine providence.

ELIZABETH'S IRONIES

Like Edgar at the end of Lear, however, Elizabeth has not lost everything. She still believes in human decency, in standards of behavior to which she thinks all persons should attain, regardless of supernatural agency. She is still a moralist, and interestingly, she still bases her morality, in part at least, on the Judeo-Christian God who is often the basis of morality in Western thought. What results from this complex experience is an overwhelming sense of irony which she directs against the very character who has contributed most directly to its creation in her—Richard. Richard is powerless against her irony precisely because Elizabeth is so sure of the human values that endure even an apparently somnolent God and a vicious king. In fact, she must assert them all the more vigorously precisely because of her precarious human condition. Elizabeth clings tenaciously to her remaining children, to her remaining power, and to her remaining sureties. Richard has as grievously underestimated this woman as he will underestimate Richmond in the final act.

Paradoxically, Richard must fall victim to her ironies precisely because he has created them so well. He has driven her, like the evil characters in Lear drive Albany, Edgar, and Lear, to certain certainties beyond which she will not withdraw. “Nothing” is not enough for such characters. Richard has also created for himself a world in which all that might have value to him, to any human being, has been so wronged that it has been rendered inaccessible to him. Richard's vulnerability to Elizabeth's ironies in this scene is surely one of his most powerfully self-inflicted wounds in the play. If providence is directing this judgment against him through Elizabeth's second causation and his own, it is just indeed. Characteristically, Elizabeth says nothing about this possibility. But in the light of Elizabeth's present psychology and Richard's participation in it, her words cannot be “too heavily ironical at Richard's expense.”

Elizabeth's ironies are so overwhelmingly effective that they should require only the briefest recitation. In fact, even Tillyard concedes them. He questions only their appropriateness to her character and to the logic of the dramatic sequence. Elizabeth immediately throws off Richard's courtship with the crushing assumption that he could only wish to destroy that which is “Faire, Royall, and Gracious” (2984; 4.4.205). She has good cause. Then it is she, not Richard, who purposefully misunderstands his words in a relentless exposure of his dishonesty. Richard has turned double meanings and false appearances to his advantage throughout the play. Now she makes him their victims. The cousins are cozened; advancement is “up to some Scaffold.” His soul (he said it) is a shaky foundation for his promised love: “So from thy Soules love didst thou love her Brothers, / And from my hearts love, I do thanke thee for it” (3002, 3022, 3040-41; 4.4.223, 243, 260-61). Richard is aware that he is losing to Elizabeth's ironies, and he is as disconcerted as Wall or Moonshine by her rude but effective interruptions: “Be not so hasty to confound my meaning.” What a witless, impotent response. Elizabeth's suggested wooing strategy is similarly devastating to him (3055-67; 4.4.271-83), cataloguing as it does all of his atrocities against her family as seals of his love. Is this not the very technique he used so successfully against Anne?

But Elizabeth is now the creator of ironies and the aggressor. The atrocities, like the cutting words that derive from them, have become too many and too damaging for Richard's continued manipulation. He can only admit his loss of inventiveness and his vulnerability to the power of her words and wit: “You mocke me Madam.” He is right. Listing the murders of brothers Edward and York, uncles Clarence and Rivers, and good Aunt Anne is “not the way / To win [her] daughter.” “Say that I did all this for love of her” (3002-3073; 4.4.223-88, passim) will not work twice, and Richard is all the more impotent for thinking that it will. Elizabeth's effective ironies become the sere, yellow leaves of Richard's impending fall.

Of course, Richard still has some time and energy left to spill and spend. He turns to Elizabeth's self-interest, and it is considerable. The result? More irony:

What were I best to say, her Fathers Brother
Would be her Lord? Or shall I say her Uncle?
Or he that slew her Brothers, and her Uncles?
Under what Title shall I woo for thee?

(3122-25; 4.4.337-40)

There can be no answer, for Richard has forfeited all such titles of family relationship. So Richard retreats again, but only to expose other vulnerabilities. England's peace will be Elizabeth's war; Richard entreats that which God forbids; Elizabeth will only wail the title of queen; Richard's “everlastingly” will not last for ever, not if Richard can end “her sweet life” when he wills. Noble eloquence and honest plainness would both be obviously false from his lips. His George is profaned, his Garter dishonored, his Crown usurped.

