[In the following essay, Trotter contends that an important theme of Richard III is the protagonist's disgust with the world of flesh and his attempt to conquer the inadequacies of nature, particularly as they are revealed by his own body. Trotter sees strong evidence of this theme in Act I during Richard's courtship of Lady Anne.]

Typical of nineteenth-century assessments of what is perhaps the most debated scene in Shakespeare's Richard III, the wooing of Lady Anne in Act I, is Henry Hudson's remark that Richard's remarkable triumph is due “not so much to any special vice or defect in [Anne] as to his witchcraft of tongue and wit, so put into play as to disconcert all her powers of resistance.”¹ Like S. T. Coleridge before him, whose own estimation of Richard sets the tone for much of the century's criticism of the play, Hudson is enthralled with Richard's intellectuality, displayed above all by the almost demonic verbal pyrotechnics which have tried the skills of the best leading men down through the centuries. More recent critics are not so enamoured as their predecessors with the Promethean man of will. Robert Ornstein, among others, has noted that some of the supposed victims of Richard's verbal “witchcraft” are better described as willingly self-deceived. Yet even Ornstein is dazzled by Richard's powers of improvisation, and he views the seduction of Anne as a not altogether serious jeu d' esprit meant to showcase Richard's talents.²

Several feminist critics have attempted to redress what in their view has been a consistent overemphasis on Richard's triumphant prowess. At its worst this line of criticism has resulted in the kind of reductive psychologizing which prompts Marguerite Waller, for instance, to claim that Richard is “politically and intellectually stupid, cowardly and boring. … He is a relatively common species of manipulative narcissist.”³ A more productive feminist view is seen in the history plays in general, and in Richard III in particular, a movement away from the feminine toward a dominant and even ultramasculine principle. Thus Richard is not simply a garden variety chauvinist, but is the very embodiment of an increasingly misogynistic world-view.⁴

In what follows, I hope to show that Richard's hatred for women is indeed a key thematic factor in the play, but I will argue that his misogyny is best perceived as an expression of loathing for the flesh itself, the flesh understood as a sign of creaturely dependence. Over against the flesh, Richard opposes in dualistic fashion a counterworld, a deathless world spun out of the vacuity of an imaginary self, a radically autonomous self unconditioned by time or history. And whatever the weaknesses of earlier generations of critics, they were surely justified in detecting an element of the uncanny in Richard's performance. For there is in his revolt against the order of nature something bordering upon the heroic. That revolt is in essence, I will argue, a gnostic quest, an antithetical ritual of self-begetting. If, as philosopher Hans Jonas has suggested, there is a “hidden gnosticism” in the modern mind, it is possible to see in Richard of Gloucester's emergence upon the Elizabethan stage the originary model for a long line of gnostic heroes, or antiheroes—from Milton's Satan to Percy's Lancelot—whose nihilistic longings for the knowledge (gnosis) of the abyss remind us of the undercurrent of displaced religiosity which has shaped, and continues to shape, our modernity.

Before turning to the wooing scene which will be the focus of this essay, it will be useful to glance at Richard's opening soliloquy and its invocation of a number of themes analogous to those of gnostic myth as analyzed by Jonas and others. Most important is the overarching motif of catastrophic birth, about which cluster the themes of exile-in-time, of the imprisoning power of the world and the flesh, of cheating nature, of a sense of the self as essentially alien, of a secret call from the “beyond” and a response in the form of heroic defiance.⁵ The malformed body Richard presents to his audience is the very image of the gnostic tibil, the body-prison: “Who has thrown me into the body-stump?” laments a second century gnostic seeker of the Mandean sect, expressing thus a radical dualism of “flesh” and “spirit” which enters into the Christian psyche by way of Augustine. So, too, does Richard seem to despair, as his repeated use of the passive voice well illustrates:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature …(6)

That Richard has been “cheated of feature” is his lament, but it is also, we suspect, his secret pride; his want of “fair proportion” may be, paradoxically, the sign of his election. For as Jonas has argued, the suffering of the gnostic self-in-exile “is at the same time a mark of excellence, a source of power and of a secret life unknown to the environment and in the last resort impregnable to it” (50). Of this election or “call,” Richard offers a mysterious hint in the reference to “dissembling Nature.” If his frightening aspect is the very emblem of reprobation, that emblem may be read (as Richard reads it) in antithetical fashion as a veiled sign of gnosis or special knowledge. As the passage continues, we sense Richard's apparent passivity giving way to a new will to power born of the conviction of absolute difference:

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair, well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous.

