[In the following essay, Plasse argues that Richard uses his malformed body as an excuse to behave wickedly.]

The opening scene of Richard III, unique among Shakespeare's plays in its call for the leading character to appear onstage alone and deliver a lengthy monologue, represents a marked departure from the crowded scenes that open the other three plays in the first tetralogy. Next to the heavily populated and eventful scenes with which those plays begin,¹ the opening of Richard III seems remarkably stark. The expansive representation of historical events offered in the first scenes of the Henry VI plays is replaced in Richard III by a more narrowly focused representation of a single figure into which the scope of English history seems to compact itself. As Bernard Spivack has noted, this shift in perspective is discernible in the Henry series, but is not fully achieved until Richard III:

By the end of Henry VI Richard has only begun to emerge from the press of men and events which diversifies that trilogy, although we become aware that already he has magnetized a change in dramatic perspective: the mural of national history in a succession of panels, its large population crowding through multiple phases of war and politics, by degrees surrenders foreground and focus to his looming portrait. In Richard III this portrait monopolizes the canvas. …

(396)

The first bold strokes of this “looming portrait” in Act 1, Scene 1 of Richard III are crucial in that they both foreground Richard's deformed body as a compelling stage presence and inaugurate the play's characteristic mode of representing in corporeal images and references Richard's impressive power over people and events. As has often been noted, this first scene offers both a highly effective introduction to the play's leading character and political themes as well as an irresistible opportunity for crowd-pleasing showmanship on the part of the actor who plays Richard. But this first scene should also be recognized as the initial iteration of an important pattern in the play which, by systematically thematizing corporeality and dramatizing the manipulation and destruction of bodies, represents the growth and ascendancy of Richard's power. In what follows, I want first to suggest some of the special features and effects of Richard's physical presence in the opening scene and then examine several other scenes to show how the thematization of the body which Richard performs in Act 1, Scene 1 operates beyond the opening moments of the play.

Every play necessarily depends on the corporeal medium of the actors' bodies to hold the audience's interest and to make meaning. As Michael Goldman has aptly observed, “An actor's profession and desire are to interest people with his body … Our response to what the actor does with his body, to the strains that are put upon it and the graces it reveals, are very strong components of our response to the play as a whole” (4). The actor who plays Richard, however, inherits an extra charge of corporeal affect by virtue of the preconceptions his audience is likely to harbor about the body of the character. Long before Shakespeare's Richard went onstage, the image of Richard as an evil, misshapen monster was firmly established in the popular imagination. Owing chiefly to Sir Thomas More's portrait of Richard as “little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, crokebacked, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard fauored of visage … malicious, wrathfull, enuious … a deepe dissumuler … not letting to kisse whom hee thought to kill” (7-8), a characterization later incorporated into chronicles by Hall, Holinshed, and others, Richard's physical deformity had gained considerable notoriety by the time Shakespeare's version of him appeared. It seems likely, therefore, that many members of Shakespeare's audience would have been predisposed to pay particular attention to Richard's physical presence and to anticipate with interest the theatrical representation of his legendary deformity. What would this notorious monster look like? Sound like? What would he do?

Modern audiences, too, are likely to approach this play with preconceptions about Richard which dispose them to fix their attention on his body. The stockpile of facts, legends, and images which furnishes modern theatergoers with their vision of the character is, if anything, even larger than that from which Shakespeare's audience might have culled its notion of Richard. The ideas available for us to bring to the play include not only the legend of Richard's deformity and some knowledge of Shakespeare's sources, but also some past experience, however vague, with Shakespeare's play itself, and any number of different performances of the role, parodies, and passing references to Richard in countless other texts.

The dramaturgy of Act 1, Scene 1 of Richard III suggests a playwright keenly aware of and prepared to exploit his audience's preset attention to the body of the leading character by putting Richard onstage alone and giving him a forty-line speech. Simply by virtue of the amount of time required for their performance, Richard's entrance and speech virtually guarantee several moments of sustained attention from the audience, certainly enough time for Richard's physical presence to register strongly. The performance history of the play also suggests that the corporeal energies which inhere in Richard's first moments onstage are strong enough to have preoccupied actors and audiences for several centuries.² In addition, the fact that Richard speaks as a prologue here, filling in past action, describing the present situation, and setting the play in motion with a frank declaration of villainous intent, would also compel the audience to be especially attentive. Richard offers information that they need as they begin to focus on the world of the play unfolding.

