[In the following essay, Targoff connects the repeated use of the word “amen” in Richard III with the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty.]

Like the twelve curses of Deuteronomy, the four Gospels of the New Testament, and endless petitions and benedictions in the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare's Richard III ends with the word “amen.” In the final scene of the play, the Earl of Richmond attempts to sanctify his right to the throne by soliciting a series of “amens” from both God and his people. First, upon receiving the crown from his stepfather, Lord Stanley, Richmond responds by seeking divine blessing: “Great God of heaven, say ‘Amen’ to all.” Second, after asserting his plan to “unite the white rose and the red,” and thereby bring to an end the Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster, he boldly declares, “What traitor hears me and says not ‘Amen’?” Finally, Richmond ends the play with a petition for peace: “Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again / That she may long live here, God say ‘Amen’” (5.8.8, 22, 41).¹

The notion that England's formal transition into the peaceful reign of Henry VII would begin with the simple utterance of “amen” may seem a perfectly reasonable, and perhaps unremarkable, affair: “amen” was the most familiar means of affirming the prayers of the priest and by the late sixteenth century had become a common term for indicating approval and consent in political as well as religious transactions. In his English and Roman history plays, Shakespeare characteristically intertwines secular and sacred uses of the word, whereby changes in rulers or kingdoms are symbolically effected through the act of saying “amen.” At the end of Henry V, for example, the French queen Isabel confirms the union between England and France by declaring, “That English may as French, French Englishmen / Receive each other, God speak this ‘Amen’” (5.2.339-40). Since God was generally thought to remain silent during theatrical performances, all who are present on stage dutifully repeat the queen's “amen,” as if on behalf of the divine (“all” say “Amen”). In the pre-Christian world of Coriolanus, Coriolanus's proposed election to consul is at least initially met with unanimous “amens” from the citizens who declare in perfect unison, “Amen, amen. God save thee, noble consul!” (2.3.126). Or, just before Richard II hands over his crown to Bolingbroke, the deposed king ironically cries out, “God save the King! Will no man say ‘Amen’? / Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, Amen. / God save the King, although I be not he. / And yet Amen, if heaven do think him me” (4.1.163-66).

These representations of all-too-earthly transfers of power, “elections” earned less by the mysterious workings of God than by what Marvell will slyly describe in Cromwell as “industrious Valour,” seem to be authorized by the utterance of a single liturgical term.² More than any other word from scripture, “amen” was understood throughout the centuries to seal or confirm whatever had been previously spoken. And yet, despite its central role in the Protestant as well as Roman Catholic liturgy, “amen” no longer remained an unproblematic or uncontested form of response in the period following the Reformation. In their efforts to strip all traces of what they considered Catholic superstition and idolatry from the practice of daily worship, English Protestants openly worried about the conditions in which “amen” could be legitimately and effectively spoken.

There is a modern explanation of how and when certain verbal formulas work that helps explain, and in important ways reproduces, some of the struggles that early modern Englishmen faced in considering the efficacy of “amen.” In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin established a critical vocabulary for describing the power of “performatives,” linguistic structures that would later come to be known as “speech acts.”³ Austin defines the performative as an utterance in which saying and doing are identical; the speaker does not describe an action but instead performs the action through the verbal utterance itself. Among the examples Austin provides are “I do (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife …)”; “I name this ship (the Queen Elizabeth)”; “I declare war.” In each of these cases, the performative will not be “felicitous”—Austin's term for “effective” or “successful”—unless the persons and circumstances are appropriate; an already married man within monogamous societies cannot be remarried even if he says “I do” to a second wife in a church, nor can an ordinary civilian declare war on a neighboring country.

So far, so good. The complications for Austin begin to arise, however, when he considers the thorny question of intention.⁴ Initially Austin contends that performatives do not depend upon a prior internal state in order to be felicitous but need only to be properly executed. Hence, in the context of promises, Austin explains that although “we are apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign … of an inward and spiritual act,” this mistaken presumption leads down a slippery slope until the promise simply describes an internal disposition rather than performing the act itself.⁵ Instead, Austin insists that the sentence “I promise that …” operates on the principle that “our word is our bond”: if the promise was made in bad faith and remains unfulfilled, it does not mean that the speech act itself was false, only that it did not yield the outcome that was expected.