Elizabeth's crescendo begins: “Sweare then by something, that thou hast not wrong'd” (3151; 4.4.366 ff.). Richard tries. Give him that. But the ironic litany is familiar to us all:

RICH.
Then by my Selfe.
QU.
Thy Selfe, is selfe-misus'd.
RICH.
Now by the World.
QU.
'Tis full of thy foule wrongs.
RICH.
My Fathers death.
QU.
Thy life hath it dishonor'd.
RICH.
Why then, by Heaven.
QU.
Heavens wrong is most of all.

(3160-67; 4.4.374-77)

Elizabeth is almost swept back to conventional belief as she undercuts each of Richard's answers. But if Richard has wronged Heaven most of all, Elizabeth says nothing of Heaven's avenging that wrong. “What canst thou sweare by now” announces the exhilarating victory she knows she has won. Richard's absolute forfeiture of all that is worth having, worth swearing by, of all that gives life meaning, has given him what he deserves, a life “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But Elizabeth can only promise judgment here. In fact, she knows only that children and parents will wail with her in the woes that Richard has stirred up for them in his “times ill-us'd repast.” If Elizabeth were ever going to invoke divine providence, this would be the time. She does not.

All of the bluster of Richard's final attempt to persuade Elizabeth seems to reinforce his utter devastation during their debate. Paradoxically, if Elizabeth will not curse him, he curses himself, to Heaven and to fortune: if “with deere hearts love / Immaculate devotion, holy thoughts, / I tender not thy beautious Princely daughter.” Since he does not so tender her, he tenders himself a fool. “Heaven, and Fortune” will “barre [him] happy houres” soon enough. And he will with their help “my selfe confound” as well. Then Richard tries blatant threats of physical violence against mother and daughter, “the Land, and many a Christian soule” (3188-3202; 4.4.396-411) if he is denied. For Elizabeth to yield at this point to the frustrated blustering of a thwarted bully would negate the purpose of the whole scene, thwart its climactic movement through Elizabeth's ironies, and make a shambles of their hitherto consistent if complex characterization. For Elizabeth to pretend to yield, to avoid Richard's suddenly threatened violence to herself, the land, and all Christian souls, makes eminently good sense and does no damage to her courage or her intellect. Richard has adduced no reasons to change Elizabeth's mind. And until his physical threats, she has had no reason to deceive him. The quick announcement of the engagement of her daughter to Richmond in the next scene demonstrates either that her mind is unchanged or that she is promising her daughter to both men (3349, 3355-56; 4.5.1, 7-8).

The final irony of the scene is that Elizabeth does not even have to be perceived as lying to Richard. If we look at the text carefully, Richard, not Elizabeth, “relents” at the end of the scene by deceiving himself, and then exulting in the self-deception. Elizabeth has only six lines after Richard's bullying peroration, which addresses, incidentally, none of her earlier objections and so concedes their validity. Her lines follow:

Shall I be tempted of the Divel thus?
Shall I forget my selfe, to be my selfe.
Yet thou didst kil my Children.
Shall I go win my daughter to thy will?
I go, write to me very shortly,
And you shal understand from me her mind. Exit Q.

(3209-20; 4.4.418-29, passim)

Where is her concession in the text? Three of these lines are rhetorical questions, the fourth a disgusted remembrance of the atrocities against her sons. She seems instead incredulous, obdurate even in the face of physical violence. If Richard is about to assault her physically, the lines could be said with uncertainty; but even that uncertainty might be a self-protective mask rather than weakness. The exit lines are also noncommittal, cleverly ambiguous perhaps but nothing more. Only a Richard desperate for another victory of any kind could be deceived by these final notes of their exchange. His confusion of mind in the following words with Ratcliffe and Catesby and the increasing threat of political chaos would seem consistent with this pattern. Without even having to lie, then, Elizabeth may have finally gulled this self-deluded Richard into believing her a “Relenting foole, and shallow-changing Woman” (3222; 4.4.431). If this is the case, Richard is really the fool here, and Elizabeth the overwhelming victor.

Though his remarks are ambiguous, Dr. Johnson must have nodded off at this moment. He seems to have assumed Richard the sudden victor and to have been offended by this “improbable” turn of events. Even worse, he may have considered Elizabeth's effective confrontation of Richard the most improbable dimension of the scene. After all, he elsewhere says of women: “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to see it done at all.”⁷ This sentiment augurs poorly for his proper estimation of Elizabeth. Stylistically, the elaborate rhetorical exchanges may be too long and too formal for some tastes, even a bit “ridiculous.” Still, Maggie Smith and Lynne Porteous recently used these words and this formality to affirm the theatrical integrity, indeed the brilliance, of a strong-willed Elizabeth. I have tried to show that in the study as on the stage, the scene can be relentless in its probability. This, at least, is the “utterance of harmony” I would command it to, had I the skill.