As the prologue gives way to soliloquy at line 14, Richard's explicit references to his body reinforce the emphasis on his physical presence fostered through the staging and strengthen whatever resonances of Richard's legendary deformity may be at play in the minds of the spectators:³

But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up—
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them—
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(1.1.14-31)

In addition to highlighting Richard's corporeal self and alerting the audience to the thread of the plot, these lines perform another important inaugural function in the play in that they present Richard as a moralizer of his own deformities. When, after describing his misshapen body, Richard goes on, with a definitive but sophistic “therefore,” to explain his villainous intentions, he encourages us to believe that there is a causal relationship between his deformities and his wickedness. In his illogical appropriation of physical deformity as cause for his treachery, a fallacy that was commonplace in contemporary moralizations of deformity,⁴ Richard designates his body as an outward sign of his moral depravity. In so doing, he also establishes himself as a self-conscious manipulator of corporeal signs. This ability to recognize powerful corporeal signs and to influence the way others construe them is central to Richard's treacherous rise to the throne.

As the plot swings into action after Richard's opening monologue, incidents gradually accumulate which develop and complicate the foregrounding of the body and of corporeal signs executed in Act 1, Scene 1. Richard's clever, calculated attacks on those who block his path to the throne, for example, are repeatedly registered through an emphasis on corporeal images, both in the language and in the staging of the play. Although Richard's subtle capacity to outwit his opponents is presented as formidable and his psychological insights acute, the full measure of his power is most impressively conveyed in his relentless pursuit of and control over the bodies of his foes. Unlike Iago, another self-conscious, ambitious villain, Richard, for the most part, is not particularly interested in toying with his victims, leading them to destruction through repeated encounters, insinuations, and exhortations which occur over a long period of time. Richard's style, by and large, is much more precipitous and direct. His characteristic method of controlling and defeating his enemies is to remove them bodily from the public sphere in which he so effectively “bustles.” He knocks his foes out of action by imprisoning them, one after the other, like so many forfeited chess pieces. Gradually, the body count grows.

Richard's conversation with “the new-deliver'd Hastings” in Act 1, Scene 1, immediately after we see Clarence led away to prison, lingers suggestively over Hastings' recent incarceration:

HAST.
Good time of day unto my gracious lord.
RICH.
As much unto my good Lord Chamberlain:
Well are you welcome to the open air.
How hath your lordship brook'd imprisoment?
HAST.
With patience, noble lord, as prisoners must;
But I shall live, my lord, to give them thanks
That were the cause of my imprisonment.
RICH.
No doubt, no doubt; and so shall Clarence too:
For they that were your enemies are his,
And have prevail'd as much on him, as you.
HAST.
More pity that the eagles should be mew'd
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.

(1.1.122-132)

This exchange suggests that the risk of imprisonment is a common danger in the factionalized world which Richard and Hastings inhabit. But as the number of bodies consigned to prison at Richard's behest grows, their imprisonment also becomes a sign of Richard's increasing command over that world: in Act 2, Scene 4 we hear that he has sent Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan to Pomfret; in Act 3 he sequesters the young Duke of York and young Prince Edward in the Tower; in Act 4 he orders his queen to “keep close” in her chamber as he spreads rumors of her sickness and impending death, and he arranges to have Clarence's son “pent up close” (4.3.36).

Once he removes enemies from his path by imprisoning them, Richard eventually arranges for their murders or executions. Such action is, like imprisonment, a common move for Shakespearean villains and power-seekers who wish to eradicate their foes. But the play's sustained attention to the physical details of Clarence's murder (l.4), the pathos of Tyrrel's slaughter of the Princes in the Tower (4.3), and the repeated references to beheadings feared, defied, threatened, and accomplished (3.1.193; 3.2.41; 3.2.69; 3.2.89; 3.4.38; 3.4.76; 3.4.96; 3.4.106; 4.3.122; 3.5.22ff.) all characterize Richard's climb to power as a reign of terror over the bodies of his enemies. These aggressive moves against the bodies of his foes resonate strongly with the forceful corporeal effect of Richard's first appearance onstage. They are integral features of Richard's body-centered modus operandi.