And yet, as his argument proceeds, Austin retreats from the implications of this position: namely, that the successful function of a performative, in a narrow technical sense, can be entirely separated from both the speaker's internal will and the external consequences of the utterance. When he articulates the six fundamental requirements for performatives to be “happy,” he assigns a significant role to intention:

Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings. …⁶

Not strictly operating on the principle that “our word is our bond” regardless of our intentions, these utterances depend for their felicity upon a correspondence between the speaker's insides and outsides. Stanley Fish's claim that in speech-act theory the realm of the “‘inward performance’ is simply bypassed” is only half true: the utterance may be successfully spoken without attention to the interior realm of the speaker, but Austin holds that both the “procedure” and its consequences can be profoundly altered by inappropriate internal conditions.⁷ This type of performative is neither void nor felicitous: it is “hollow.”

One of the strange omissions in Austin's text is the category of devotional performatives. In lectures devoted to utterances in which to say is also to do, why does Austin fail to consider the rich examples of an explicit performative like “I pray,” or an implicit performative like “amen”?⁸ No doubt a range of explanations might be given, explanations that would require a far deeper inquiry into Austin's life and work than I am prepared to undertake here. But one possible reason relevant to our purpose lies in the complications that arise when the only confirmation of felicity lies in the largely unknowable or imperceptible response of the divine. Austin's general disregard for the aftermath of an infelicitous performative, and his particular indifference to theological utterances, make it difficult to address these complications within the terms of his work. However, they raise important questions for early modern devotional practice. Can God be said to hear prayers that are uttered without the full engagement of the speaker? Do worshipers benefit from saying “amen” when they have not adequately understood or do not agree with the words that the minister has uttered? And can we predict what might happen when conventional acts are performed irresponsibly or under coercive pressure?⁹

Although Austin avoids the murky terrain where such questions inevitably lead, these concerns were of the utmost exigency to early modern churchmen, for whom the ambiguous status of “amen” as a devotional performative was a source of real uneasiness. It is this uneasiness, I want to argue, that Shakespeare exploits in Richard III, a play keenly attuned to the questions of consent that surround both devotional and political practice in the public sphere. In Richard III, Shakespeare stages the act of conferring the English kingship not once, but twice. Although the circumstances for these two instances are very different—the first involves the fraudulent “election” of Gloucester, the second, the crowning of the worthy and victorious Richmond—both scenes strikingly, and perhaps unsettlingly, depend for their resolution upon a collective response of “amen.”¹⁰ And if in the first instance, this response, however contrived, ultimately succeeds, in the second instance, “amen” lingers on the stage unanswered. Given the position of Richard III as the play that historically reenacts the origins of the Tudor dynasty, a dynasty whose claims to the English monarchy were hardly unproblematic, the silence with which its characters meet Richmond's repeated requests for “amens” poses a peculiar dilemma.¹¹ For Henry VII's right to the throne to be validated within the play's construction of kingly election, Shakespeare would seem somewhat daringly to require an unscripted, voluntary gesture of either theatrical or devotional assent from the audience: the clapping of hands or the utterance of “amen.” As we shall see, these two modes of communal response are by no means unrelated.

I

What did it mean to utter “amen” in sixteenth-century England? And how was this Hebrew word so effortlessly assimilated into the vernacular tongue? In the state-issued Bibles and Common Prayer Books of the English church, “amen” was one of very few words that resisted translation. Despite the fervor with which Protestants insisted upon rendering the entirety of the Old and New Testaments into English, it seems unlikely that many sixteenth-century Englishmen or women would even have recognized “amen” as originating outside of their native language. Just as the Vulgate treated “amen” as if it were a proper Latin word, so English texts erase all traces of difference when printing this Hebrew term.¹² Even the Bible translated by John Eliot for the native tribes of Massachusetts in the early 1660s retains the use of “amen” rather than attempting to find an approximate term in the Algonquian tongue.¹³ Among Protestant Bibles, only the staunchly Calvinist Geneva Bible draws attention to the foreignness of the word. Most of its Old Testament uses are replaced with the phrase, “so be it”; or in the case of Revelation 3.14—“And unto the Angell of the Church of the Laodiceans, write, These things saieth the Amen, the faithfull and true witnesse, that beginning of the creatures of God”—the editors provide a marginal gloss explaining that “Amen soundeth as much in the Hebrewe tongue as Truely, or Trueth it selfe.”