(I. i. 20-30)

If his “rudely stamped” form sets him apart from others, from “this breathing world” (emphasis added), it also masks an inward superiority. Jonas has noted that the gnostic vision of a radically transcendent “beyond” inevitably demarcates “this world” from “that world”—the world in which one's omnipotence is realized: “The demonstrative pronoun has thus become a relevant addition to the term world; and the combination is … a fundamental linguistic symbol of Gnosticism, closely related to the primary symbol of the alien.”⁷ I might add that a disturbing ambiguity hovers about the penultimate recurrence of the first-person pronoun: “I am determined to prove a villain.” In what sense is Richard “determined”? What are we to make of an assertion of freedom predicated upon necessity? An answer may emerge if we consider what the above-quoted passage reveals about Richard's sense of time.

Into “this breathing world” Richard has been thrown prematurely (“sent before my time”) and “scarce half made up.” Born, we will recall, “legs foward” (3 Henry VI, V. vi. 71), his sense of time is wholly dualistic; his movement is headlong out of the past, out of the catastrophe of his birth, irreversibly toward the future. Between the two lies a vacuous present in which Gloucester cannot, or will not, “delight to pass away the time.” The modernity of this future oriented sense of time will be evident to most readers; less familiar may be its similarity to the gnostic concept of time enunciated in the following formula attributed to the heresiarch Valentinus: “What makes us free is the knowledge who we are, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed.”⁸ In terms that might well apply to Richard's opening soliloquy, Jonas notes the affinity between the Valentinian formula and Pascal's lament at having been “cast into the infinite immensity of spaces,” or Heidegger's “flungness” (geworfenheit): “The term … expresses the original violence done to me in making me be where I am and what I am, the passivity of my choiceless emergence into an existing world which I did not make and whose law is not mine.”⁹

To achieve the gnosis or redemption held out in the Valentinian formula (the unlimited freedom or omnipotence that beckons out of the future), a crisis must be provoked—the vacuity of the “now” must be filled with frenetic plotting, or, rather, counterplotting against the conspiracy of this world. Richard must have a “world” to “bustle in” (I. i. 152), but it will be a world fashioned in his own image. That he could choose otherwise and follow the traditional Christian pattern of heroism, the model which offers itself equally to cripples and the fair proportioned, is evaded here. Richard embraces the material sign of his reprobation as the emblem of an inward and unconditional freedom. As Georges Battaille has said of the pattern of gnostic revolt, “it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one's reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am.”¹⁰ Thus in Richard's “I am determined to prove a villain,” we can hear an echo of the threat of the unrepentant Adam in the heresiarch Mani's misreading of the Eden narrative. Having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam learns the truth of his imprisonment and cries, “Woe, woe unto the shaper of my body, unto those who fettered my soul.”¹¹ Richard's punning “determined” is the rhetorical equivalent of an inward evasion of the very possibility of grace, that is, of a sacramental redemption within the order of nature. He is determined to avert his eyes from the mortal shadow cast by the sun—ever the symbol of all “true” representation—and to “prove” himself a villain. We should not, therefore, be misled by the ironic “since I cannot prove a lover,” for two scenes later he proves himself a liar.

In the often discussed wooing scene (I. iii) in which Richard engages the Lady Anne in an inverted Petrarchan rhetorical duel, a gnostic structural pattern, or dialectic, emerges which may be described in terms borrowed from Harold Bloom, a literary critic whose use of the gnostic paradigm is by now well known. According to Bloom, “[W]hat a Gnostic or strong poet knows is what only a strong reading of a belated poem or a lie-against-time teaches: a freedom compounded of three elements, and these are: negation, evasion, extravagance (emphasis added).”¹² Negation may here be understood as a figurative severance from, and a flight out of, a dead and imprisoning time past—time understood beneath the sign of the flesh (that which decays). Evasion follows upon negation and appears as improvisation, as a will to deception which would preclude the redemptive possibility of time present. On the “rhetorical level,” according to Bloom, evasion “is always misinterpretation or misreading.”¹³ And, finally, extravagance as the ultimate term of the dialectic, may be understood as the confident assumption of gnosis or omnipotence.