Richard's habit of incarcerating his enemies and having them killed comes into better focus as part of a systematic deployment of corporeal references and images representing the fact and the mode of Richard's ascendancy when seen alongside several other successful stratagems through which Richard consolidates his power. Each of these victories depends on Richard's ability to manipulate the force and meaning of his own body. Richard's startling strike against Hastings during the strawberry council scene (Act 3, Scene 4) is a case in point. Having withdrawn with Buckingham from the council chamber at line 41, Richard re-enters around line 59 in an agitated state, asking those assembled to “tell me what they deserve / That do conspire my death with devilish plots / Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail'd / Upon my body with their hellish charms?” (59-62). When Hastings, who takes this question seriously, answers that “they” deserve death, Richard holds up his withered arm and accuses Edward's wife and Mistress Shore of bewitching him: “See how I am bewitched! Behold, mine arm / Is like a blasted sapling wither'd up! / And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch, / Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore, / That by their witchcraft thus have marked me” (3.4.68-72).

Richard's invocation of the deforming effects of witchcraft and his display of his withered arm seem to accord him an uncanny power here. Even though the assembled lords must know that Hastings is being set up, no one protests the trumped up charge against him. They seem paralyzed. Richard's control over this event stems not only from the velocity of his surprise attack, but also from the contradictory and confusing messages his words and gestures send in the scene. Ostensibly, Richard plays the innocent victim of “damned witchcraft,” displaying his deformed limb as a sign of evil done to him by others. In so doing, he seems to be giving up the power he claims at the beginning of the play, where, in his opening monologue, he identifies his physical defects as the source of his own wickedness. At the same time, however, as he brandishes his deformed arm, shouts about witchcraft, and precipitously condemns Hastings, Richard retains the aura of deadly aggressiveness which many previous readings of his body have projected in the play.⁵ By playing both victim and aggressor here, and by using his deformed arm to project both roles, Richard seems to “moralize two meanings” in one body. This doubleness allows him to exercise enormous power in the scene while seeming to give it up. As Richard flashes these contradictory messages, potential opposition is effectively neutralized.

Richard's winning over of the Lord Mayor and the citizens in Act 3, Scene 7 also depends, in part, on his control over how others understand his body. Working through his mouthpiece Buckingham, Richard spreads rumors challenging the legitimacy of his brother Edward and Edward's children in order to block their claim to the throne. Buckingham tells the citizens that Edward's bastardy can be confirmed by the fact that he does not physically resemble his father, while, on the other hand, Richard's rightful claim to the throne is signalled by his being the “right idea of [their] father, / Both in … form and nobleness of mind” (3.7.13-14). Richard's complicated seduction of the citizenry is based, in part, on the notion that he should be king because he looks like he should be king.

The most striking demonstration of Richard's power to manipulate bodies to his advantage, however, comes in Act 1, Scene 2, when he interrupts Lady Anne's lamentations over the corpse of Henry VI in order to carry out his plan to woo her. The success of Richard's wooing of Anne depends on, among other things, several moves by which he skillfully dissolves the connections that Anne seeks to enforce between Richard's corporeal self and Henry's murdered body—connections which, for a time, seem to ward off Richard's advances.

Although she is ultimately won over by Richard's relentless arguments, petitions, and posturings, Anne is an aggressive opponent at the outset. She answers Richard's pious request, “Sweet saint; for charity be not so curst,” with a vehement diatribe against his crimes:

Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not;
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill'd it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.
O gentlemen! See, see dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh.
Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity,
For 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins where no blood dwells.
Thy deed inhuman and unnatural
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.
O God! which this blood mad'st, revenge his death;
O earth! which this blood drink'st, revenge his death;
Either heav'n with lightning strike the murderer dead,
Or earth gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good King's blood
Which his hell-govern'd arm hath butchered.