ELIZABETH'S TEMPTATION

Elizabeth responds to Richard's final bullying speech with the intriguing question, “Shall I be tempted of the Divel thus?” (3209; 4.4.418). Such interrogatives characterize most of her last responses to Richard. I have argued that they drive an ironic wedge between the true Elizabeth and the Elizabeth Richard desperately wants to perceive. But her question is of particular interest because it suggests that Elizabeth considers Richard's wooing to be analogous to the Devil's temptations of Adam and Eve or of Christ. Renaissance understandings of those temptations reveal interesting analogies between them and this courtship sequence.

Throughout most of 4.4, Richard is either defending himself against Elizabeth's scathing words, or offering to her as attractively as he can the allurements of the world, the first of Satan's traditional triad of temptations. Richard correctly senses the world to be Elizabeth's particular weakness, even after all of her reversals. Her early questions of him would seem to confirm this intuition, while revealing as well the new wisdom her suffering has brought her: “What good is cover'd with the face of heaven, / To be discovered, that can do me good” is one such question. Another: “Tell me, what State, what Dignity, what Honor / Canst thou demise to any childe of mine?” Unlike her final rhetorical questions, which are actually devastating answers, or clever equivocations, these seem to invite answers, and Richard tries to provide them: “Th'advancement of your children, gentle Lady / … Unto the dignity and height of Fortune, / The high Imperiall Type of this earths glory.” This is “the world” epitomized, and Richard the Tempter harps on it throughout the scene. Even the proffered sweetness of second motherhood may continue his worldly temptations, though it contains as well some appeal to the flesh, sensual delight: “To quicken your encrease, I will beget / Mine yssue of your blood, upon your Daughter.” This motherhood will hurt less (“save for a night of groanes”), vex less, comfort more: “mine shall be a comfort to your Age.” But when Richard adds, “And all the Ruines of distressefull Times, / Repayred with double Riches of Content” (3026-3109; 4.4.247-324, passim), we see that the world is still his primary thrust. Elizabeth will receive not “double Riches,” but “ten-times double gaine of happinesse” if only she yield to him.

But Richard does not stop here. He goes on to try to make Elizabeth her daughter's tempter, much as Satan used Eve to tempt Adam:

Go then (my Mother) to thy Daughter go,
Make bold her bashfull yeares, with your experience,
Prepare her eares to heare a Woers Tale.
Put in her tender heart, th'aspiring Flame
Of Golden Soveraignty: Acquaint the Princesse
With the sweet silent houres of Marriage joyes:
And when this Arme of mine hath chastised
The petty Rebell, dull-brain'd Buckingham,
Bound with Triumphant Garlands will I come,
And leade thy daughter to a Conquerors bed:
To whom I will retaile my Conquest wonne,
And she shalbe sole Victoresse, Caesars Caesar.

(3110-21; 4.4.325-36)

This time, Richard the Tempter has combined the world, the flesh, and the Devil. If young Elizabeth will share a conqueror's bed, the world and the flesh will be “retailed” to this “sole Victoresse, Caesars Caesar.” Teach her to aspire to sovereignty; acquaint her with the joys of sex; ask her if she would be “lord of all the world.” It has a familiar ring to it, this triple equation. The world, the flesh and the Devil, power and wealth, sexuality, and pride are all in Richard's package, as they are in the Devil's for Christ, Adam, and Eve.

Elizabeth devastates the proffered gift with her sarcasm. As we have already seen, her answer comes in the form of a series of questions (“What were I best to say … tender yeares?” [3122-27; 4.4.337-42] which cannot be answered. Richard tries anyway, but this simply adds to his frustration and his defeat. His wiles, his fraud, his guile have not worked. He has neither seduced Elizabeth nor convinced her to seduce her daughter to his will. Even with her recent disillusionment, she can still invoke God, law, honor, and love against Richard's temptations. Her daughter would apparently be even more likely to recoil at these unnatural, ungodly, illegal, immoral, and loveless suggestions. Elizabeth's “Reasons are too deepe and dead” for shallow, quick Richard, and she will “harpe on [them] … till heart-strings breake” (3147-49; 4.4.362-65). Richard has failed so completely that it takes him almost sixty lines to regain the offensive.