Derived from the Hebrew three-letter root AMN, which developed into terms such as “Emuna” (faith) “Amin” (reliable), “Amnam” (“really, as I said it”), “amen” can best be translated as an adverbial expression meaning “certainly,” “verily,” or “surely.” In the Hebrew Bible, “amen” was used primarily as what Austin calls an implicit performative, which affirmed a prior utterance.¹⁴ With few exceptions, it is typically spoken by a second party, whether individual or corporate, and not by the speaker of the prayers or injunctions himself; according to the rabbis, the purpose of saying “amen” was not simply to confirm the priestly blessing but to appropriate the blessing as one's own. In several instances in the scriptures, it serves to introduce an individual's answer to the previous speaker, as when the prophet begins his speech in Jeremiah 28.6, “Amen: the LORD do so”; or in I Kings 1.36, “And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada answered the king, and said, Amen: the LORD God of my lord the king say so too.”¹⁵ During the Babylonian Exile and post-Exile period, the term seems to have evolved into a formula of consent in congregational prayer, spoken by the people in response to the petitions of the priests, and the additional words of the answer—“the LORD do so,” “the LORD God … say so”—were generally omitted.¹⁶

The foundational example of this liturgical use surfaces in response to curses, and not to benedictions. In the “Exhortation to Obedience” in Deuteronomy, each of the Levites' curses—“Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image” (27:15); “Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother” (27:16); “Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way” (27:18); and so on—is followed by the injunction: “and all the people shall answere and say, Amen.” The “shall” here has the force of a liturgical imperative, whereby worshipers have no choice but to perform their obedience to the law.¹⁷ According to classical sources, the response of “amen” became so crucial a part of congregational worship that in the large synagogue in Alexandria, where not all members of the congregation could hear when a prayer or blessing had concluded, an official would wave a flag from a platform in the middle of the synagogue in order to signal exactly when “amen” ought to be said.¹⁸

The use of “amen” in liturgical worship was by no means limited to Jewish worship: it was adopted in the Christian church's earliest recorded prayer, in The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.¹⁹ The second-century Roman Justin Martyr describes in his First Apology the role of “amen” at the end of the Eucharist service: “When the bishop has finished the prayers and the thanksgiving service, all the people present conclude with an audible voice, saying Amen.” He then translates the term for those unfamiliar: “Now Amen in the Hebrew tongue is, ‘So it be.’” Justin's emphasis on the congregation's “audible voice” suggests the crucial role that the worshipers played in sealing liturgical texts; later in his account, he explains that after the “bishop, as before, sends up prayers and thanksgivings with all the fervency he is able … the people conclude all with the joyful acclamation of Amen.”²⁰ As is consistent with Austin's account of speech acts, the affirmation itself performs the approval of the individual worshiper, whose word functions as his or her bond.

As an alternative to performing one's approval or appropriation of liturgical prayers with the “joyful acclamation of Amen,” the people may have chosen a parallel response that is also described in the Hebrew Bible: to clap their hands in applause. Hence Psalm 47 begins: “O Clap your hands, all ye people shout unto God with the voice of triumph.”²¹ This notion of applause as a means of expressing gladness surfaces both in images of humans as well as in metaphorical accounts of trees and bodies of water, which are said to celebrate the Lord through clapping their hands. Thus in Isaiah 55.12, the prophet describes a time in which “the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Or in Psalm 98, David enjoins the sea to roar, and the floods to “clap their hands” as signs of “joyful noise before the LORD.”

According to the mid-seventeenth-century chronicler of manual gestures John Bulwer, applause belongs to the category of natural uses of the hands. “To clap the raised hands one against another,” Bulwer explains, “is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased, [an expression] used by all nations. For applause, as it is a vulgar note of encouragement, a sign of rejoicing, and a token and sign of giving praise and allowance doth wholly consist in the hands.” Although in this preliminary definition applause serves simply as an outward “sign” or “token” of an inward act [of rejoicing, assenting, approving], Bulwer explains that it performs a crucial affective function. “This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of the multitude,” he continues, that “when [the people] cannot contain their joy in silence … there is nothing more common with them than by clapping their hands to signify their exceeding joy and gladness of heart.”²² Here applause becomes a means of releasing emotional excess: the clapping does not passively reflect an internal state but actively relieves the overflow of the individual's heart.