(1.2.50-67)

In her declaration of Richard's victory over Henry's “mortal body” (1.2.47) and in her accusatory description of the fresh blood which flows from Henry's wounds, Anne summons up powerful signs of Richard's guilt. But in identifying Richard as Henry's murderer, she also acknowledges Richard's power over the highly potent corporeal sign which lies silent at their feet—the body of King Henry VI. Anne's earlier apostrophe to Henry's corpse, “Poor key-cold Figure of a holy king, / Pale ashes of the House of Lancaster, / Thou bloodless remnant of that royal blood” (1.2.5-7), suggests the formidable weight of signification which the King's wounded body bears.⁶ The “keycold Figure” over which Anne laments figures not only a human corpse, but also the living Henry, and, most importantly, the immortal “body politic” of the King.⁷ The dried blood on Henry's wounds signifies on several levels as well, representing not only the violence of his death, but also his noble lineage, his claim to the throne, and, metonymically, the collective blood of all English subjects.⁸ Anne's articulation of Richard's power over the King's mortal body is an ominous indication of Richard's growing power over all bodies, including her own.

While the corpse over which Anne laments here bears witness to the violence of Richard's corporeal operations, a more subtle and insidious aspect of his ability to appropriate bodies for his purposes is displayed as the scene progresses and Anne is drawn deeper into Richard's web. After several denials, Richard finally admits his role in Henry's murder (1.2.105), and then abruptly shifts the discussion into a sexually charged mode, bluntly declaring his desire for Anne:

ANNE:
He is in Heaven, where thou shalt never come.
RICH.:
Let him thank me that holp to send him thither,
                              For he was fitter for that place than earth.
ANNE:
And thou unfit for any place but hell.
RICH.:
Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
ANNE:
Some dungeon?
RICH.:
Your bedchamber.
ANNE:
Ill rest betide the chamber where thou liest.
RICH.:
So will it madam, till I lie with you.

(1.2.104-116)

From this frank assertion of his desire to possess Anne sexually, Richard moves to a more subtle appropriation of her body into his controlling discourse, asking, “Is not the causer of the timeless deaths / Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward, / As blameful as the executioner?” (1.2.121-123). Anne replies, “Thou wast the cause, and most accurs'd effect” (1.2.124). Richard's answer contradicts Anne and asserts, “Your beauty was the cause of that effect: / Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep / To undertake the death of all the world, / So I might live an hour in your sweet bosom” (125-128).⁹ Anne has already posited a causal connection between Richard's body and Henry's murdered corpse: When Richard stops the funeral procession and Henry's wounds bleed, Anne exhorts him to “Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity; / For 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood” (57-58). A few lines later she invokes Richard's “hell-govern'd arm” (67) as the agent of Henry's death. By contradicting Anne in his reply and invoking her beauty as “the cause of that effect,” Richard challenges the causal connection which Anne has anounced and reconstructs it, removing his body as the purported cause and substituting for it Anne's beauty.¹⁰ By positioning Anne's beauty this way, Richard aligns Anne's body with the “hell-govern'd arm” and the “lump of foul deformity” which she has identified as the cause of Henry's death. In Richard's representation of the crime, Anne not only replaces him as Henry's murderer, but her beauty replaces his own monstrosity.

Anne resists this appropriation of her corporeal self by fantasizing a self-mutilation that would annihilate the beauty which Richard has adduced as a cause of Henry's murder: “If I thought that, I tell thee, homicide, / These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks” (129-30).¹¹ Anne never actually carries out this threat to mutilate herself, however, and when she tries to turn her aggression outward at Richard instead of directing it against her own body, she can do nothing more than spit at him as he persists in declaring his amorous intentions, boldly asserting that he loves Anne better than her husband could. Anne's gesture of spitting, which highlights her impotence in the face of Richard's growing power, recalls the similarly ineffectual bleeding of the “congeal'd mouths” on Henry's corpse in a different but equally futile effort to protest Richard's domination.