Even then, Richard has no new arguments, no counterarguments either. He asserts that he will “thrive,” and that Elizabeth will plead his case to her daughter. He will have his way, or else:

Without her, followes to my selfe, and thee;
Her selfe, the Land, and many a Christian soule,
Death, Desolation, Ruine, and Decay:
It cannot be avoyded, but by this:
It will not be avoyded, but by this.

(3198-3202; 4.4.407-11)

Elizabeth responds: “Shall I be tempted of the Divel thus.” With these words she clearly connects Richard's last thrust with the temptation of force, of violence, traditionally the last recourse of the Devil, his final and most desperate strategy. He uses it only when the other three have failed.

Elizabeth Pope discusses this final strategy in her book on Paradise Lost. As she suggests, “Many exegetes agreed that Satan did try to terrorize Christ,” as part of the temptation in the wilderness. But the more traditional time for the temptation of violence was later, during the Passion: “Satan can tempt either by ‘fraud’ or ‘violence’: that is, either by persuasion or by fear. In the wilderness, he assailed Christ with persuasion only; afterwards, at the time of the Passion, he tried to shake him through threats of death and torture.”⁸ Lancelot Andrewes describes the tradition in a sermon on the temptations of Christ:

Christ was too cunning for him in desputing: he meant therefore to take another course; for as James noteth, there be two sorts of temptations, one by enticement as a serpent, another by violence as a lion; If he cannot prevail as a serpent, he will play the lion.⁹

Elizabeth's allusion to the Devil's temptation just after Richard's crude threats of “Death, Desolation, Ruine, and Decay,” to Elizabeth, her daughter, himself, and the whole world, effectively suggests this theological tradition, and invites its application to the play. Richard, frustrated by the obvious failure of his enticing fraud, must finally resort to violence. Failing as a serpent, he must become a lion. But Elizabeth, “too cunning for him in disputation,” may also be too courageous for him in violence. Modifying a now-familiar rhetorical pattern, she may be understood to deflect his fury with a cleverly aimed series of questions, and deceive the dissimulator at the same time. Richard will no longer “thrive,” any more than he intended to “repent.” His last, threatening temptation of force has resulted merely in a potent curse against himself.

ELIZABETH'S SOURCES

The most important source of Elizabeth in 4.4 of Richard III is Hall's The union of the two noble …families of Lancastre and Yorke. Two other sources are also worth our brief attention, Thomas Legge's Richardu Tertius (1579) and the anonymous The true tragedie of Richard the Third (1594). Considered together, the three provide another interesting perspective on Shakespeare's treatment of Richard's courtship of his potent adversary.

In Hall's account, Queen Elizabeth, courted by “diverse and often messengers,” “men bothe of wit and gravitie,” finally yields to Richard's proposals. She is not courted directly by Richard himself. Since Shakespeare so clearly uses Hall elsewhere in the play, and since Hall's account of the courtship is brief and revealing, it should be reproduced:

[Richard] clerely determined to reconcile to his favoure his brothers wife quene Elizabeth either by faire woordes or liberall promises. … Wherefore he sent to the quene beynge in sanctuarie diverse and often messengers, whiche first shoulde excuse and purge him of all thinges before against her attempted or procured, and after shoulde so largely promes promocions innumerable and benefites, not onely to her but also to her sonne lord Thomas Marques Dorsett, that they should brynge her yf yt were possible into some wanhope, or as men saie into a fooles paradise. The messengers beynge men bothe of wit and gravitie so persuaded the quene with great & pregnaunte reasons, then with fayre & large promises, that she began somewhat to relent & to geve to theim no deffe eare, in somuche that she faithfully promysed to submyt & yelde her selfe fully and frankely to the kynges will and pleasure. And so she putting in oblivion the murther of her innocente children, the infamy and dishonoure spoken by the kynge her husbande, the lyvynge in avoutrie [adultery, OED] leyed to her charge, the bastardyng of her daughters, forgettyng also y^e feithfull promes & open othe made to the countesse of Richmond mother to y^e erle Henry, blynded by avaricious affeccion and seduced by flatterynge wordes, first delivered into king Richards handes her v. daughters, as Lambes once agayn committed to the custody of the ravenous wolfe. After she sente letters to the Marques her sonne … willynge him in any wise to leave the earle [of Richmond] and without delaie to repaire into Englande, where, for hym were provided greate honoures and honorable promocions, asserteignynge hym ferther, that all offences on bothe parties were forgotten and forgeven, and bothe he and she highely incorporate in the kynges hearte. Surely the inconstancie of this woman were muche to be merveled at. … [K]ynge Rycharde had thus with glorious promyses and flatterynge woordes pleased and appeased the mutable mynde of quene Elizabeth.