Although Bulwer describes the gesture of applause as entirely separate from verbal utterance, in the example that he provides from the Hebrew Bible, clapping is accompanied by vocal confirmation: “When Jehoiadah the priest caused Joash the son of Ahazia to be crowned king and had brought him out and given him the testimony, they made him king and anointed him, and they clapped their hands and said: God save the King” (2 Kings: 11.12).²³ The meaning of this concluding phrase, “God save the King (or Queen)” has been so deeply absorbed into a formulaic greeting that it has lost its original charge. Poised between a shout of affirmation and a prayer, “God save the King” invokes divine sanction for the choice of one's earthly ruler. The force of this declaration as prayer was not lost on Shakespeare, however, who uses it, along with “amen,” as a rhetorical means to sanctify royal power. We might recall, for example, Richard II's lines before handing over his crown—“God save the King! Will no man say amen? / Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, Amen. / God save the King, although I be not he. / And yet Amen, if heaven do think him me” (4.1.163-66). Here the response of “amen” replaces the biblical role of applause as the gesture that would affirm either Bolingbroke's or Richard's right to the throne. In its mingling of applause and prayer, the verse Bulwer cites from 2 Kings also resonates with Prospero's requests in the Epilogue to The Tempest: he asks both that the audience “release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands,” and relieve him “by prayer, which pierces so, that it assaults / Mercy itself and frees all faults” (Epil. 9-10, 16-18).²⁴

The resonances between “amen” and applause connect to wider parallels between the roles of the congregation and the audience in the two preeminent spheres of public performance in early modern England. In the theater and the church, respectively, the immediate success of a play, sermon, or prayer would largely have been determined by the willingness of those in attendance either to affirm or consent to what had transpired. To applaud as a sign of indicating approval in the theater dates back at least to classical drama and seems to have been a deeply habituated, if not, as Bulwer imagines, a “natural” response, to a pleasurable dramatic performance.²⁵ Within the history of the English stage, the role of applause seems to have shifted in the mid-sixteenth century with the opening of commercial playhouses. As Andrew Gurr has explained, the commercial theaters marked the end of a system in which players would have collected payment in a hat following performances in marketplaces or would have made private payment arrangements with an innkeeper for plays done in innyards but would not have received direct and standardized income from the audience. In this earlier system, money combined with applause as the spectators' means to convey their approval or disapproval of the play.²⁶ Once the practice of paying for admission before the performance had been introduced, the acts of judging and paying were permanently severed, and applause became the primary vehicle of response following a theatrical performance. Despite Ben Jonson's comical efforts in the “Induction” to Bartholomew Fair to limit the audience's right to criticize the play based on the relative price of their tickets, playgoers enjoyed the freedom to clap, or hiss, at their discretion.²⁷

In the English Protestant church, the congregation would similarly have been offered the opportunity to respond to the prayers and sermons that were uttered, although in this case their responses were far more prescribed. Many of the prayers in the English liturgy required responsive readings on the part of the congregation, a practice that engaged the worshipers in a manner without precedent in either the Catholic Church or the Elizabethan theater. However, in answer to those prayers that were uttered by the minister alone, as well as in response to sermons or state-issued homilies, the congregation was asked to show its consent not by an act of applause, as they may have done in the early church, but instead by the uniform utterance of “amen.”²⁸ As the minister John Browning contends in his 1636 defense of public prayer: “Every he that is a private man (as in the Church, besides the Ministers, all are) must and ought to set to his Seale, and to subscribe, as it were, making it his owne deed, by his owne Amen.” The analogy of the vocal “amen” to a “Seale,” whereby the utterance pledges the speaker's commitment to the terms of the minister's prayers, suggests the personalization, or privatization, of otherwise collective devotional property: just as the deed transfers the possession of land, so the “amen” appropriates the prayers for individual worshipers. Moreover, Browning continues, the sheer act of affirming the minister's prayers helps stimulate the congregation's devotional fervor: “for hereby (namely by the voice and our outward gestures) we stir up our owne devotions, we drive away drowsinesse and sleepinesse; we rouse up our spirits, we cheere our mindes, we quicken and kindle our zeale.”²⁹ Outward assent becomes not simply a reflection but a vehicle for affective piety.