Richard's triumph over Anne's resistance, however, is a result not only of his rhetorical manipulation of her beauty to implicate her in his crimes, but also of his physical gestures of self-abasement when he kneels before her, bares his breast, and begs her to kill him with his sword (1.2.178-187). Richard's gestures force a shocking reversal in the structure of dominance which has organized the encounter thus far. As in the council scene with Hastings, Richard seemingly gives up power here to assume the role of a victim. With Richard's sudden assumption of a submissive posture, Anne becomes the wielder of the sword which is the emblem of Richard's power and of the instrument by which Henry and Edward have died. As Richard pleads with Anne to kill him, reiterating the role of her beauty in his violent crimes, Anne is unnerved: to seize the power offered to her and kill Richard would be to assent to his insistence on the connection between her corporeal self and the murders of her loved ones and, in a sense, to re-enact them by participating in the cycle of violence which these murders constitute (“Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry, / But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me. / Nay, now dispatch; 'twas I that stabbed young Edward, / But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on” [1.2.179-182]). Not to murder Richard, on the other hand, leads Anne into another trap, since, in the discursive frame which Richard has constructed, her refusal to take his life implies acceptance of Richard's professed devotion to her by suggesting that her hesitation to kill him stems from his flattering invocation of her “beauty.” The syntactic parallel in Richard's “Take up the sword again, / Or take up me” (188) after she lets the sword fall (182) falsely limits the choices open to Anne at this moment to two actions, both of which signify acceptance of Richard. Anne chooses to “take up” Richard, not the sword (“Arise, dissembler; though I wish thy death, / I will not be thy executioner” [188-189]), which would make her, according to Richard, an “accessory” to his murders of her loved ones. Richard's rhetorical appropriation of Anne's “beauty” into the discussion of murderous “causes,” combined with his uncharacteristically submissive posture (kneeling, breast bared), seem to thwart Anne's ability to formulate and execute her own desires to such a degree that she finally accepts his ring.

Anne appears to be distracted from any further protests against Richard by his final petition, which he quickly appends to his heavily Petrarchanized admiration of the ring she now wears (1.2.207-212). As Anne agrees to Richard's request that she “leave [her] sad designs / To him that hath most cause to be a mourner” (210-11) and allow him to supervise Henry's interment, the body which she has repeatedly invoked as a potent sign of enmity between them is transferred to Richard, as will soon be all the powers that Henry's body represents. Although this final triumph is at best anti-climactic after the extraordinary drama of the wooing scene, the image of Richard as custodian of Henry's body and overseer of his burial, the ultimate form of bodily incarceration, constitutes the play's most frighteningly potent sign of Richard's body-centered mode of claiming power.

As King Henry's corpse is removed from the stage at Richard's request, Richard's own body looms once again into the foreground as he delivers a speech that counterbalances his opening soliloquy. In the earlier speech, Richard laments his physical defects as detriments to his erotic appeal, but here, in a self-consciously ironic reversal of his former mood, Richard marvels at his amorous triumph over Anne and playfully celebrates his body as a primary factor in his success:

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

(1.2.258-62; 267-78)

Richard's desire for a mirror in which to look at himself, and his plan, meanwhile, to watch his shadow, suggest both the intensity and the necessity of his corporeal self-consciousness as he embarks on the next phase of his rise to power. He needs to keep his gaze intermittently fixed upon his body, not only in order to admire the vehicle of his most recent success, but also to perfect his next moves.

Notes

1. The funeral of Henry V, the alarm among the English over losses in the French war, the presentation of Queen Margaret at court, discontent among the English nobles over the new treaty with France, and the confrontation between Henry VI and his Yorkist foes are among the events depicted in the opening scenes of the Henry VI plays.

2. David Garrick, for example, reportedly played this entrance in such a way that “the moment he entered the scene, the character he assumed was visible in his countenance.” W. C. Macready remembers Edmund Kean's Richard as “a little keenly-visaged man” who “rapidly bustled across the stage” in this scene. Another description of Kean's entrance avows that “He waddles in a sort of dogtrot, and all at once without any apparent reason, he stops short to give a disquisition.” Walt Whitman writes of Junius Brutus Booth's “quiet entrance from the side, as with head bent, he slowly and in silence (amid the tempest of boisterous hand-clapping), walks down the stage to the footlights with that peculiar and abstracted gesture, musingly kicking his sword which he holds off from him by its sash. … I can hear the clank and feel the perfect following hush of perhaps three thousand people waiting.” W. A. Darlington reports that Olivier's Richard came in “at the back” and made “his progress downstage a thing of so many artfully contrived hesitations, of so much play of expression, that it seemed as if the time that elapsed before he spoke could be reckoned by minutes rather than seconds.” Ramaz Chikvadze's Richard, like Olivier's, was, according to Steve Grant in The Observer (26 August 1979), “a creature of terrifying physicality … a swaggering Napoleonic toad … the mouth evil in its pencil thin arrogance, the eyes bulging the compact topheavy body stalking the landscape, hands behind back or twisting round a swordstick, half clown, half psychopath.” These performance descriptions are quoted from Julie Hankey's edition of Richard III. See also C. P. Cerasano's discussion of Anthony Sher's preparation and performance of Richard for the RSC in 1984.