The wooing, or better yet, seduction of Anne begins with a powerful symbolic negation of the traditional Christian ceremonial “binding” of profane time by way of sacramental ritual and ceremony. Following in solemn procession the bearers of the royal corpse, Anne mourns the death of the saintly King Henry VI. The rhythm of the verse in these opening lines is the rhythm of sacred time, of the plenitudo et extensio which binds the living and dead, a bond now sacralized by ritual incantation:

Set down your honorable load—
If honor may be shrouded in a hearse—
Whilst I awhile obsequiously lament
The untimely fall of virtuous Lancaster.

(I. ii. 1-4)

The emotional weight of the passage falls squarely upon the word “untimely,” which is of course a reference to Henry's murder at the hands of Gloucester, whose fate it is to be untimely. And at the thought of Richard, Anne's lament rises toward a crescendo of curses barely restrained by formal repetition. Here she addresses the slain king:

Be it lawful that I invocate thy ghost
To hear the lamentations of poor Anne,
Wife to thy Edward, to thy slaught'red son
Stabbed by the selfsame hand that made these wounds!
Lo, in these windows that let forth thy life
I pour the helpless balm of my poor eyes.
O, cursed be the hand that made these holes!
Cursed the heart that had the heart to do it!
Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence!

(I. ii. 8-16)

Despite the considerable critical ingenuity expended upon this scene, no one has noticed that Anne's curses are themselves a violation of the norms of Christian charity, and thus already a profanation of this funeral rite. Richard is waiting in the wings, taking her curses—so full of the venom upon which he feeds—for his cue. Indeed, the curse which follows repeats the emphasis upon Richard's untimeliness, for Anne wishes upon him an offspring who will be—just as he was—“abortive … prodigious, and untimely brought to light” (I. ii. 21-22).

But Anne's violation of the sanctity of the funeral rite is not of the same order as Richard's violent and impious intrusion:

Villains, set down the corse, or, by Saint Paul,
I'll make a corse of him that disobeys!
GENTLEMAN.
My Lord, stand back, and let the coffin pass.
RICHARD.
Unmannered dog! Stand thou, when I command!
Advance thy halberd higher than my breast,
Or by Saint Paul, I'll strike thee to my foot
And spurn thee, beggar, for thy boldness.

(I. ii. 36-42)

We would do well to remember just how sobering an iconographic presence this royal corpse must have been for an Elizabethan audience. For as Kantorowicz reminds us, in his funeral procession, “for the last time, the dead king acts out the person of the Dignity,”—that is, the corpus mysticum, the body mystical which was believed to contain the spiritual substance of the king's subjects.¹⁴

Richard's intrusion upon the scene is thus a double violation, for he flaunts the ceremonial strictures of both Church and State—negating, or rending with one brash thrust of his sword the fabric of ritual time. Anne does not fail to recognize his satanic aspect:

Avaunt thou dreadful minister of hell!
Thou hadst but power over his mortal body;
His soul thou canst not have. Therefore, begone.

(I. ii. 46-48)

Like Lucifer, Richard is a hunter of souls. But, of course, it is not Henry's soul that this “minister of hell” is out to ensnare. That Anne does not immediately recognize the danger suggests something less than the vigilance counseled by the Apostle Paul, whose name Richard has sworn by, as we have seen, only a few lines earlier.¹⁵ Unlike Eve, whose seduction by the Serpent in the Garden may be a model for this temptation scene, Anne cannot claim prior ignorance of the reality of evil.¹⁶ In any case, Richard responds to her rebuff with all the evasive and insinuating flattery traditionally attributed to the Serpent:¹⁷ “Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst” (I. i. 49). This is Richard's first parry in the dialectical swordplay which will end, quite literally, with Anne's refusal to take up Richard's proffered sword and plunge it in his breast. With that refusal she makes her fatal assent to the devil's bargain. But given the nature of her opponent, we might argue that by entering into the debate at all she has tacitly assented here at the outset.