What underlies Browning's position is the assumption that only those worshipers in possession of inward faith could successfully pledge themselves in external acts of devotion; without the requisite foundation of belief and piety, the individual's outward performance would simply fail to be felicitous. Hence George Downame, in his 1640 Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer, contends that the sinner is physically “not able to utter one word [of the Lord's Prayer] aright”; and Bulwer argues that “hypocrites, entangled in vain cares or wicked cogitations, lie groveling on the earth and by a contradiction of gesture bear witness against themselves.”³⁰ Shakespeare cannily stages these symptoms of sinfulness in act 2 of Macbeth, when Macbeth finds himself incapable of responding “Amen” to the “God bless us” that he overhears as he stands outside the chamber of Duncan's sons. “But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?” the murderous Thane of Cawdor, with Duncan's blood on his hands, anxiously asks his wife, “I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat” (2.2.29-31). Here the speech act misfires not for lack of intention—Macbeth is desperate to possess the prayers as his own—but due to what Austin would explain as “the total situation in which the utterance is issued,” or what Protestants might simply regard as a lack of grace.³¹

At the same time that some churchmen sought to narrow the conditions for a felicitous utterance of “amen,” others feared that once it was dislodged from the throat and released into the world, it might assume real devotional power. Among the vast array of liturgical utterances in the Prayer Book that were imagined to require the worshiper's full participation and consent in order to be devotionally effective, “amen” threatened to be the peculiar exception to the rule. What if, in the manner of Austin's most straightforward performatives, the congregation's utterance of “amen” in the right time and place would indeed send the minister's prayer directly to God? Although the ramifications of disturbing God with hollow prayers were not typically specified, the horror of these speech acts loomed large in the early modern Protestant conscience.

Whereas parishioners in the Catholic Church were expected to issue their “amens” in response to the priest's often inaudible or uncomprehended Latin prayers, Protestant worshipers were instructed to respond to the minister's petitions only when they had fully understood and approved his words. The problems that might arise from the utterance of “amen” without full understanding or assent motivate the late-seventeenth-century preacher Samuel Annesley to encourage his fellow ministers to preach clearly to their congregations, forgoing all “overstudied phrases and singular notions of their own fancies.” “Any unintelligible or doubtful expressions,” he warns, “do but lay a stumbling-block in the way, to hinder the hearers giving readily their AMEN,” whereas plain language based on scripture will more easily reach the people's hearts, and receive their vocal consent. Unless the minister uses all possible “diligence of mind” in forming his petitions, the congregation “cannot consent to every part”: “for a man who is to set his hand and seal to an Indenture, will hear all the conditions, that he may know what he binds himself to; so we, being to seal all the Prayers with our lips and hearts, had need mind what we seal to.”³² Once again, the language of legal contract blurs with the language of liturgical practice: in order to assent to the minister's prayers, the worshiper must be fully familiar with the prayers that the minister offers. Without this depth of understanding, the congregational utterance will lack what Austin describes as the “thoughts and feelings” required for a felicitous performative, and the “amen” will at best be hollow.³³

The danger of this hollow utterance rests less upon the shoulders of the congregation than upon those of the minister. For, Annesley continues, when the worshipers no longer follow the public prayers, they “indulge their thoughts in vanities, [and] like a wanton spaniel from his Master's walk … come in from this false scent to the quest, with full cry, and a dirty AMEN.”³⁴ A “dirty” amen is doubly threatening, we might imagine, because it is presumably indistinguishable from its “clean” alternative: the minister may think he has received corroboration in his prayers, and yet the basis of this support might be fraudulent in ways that lie beyond his perception. Hence the speech act itself seems felicitous: it was spoken by the appropriate people at the appropriate time in the appropriate place, and yet it is fatally unhappy or flawed. Moreover, although the minister cannot easily determine whether the “amens” given to his prayers are wholesome or tainted, the same cannot be said of God. If a unanimous pronunciation of “amen” in good faith carries “an assurance that God will accept our praises, and answer our prayers,” then a hollow performative, a dirty amen, certainly diminishes God's willingness to bend his ear.