(fol. xlviii)¹⁰

Hall is perplexed at her inconstancy and her avarice, not to mention her naiveté, but he has no question that she has changed her mind. This is clearly the version of the scene that Richard perceives. The strategies sound particularly familiar: the excuses for Richard's villainy, the promised preferment of Dorset, and her own “promes promocions innumerable and benefites.” The result is just what Richard hoped: “blynded by avaricious affeccion and seduced by flatterynge wordes,” Elizabeth “delivered” her daughter. The tempter prevails over a shallow and changing woman, by appealing to her love of things and her love of praise, the world and the Devil. But Hall's Richard is not responding to the scene we have just witnessed. Shakespeare has transformed the bland negotiations of Hall's account into a vivid confrontation between Richard and Elizabeth. This Elizabeth may be neither mutable nor gullible enough for his wiles.

The differences Shakespeare introduces may therefore be more significant than the similarities. In the first place, Richard himself courts Elizabeth in the play, and his precarious position by now, both with her and with us, hardly presages well for his efforts. Further, Shakespeare's Elizabeth is shown “somewhat to relent,” only if we mean deceitfully; she is never shown “faithfully … to submyt & yelde her selfe fully and frankely to the kynges will and pleasure.” At most she offers some ambiguous final questions. Before that she adamantly refuses to yield an inch. “Deffe eare” would best describe her responses to all of Richard's blandishments. That and “articulate tongue.” For Shakespeare's Elizabeth, unlike Hall's, is full of reasoned and emotional arguments which Richard cannot answer. Finally, the order of her final negotiations is reversed from Hall to Shakespeare. In Hall, Dr. Lewes, Richmond's physician, first proposes the Richmond-Elizabeth match to the queen in sanctuary. Her response is joyous: “lorde howe her spirites revyved, and how her heart lept in her body for joye and gladnes” (fol. xxxvii). She is thus all the more shallow and changing in Hall when she is later seduced by Richard's emissaries.

In Shakespeare, it is Richard who is quickly undercut by her subsequent agreement with Richmond, only a hundred lines after Richard proclaims victory. Her messenger Derby tells Sir Christopher, “tell Richmond this from me, … that the Queene hath heartily consented / He should espouse Elizabeth hir daughter” (3349, 3355-56; 4.5.1, 7-8). The close timing of this announcement would seem to emphasize Richard's self-deception, just like the intervening news of gathering rebellion by four messengers and Richard's confusion with Catesby and Ratcliffe. All of these “songs of death” are added to Hall by Shakespeare. All of them increase the probability of Elizabeth's successful deception of Richard at the end of the courtship scene.

The relationship between Legge's Richardus Tertius and Shakespeare's Richard III is ambiguous at best. Still, Legge's treatment of the essential action of 4.4 is interesting to compare to both Hall and Shakespeare. Legge conceives two wooing scenes, one in which Queen Elizabeth is persuaded by Lovell to yield to Richard's desires, and a second in which Princess Elizabeth resists Richard's personal proposals. Thus Legge, alone among the sources, may have provided Shakespeare with both a model for Richard's failure and a model for his success in this late courtship. In Legge, Lovell succeeds and then Richard fails, a further deflection. Young Elizabeth is given the glory of resisting the tempter. Not incidentally she is also insulated from her mother's past and present weaknesses in Legge by her direct victory. It is Princess Elizabeth who catalogues Richard's bloody crimes and his incestuous proposal with the most hyperbolic of classical allusions. Interestingly, when Legge's Richard see the futility of persuasion, he turns like Shakespeare's to devilish threats of violence: “There is a double way for ruling for a prince, love and fear. It is advantageous for kings to try both.” But this Elizabeth prefers not to consent, choosing death over dishonor. She even faces down a veiled threat of rape. Legge's Richard, unlike Shakespeare's, knows his impotence “in her madness” of honor, and decides to “postpone this business” until her fury diminishes. He is unequivocally defeated by her.¹¹