To Anne's passionate curses, Richard returns Petrarchan conceits—that is, a series of verbal evasions or improvisations which might be termed misreadings, not merely of the “text” Anne provides, but of the Petrarchan text as well:

RICHARD.
Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.
ANNE.
Villain, thou know'st nor law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
RICHARD.
But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

(I. ii. 68-72)

While his logic leaves something to be desired, Richard's misreading is not without some truth. Anne, with a mouthful of curses, has forgotten the “rules of charity.” And perhaps her vulnerability on this point is what tempts her farther into this “keen encounter of wits”—an encounter which can only lead to entrapment. For the moment, however, she proves an able opponent:

ANNE.
O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!
RICHARD.
More wonderful, when angels are so angry.
Vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman,
Of these supposed crimes to give me leave
By circumstance to acquit myself.
ANNE.
Vouchsafe, diffused infection of a man,
Of these known evils, but to give me leave
By circumstances t'accuse thy cursed self.
RICHARD.
Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.

(I. ii. 74-82)

Anne is no mean rhetorician, but silence would be her best argument. Instead, she enters with a certain gusto into this semantic jousting; and in so doing she is already participating in a fiction of Richard's design. Yet punning upon his fawning “divine perfection” with her own “diffused infection,” Anne does inadvertently provide us with a clue to the nature of Richard's power, which lies precisely in his ability to manipulate the narratives that others construct in an attempt to define him, or, more importantly, to define themselves. Shakespeare's audience would have been particularly sensitive to the subtle identification between Richard and a plague-like “infection.” For believing in nothing—save his own secret omnipotence—Richard insinuates himself almost invisibly into the lives of his victims. Unburdened with the common sense conviction that language bears some essential relation to the world, to truth, Gloucester manipulates words with an unsettling ease. Even the “truth” that he was in fact the murderer of King Henry becomes an element of the fiction which insidiously undermines Anne's pious resistance. Admitting his guilt, Richard nonetheless pretends to have done the deed out of love: “He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband / Did it to help thee to a better husband” (I. ii. 138-39).

Of course, Anne's revulsion for Richard is for the moment understandably whipped into a white heat; she spits at him and commands him to withdraw: “Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes” (I. ii. 148). But Richard has now drawn Anne precisely to that point where revulsion reaches its extremity and may begin, if carefully prompted, to spill over into its opposite. But if that is to occur, Richard must simulate genuine passion, and do it so well that he becomes pitiable.

Thus in the climactic passage of the scene, Richard narrates a moment out of his past in such a way as to invest his demonic fatality (that which Anne hates and fears) with a tragic hue (that which she may find piteous):

Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears,
Shamed their aspect with store of childish drops:
These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear—

(I. ii. 153-55)

Even when those hardened warriors—his father and Edward—wept at the death of Rutland, the youngest of the York brothers, Richard in his pride disdained to shed a tear. Not even the death of his own father, though it caused him sorrow, could wrest from his “manly eyes” a “humble tear.” In short, Richard represents himself as a victim of his own pride. Beneath this cruel aspect, he seems to say, I have carried a lonely burden of loss and sorrow. But “what these sorrows could not then exhale / Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping” (I. ii. 165-66).

When Richard concludes this solemn speech (of some eighteen lines in length) Anne is, for the first time, silenced. And behind that speechlessness lies the beginning of, if not love, then pity—and thus surrender to the power of Richard's supreme evasion. What had seemed bestial cunning and satanic malice in Anne's (and our) prior reading of Richard's character, may now be read anew as a mask behind which the true Richard suffered and longed for just such an opportunity to offer up his pride at the altar of love. So convincing is his performance at this point that even we, his intimates in deception, are half willing to believe it.