3. For this and all subsequent quotations, I have used the Arden edition of Richard III, Antony Hammond, ed. (London: Methuen, 1981).

4. See, for instance, Francis Bacon's essay, “Of Deformity,” quoted in the introduction to the Arden edition, 101-102.

5. I am thinking here not only of Richard's own earlier interpretations of his body, but also of Margaret's references to him as a “Poisonous bunch back'd toad” and a “bottled spider” in Act 1, Scene 3.

6. Robert Ornstein, in A Kingdom for a Stage, suggests the following range of significations for the King's body:

   Whatever role the Prince may play, magus or scapegoat—the King's body is the living presence of the nation and his royal We a communion of multitudes. He is the Host upon which a people feed, in whose veins flows the blood of twenty thousand or a hundred thousand men, and whose illnesses infect his meanest subject. His sacred right is a mystery of blood that raises the throne above the gross purchase of political ambition but that makes the commonwealth subject to accidents of birth and death.

   (30)

   Along similar lines, Francis Barker, in The Tremulous Private Body, explains that “the body has a central and irreducible place” (22) in the social order of the period. “The social plenum is the body of the king” (31).

7. See Ernst Kantorowicz's account of the theological antecedents of the juridical conception of the King's double body in The King's Two Bodies. See also Marie Axton's account of the diffusion of the concept through legal documents drawn up during the reign of Elizabeth I in The Queen's Two Bodies.

8. On the significance of blood in Shakespeare, see Berkeley.

9. Spivack's assessment of Richard's strategy with Anne is remarkable for the sexual rhetoric which it musters in order to describe what Richard does in this scene. According to Spivack, Anne “submits to an imperious skill that thrusts against her mood at its fiercest, engages it with flexible pressure while it struggles, and grasps it with careless, rough control when it melts” (406). Ornstein names that which Spivack only implies, suggesting that Richard's triumph over Anne is “more of a rape than a seduction, for though he seems to cringe and fawn, he bullies and intimidates and mocks her high moral tone by appeals to Christian charity … He answers her hyperboles of outrage with hyperboles that are outrageous” (76).

10. Madonne Miner has noted the way that Richard's invocation of Anne's beauty “directs culpability from himself onto the female figure” (37) and thereby “constructs a bond of alliance between Anne and himself against the House of Lancaster, rendering her powerless” (38). But she does not read this scene in terms of the shifting corporeal significations generated by the bodies of Richard, Anne, and Henry.

11. Anne displays a similar desire for self-mutilation in 4.1., when she refers to the crown she wears as Richard's queen: “O would to God that the inclusive verge / Of golden metal that must round my brow / Were redhot steel, to sear me to the brains” (4.1.57-59).

Works Cited

Axton, Marie. The Queen's Two Bodies. London: Royall Historical Society, 1977

Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body. London: Methuen, 1984.

Berkeley, David S. Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare's Plays. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1984.

Cerasano, C. P. “Churls Just Wanna Have Fun: Reviewing Richard III.” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 618-29.

Goldman, Michael. Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Hankey, Julie, ed. Richard III. Plays in Performance Series. Barnes and Noble Books: Totowa, N.J., 1981.

Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King's Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Miner, Madonne. “’Neither mother, wife, nor England's queen’: The Roles of Women in Richard III.” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Carolyn Ruth Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

More, Thomas. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Richard Sylvester, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

Ornstein, Robert. A Kingdom for a Stage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.