From The true tragedie we receive only the most cryptic of notes about the scene from Lovell: “My Lord very strange she was at the first, / But when I had told her the cause, she gave consent.” Then Queen Elizabeth and her daughter appear after the battle and the queen seals an earlier vow with Richmond. Her dutiful daughter consents to her will, and England rejoices.¹²

The sources suggest that Shakespeare may have added considerable strength of wit and will to Queen Elizabeth during the wooing scene, inevitably deflating Richard in the process. At the same time, Shakespeare has left her decision at the end of that scene much more ambiguous than it is in any of the sources. In them she always yields, then vacillates toward Richmond after his victory. Legge's young Elizabeth provides a better model than her mother for Queen Elizabeth's relentless denials in Shakespeare. Far from moving gradually from denial to curiosity to assent, Hall's pattern and Legge's, Shakespeare's Queen Elizabeth denies all of Richard's arguments with withering irony, names him the Devil he is in his final demands. Her hard-won skepticism about divine providence seems to have made Shakespeare's Elizabeth much more careful—provident if you will—about her remaining son and daughter than the gullible and frightened mother of Shakespeare's sources. We have in her the first worthy adversary of the Devil Richard since Margaret. Elizabeth can be seen to outwit him in cunning and controversy, assert over him moral superiority and courage to boot, and outlast him politically as well by returning with her daughter to Richmond's throne. In so doing she also survives some, though not all, of Margaret's curses. That survival, of kin and crown, reminds us of her stubborn refusal to credit their supernatural efficacy. This is a queen of which a descendant and a namesake, say Shakespeare's Elizabeth, could be justly proud.

Notes

1. Quoted in Furness, ed., New Variorum, note 210, p. 337. Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard the Third, agrees, p. 190.

2. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey, p. 18; Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 214.

3. See note 210, p. 337 in Furness, ed., New Variorum, for early disagreement. Cf. Hudson's comment, in hud1, note 450, p. 355 (most critics to 1872 think “Elizabeth is really beguiled”; he does not). See also Tanner, “Richard III Versus Elizabeth: An Interpretation,” pp. 468-72; Dollarhide, “Two Unassimilated Movements of Richard III: An Interpretation,” pp. 40-46. The former finds Richard deceived, the latter Elizabeth. See also Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, pp. 75, 78, and Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard the Third, who thinks Elizabeth may pretend to yield.

4. The first Folio; see introduction, note 1.

5. See discussion in chapter 1, and note 23.

6. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments, p. 74.

7. In Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1:463.

8. Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem, p. 88. See also Stein, Heroic Knowledge, pp. 118-19; Tillyard, Milton, p. 263; Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic, p. 305.

9. Andrewes, Ninety Six Sermons, 5:483.

10. Hall, The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke.

11. Legge, Richardus Tertius, pp. 441-42. See also Bullough, 3:310-12. The last two phrases are quoted from Bullough's more dramatic translation. Lordi has “foolishly” and “put off these things.”

12. The true tragedie of Richard the Third, sigs. G1 H4.

Textual Bibliography

Editions Fully Collated, with Abbreviations

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HUD1 Works. Edited by Henry Hudson. 11 vols. Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1851-[56].

Andrewes, Lancelot. Institutiones piae, or Directions to pray. London: Henry Seile, 1630.

———. Ninety Six Sermons Reprint of 1843 ed. 5 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1967.

Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. Edited by G. B. Hill. Revised by L. F. Powell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 8 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-75.

Chambers, E. K. Shakespeare: A Survey. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1951.

Clemen, Wolfgang. A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III. Translated by Jean Bonheim. London: Methuen, 1968.

Dollarhide, Louis. “Two Unassimilated Movements of Richard III: An Interpretation.” Mississippi Quarterly 14(1960): 40-46.

Hall, Edward. The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of ancastre & Yorke. … [London], 1548.

Hunter, Robert G. Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976.

Legge, Thomas. Richardus Tertius. Translated by Robert J. Lordi. New York: Garland Press, 1979.

Lewalski, Barbara. Milton's Brief Epic. Providence: Brown University Press, 1966.

Ornstein, Robert. A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History, Plays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Pope, Elizabeth. Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947.

Stein, Arnold. Heroic Knowledge. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965.

Sutcliffe, Matthew. The practice, proceedings, and lawes of armes. London: Christopher Barker, 1593.

Tanner, Stephen L. “Richard III Versus Elizabeth: An Interpretation.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 468-72.

Tillyard, E. M. W. Milton. London: Longmans Green, 1959.

———. Shakespeare's History Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1947.