With regard to this transformation of Anne's response—one many critics have found implausible—the doctrines of one of Shakespeare's most notorious contemporaries, Giordorno Bruno, may not be irrelevant. Though best known for his theory of infinite worlds—which eventually brought him to the attention of the Inquisition—Bruno was in fact the foremost purveyor of gnostic doctrine in the Renaissance.¹⁸ One of the most important elements of Bruno's teaching was an erotic psychology—perhaps better termed an erotic magic—designed, with a cynicism astonishing even in the age of Machiavelli, to gain for its practitioner an unlimited power over others. In one late treatise, the Theses de Magia, Bruno anticipates Freud in identifying erotic energy as the raw force shaping all human behavior. The These de Magia is, in fact, a practitioner's manual for the manipulation of that raw energy. It demonstrates the means of creating the vinculum, or bond, which will able the magus practitioner to gain control over the will of his victim, and Eros is his tool:

All affection and bonds of the will are reduced to two, namely aversion and desire, or hatred and love. Yet hatred itself is reduced to love, whence it follows that the will's only bond is Eros. … As regards all those who are dedicated to philosophy or magic, it is fully apparent that the highest bond, the most important and most general, belongs to Eros; and that is why the Platonists called love the Great Demon.¹⁹

It should be apparent that Bruno is using the terms “love” and “Eros” synonymously; they represent simple raw desire. The job of the manipulator, or hunter of souls, is to remain detached from any real emotion, while nevertheless simulating the passion by means of which he hopes to control his victim. Such a manipulator, a skillful one like Richard of Gloucester, may transmute the Eros of aversion into the Eros of desire (or pity).

Indeed, Richard's manipulative technique so resembles the strategy counseled in Bruno's work that one may suggest, if not a direct influence, then at least an illuminating analogue. Shakespeare could not have been unaware of Bruno and his teaching, as Frances Yates and others have suggested.²⁰ Moreover, Bruno's Heroici Furori published in England in 1585 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, established a memorable precedent for Shakespeare's parodic treatment of the Petrarchan love lyric. For the sonnet sequence of which the Heroici is composed imitates Petrarch in a subversive manner, misreading the Italian poet's amorous conceits as emblems of gnostic liberation from the bestiality of the flesh. In the dedication to Sidney we find an attack upon Petrarch's idolatry of woman so virulently misogynistic that we must wonder whether, given the other parallels already noted, it may have inspired Shakespeare's conception of Gloucester. The poet who sighed for his Laura, Bruno writes, lacking the intelligence to apply himself to higher things, cultivated a bestial idolatry, all for the sake

of these eyes, these ears, this blush, this tongue, this tooth, this hair, this dress … this little shoe, this sun in eclipse … this slut, this stench, this deathbed, this privy, this menstruation, this corpse … which, by means of a superficial appearance, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, a Circe-like charm in the service of procreation, deceives us by taking the form of beauty.²¹

If the seduction of Anne offers us nothing so explicit as this, most readers would agree that a troubling undercurrent of hostility informs the scene—that is, a hatred of the flesh which takes woman as the emblem of all that is degrading in man's creaturely status. Indeed, the seduction is immediately preceded by Richard's suggestion of “another secret close intent / By marrying her which I must reach into” (I. i. 158-59)—words that in retrospect seem decidedly obscene. We may also recall in this context Richard's encounter with Queen Elizabeth in Act IV when, replying to the Queen's reminder that he murdered her children, he retorts that

… in your daughter's womb I will bury them,
Where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

(IV. iv. 423-25)

If the imagery here seems at first glance inviting, it is upon closer inspection grotesque. Moreover, it should be read within the context of a pattern of allusions throughout the play which depicts Richard as the “slander of [his] heavy mother's womb” (I. iii. 230).²² The most telling is the lament of the Duchess of York herself:

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

(IV. i. 52-55)

In short, Richard's deadly career has been a repudiation of the life-giving goodness of the womb. Once alerted to this pattern of allusion, it is difficult to read the overture to Elizabeth cited above as anything other than maliciously ironic. For Richard as for Bruno, the womb is an object of fear and loathing, at once a burial and a breeding ground.

If Richard's deepest desire is, as I have argued, the gnosis, or knowledge of his own omnipotence, then it may be reiterated that the capture of Anne is not primarily a political maneuver, but rather an attempt to free himself from the threat of bondage. In short, the emblem of creaturely desire and dependence must be degraded if the gnostic manipulator is to avoid being himself “enchained” by Eros; that freedom is the guarantee of his control over the wills of others, and thus of the success of his evasion of grace—that is, of the possibility of redemption within time present. When Anne capitulates, Richard produces a sign of the bondage into which she has fallen. He slips a ring upon her finger: “Look how my ring encompasseth thy finger / Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart” (I. ii. 204-06). But, of course, the reverse is true. It is Anne who is encompassed by the insinuating web of fictions which Richard has spun—with a calculated spontaneity—out of the vacuity of an already negated present.

The scene closes with another of Richard's soliloquies, and we find him in an exultant mood of half-feigned astonishment at his victory over the hapless Lady Anne: “Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won?” (I. ii. 227-28). But we must be cautious of his apparent candor; for he conceals as much as he reveals:

I'll be at charges for a looking glass
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in fashion with myself,
I'll maintain it with some little cost. …
Shine out fair sun, til I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(I. ii. 255-59, 262-63)

This is Richard's moment of sublime extravagance; the passive sufferer of the play's opening soliloquy has made good on his promise. Of special note is the subtle reorientation toward that crucial symbol, the sun. Before, Richard paid at least an indirect homage to a law higher than the self. His delight had been “to see [his] shadow in the sun / And descant upon my own deformity.” Now, he audaciously commands the sun to shine so that, having bought a looking-glass, he may see only the restless passage of that shadow.²³ If the sun is the preeminent symbol of a “true” representation, of a world of real objects with meaning outside the confines of the self, then Richard in effect declares here his denial of that world. The looking glass, traditionally an image of self-knowledge—that is, of the knowledge of one's mortality—is here transformed into an image of imaginary self-creation. It captures only what Eric Voegelin, in a study of gnostic self-creation, has called “the flight from the self's non-essential facticity toward being what it is not.” The nature of the freedom it reflects is “the necessity of making a choice which will determine one's own being” (emphasis added).²⁴

For Richard, the “flight from the self's non-essential facticity” is a flight from the center of existential gravity that is the body, a flight into absolute difference or otherness. He aspires to the Throne under the mistaken conviction that absolute power, in the worldly sense, will guarantee the radical autonomy that is his deepest aim. But the Throne stands symbolically and existentially at the center of life, and the King—if rules successfully—must bind his will to the will of the people. He must attain their trust. Little surprise, then, when upon ascending the Throne, Richard immediately begins to falter and hesitate. Only when the forces of retribution begin to move against him does he become his old self again—full of “that alacrity of spirit” that he was “wont to have” (V. iii. 73). And in his final, doomed speech he reveals that nihilistic longing for the abyss that has been his guiding star from the beginning: “I have set my life upon a cast / And I will stand the hazard of the die” (V. iv. 9-10).

Notes

1. Henry Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters, 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn and Co.: 1872; rpt. New York: AMS Reprint 1973), pp. 149-150.

2. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 71.

3. Marguerite Waller, “Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A ‘Deconstructive,’ ‘Feminist’ Rereading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare's Richard III,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 160.

4. See, for example, Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982); Margaret Ranald Loftus, “Women and Political Power in Shakespeare's English Histories,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 30 (1980), p. 25; and Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981).

5. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). See ch. 3, “Gnostic Imagery and Symbolic Language,” pp. 48-99. Jonas' study remains the standard general work on ancient gnosticism and is especially interesting in suggesting the analogue with modernity which I have noted (see pp. 320-40). Others who have entered the dialog over the relationship between gnosticism and modernity include Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1968); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983); Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature & History of Gnosticism, trans. Robert M. Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); and Gregor Sebba, “History, Modernity and Gnosticism,” The Collected Essays of Gregor Sebba, eds. Helen Sebba, Anibal A. Bueno and Hendrikus Boers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991). Of these the most cogent analyses are those of Voegelin and Blumenberg. The latter draws upon Voegelin's contention that modernity is best described as a reemergence of the gnostic world-view brought about by the break-up of the medieval synthesis. However, Blumenburg differs in arguing that modernity is in fact a “second overcoming of gnosticism.” The point is debatable, but the present essay assumes the truth of Blumenberg's suggestion that Christianity absorbed, by way of Augustine and St. Paul, a hidden dualism never wholly overcome by subsequent theological development. That gnostic element, according to Blumenberg, is contained for the better part of the Middle Ages only to resurface with the advent of nominalism—especially with Ockham's speculations on the radical Otherness of God. This gnostic turn becomes operative across a wide spectrum of Christian experience as it is mediated, inadvertently, through the theologies of Luther and Calvin—particularly through their doctrines of the Hidden God and predestination. For an argument which lends some support to this position, see Paul Ricoeur, “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974). For a discussion of the gnostic / Manichaean element in Luther's thought (and his followers), see Theobald Beer, Der frohliche Wechsel und Streit (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980). Since a discussion of the mediatory role played by nominalism and Reformation thought in nurturing the gnostic influences permeating northern Europe in the sixteenth century would require lengthy treatment, I have passed over the problem. However, readers familiar with Reformation theology of election will immediately notice relevant parallels. A view which attempts to absolve Luther and Calvin of any gnostic “taint” is to be found in Philip J. Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). However, Lee's treatment of modern gnosticism as essentially an anthropological concern—i.e. the emergence of the autonomous self—agrees with my own.

6. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: The Viking Press, 1969); all subsequent quotations from the play will be cited parenthetically in the text.

7. Jonas, p. 51.

8. Attributed to Valentinus by Clement of Alexandria in his Excerpta ex Theodoto. I have used Jonas' translation, The Gnostic Religion, p. 334.

9. Jonas, pp. 334-35

10. Georges Batailles, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 49.

11. Jonas, p. 87.

12. “Lying Against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism,” Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 59.

13. Bloom, p. 67.

14. See Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 424. Kantorowicz's study demonstrates how the figure of the king evolved from its early association with Christ's “royal priesthood” toward the complete absorption of the symbolism of the corpus mysticum formerly associated exclusively with the Church.

15. I refer to Paul's advice to the Ephesians to “Put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers against the rulers of the darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:11-12).

16. See Calvin's remarks on Eve's temptation scene in Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, vol. 1, trans. John King (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1948) pp. 145-46.

17. I am thinking particularly of the Mystery tradition still alive—albeit in a much diminished form—in Shakespeare's childhood. One account of the Temptation was performed by the Grocers of Norwich in 1565. There the Serpent first approaches Eve with the following address: “O lady of felicite, beholde my voice so small!” See The Creation of Eve, with the Expelling of Adam and Eve out of Paradise in Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. John Quincy Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), p. 90.

18. For an overview of the specifically “gnostic” element in Bruno's teachings see Stephen A. McKnight “Understanding Modernity: A Reappraisal of the Gnostic Element,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring (1979), pp. 107-17.

19. As translated in Ioan P. Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 91. Bruno's Theses and his De Vinculum, a crucial companion text, were composed in Latin in 1590-91. Neither have been translated into English to date. For the authoritative Latin texts see Jordani Bruni Nolani, Opera Latine Conscripta, vol. 3 (Florentiae 1893; rpt. Stuttgart Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann, 1962).

20. For a brief summary of Bruno's work and travels, including his stay in England in the 1580's, see Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). For the most recent discussion of Bruno's possible influence on Shakespeare, see Hilary Gati, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 114-64. Gati makes no reference to Richard III, but he does make a convincing case for the availability to Shakespeare of several of Bruno's most important works and demonstrates an influence on Hamlet. It is unlikely that the Latin texts of the Theses made its way into England before Shakespeare composed Richard III, but the erotic psychology espoused there is already hinted at in earlier texts.

21. This translation of the passage is from Ioan P. Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 68. For the full text, see The Heroic Frenzies, trans. Paul Eugene Memmo, Jr., University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, vol. 50 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1964).

22. See also Margaret's curse at IV. iv. 47 and 54 and the Duchess of York's at IV. iv. 137-39.

23. I am indebted to Harold Bloom for this insight into the passage. See his introduction to Elizabethan Dramatists, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986). To my knowledge, Bloom is the only other critic to have noticed the persistent undercurrent of gnostic imagery in the play.

24. Eric Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p. 185.