II

In the highly corrupt world of Shakespeare's Richard III there are no meaningful distinctions between a clean and a dirty “amen.” Although Richard, Duke of Gloucester, recognizes the political expediency of obtaining the citizens' outward, vocal consent before becoming king, he assigns no significance to their inward disposition toward his rule. “How now, how now!” he addresses Buckingham, who has come from a meeting with the Mayor and people of London, “What say the citizens?” (3.7.1). In response to Buckingham's description of the meager enthusiasm voiced in support of Richard's assumption of the throne—no more than “ten voices cried ‘God save King Richard,’” and those were none other than Buckingham's supporters—Gloucester exclaims with utter disgust: “What tongueless blocks were they! Would they not speak?” (3.7.42-43).

The two eminent theatricalists proceed to stage what is surely the most cynical scene of “election” in Shakespeare's works, a scene whose cynicism depends upon the absolute intertwining of devotional and political fraudulence. Buckingham instructs Gloucester to “get a prayer book in your hand / And stand between two churchmen” (3.7.47-48), a posture that is repeatedly confirmed in the dialogue that follows. First, we are told by Catesby that Richard cannot meet the citizens and Mayor who await him. “He doth entreat your grace, my noble lord / To visit him tomorrow, or next day,” Catesby proclaims to Buckingham, no doubt exceedingly loudly, “He is within with two right reverend fathers / Divinely bent to meditation / And in no worldly suits would he be moved / To draw him from his holy exercise” (3.7.59-64). After urging Catesby to return to Richard and beg once again his presence, Buckingham repeats to the crowd the devout behavior of the duke:

Ah ha! My lord, this prince is not an Edward.
He is not lolling on a lewd day-bed,
But on his knees at meditation;
Not dallying with a brace of courtesans,
But meditating with two deep divines;
Not sleeping to engross his idle body,
But praying to enrich his watchful soul.

(3.7.71-77)

These secondhand descriptions of Richard receive ocular proof when he finally appears on the stage, as promised, between two clergymen, which the Mayor and Buckingham gloss for the crowd as if narrating a royal entry:

MAYOR.
See where his grace stands 'tween two clergymen.
BUCKINGHAM.
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity;
And see, a book of prayer in his hand—
True ornaments to know a holy man.

(3.7.95-99)

Richard now assumes the theatrical role of a resistant heir, piously dismissing Buckingham's offers of the throne on behalf of “all good men of this ungoverned isle” (3.7.110). After a series of these exchanges, culminating in Buckingham's departure from the stage, Richard yields to the request of Catesby and perhaps “another” to recall Buckingham and accept the throne.³⁵ If we follow the Folio version of the play, the scene concludes with “All” asserting their consent to Buckingham's triumphant declaration, a variation on the biblical formula, “God save the King”: “Then I salute you with this royal title: Long live [king] Richard, England's worthy king!” (3.7.230).³⁶ In the first Quarto, the response to Buckingham is made by the Mayor alone, while the citizens remain stonily silent. In both texts, however, the utterance that is used to confer legitimacy upon Richard is the simple, and here unmistakably dirty, term “Amen.”³⁷

Shakespeare's careful attention to the very thin veneer of popular consent that Richard manages to receive follows closely upon his primary source for the play, Thomas More's History of King Richard III.³⁸ More's version of this story recounts an even lengthier series of events staged to authorize Richard's assumption of the throne, and it draws more directly upon the manipulation of religious as well as political performances. The episodes begin with a contrived public sermon at St. Paul's given by the popular preacher Dr. Shaw, whose subject was the illegitimacy of King Edward's two heirs: “Spuria vitulamina non agent radices altas, that is to say bastard slippes shal never take depe roote.” According to Buckingham's instructions, Shaw was to proceed from this condemnation of the little princes as bastards to praise of Gloucester; just as Shaw began his elaborate panegyric, Gloucester was meant to enter the grounds, “to thend that those words meting with his presence, might have been taken among the hearers, as thoughe the holye ghost had put them in the preachers mouth, & should have moved the people even ther, to crie king Richard king Richard, that it might have been after said, that he was specially chosen by god & in maner by miracle.”³⁹

This planned coincidence, as it were, depends for its success upon precise timing, which Shaw and Gloucester spectacularly fail to achieve. For while Gloucester tarried along the way, nervous that he would arrive too early, Shaw for his part feared that the duke would arrive too soon and rushed quickly through the earlier parts of the sermon. The result was that Shaw had long finished his praise of Gloucester and moved onto other matters before Gloucester came, “whom when he beheld coming, he sodainly lefte the matter, with which he was in hand, and without ani deducion thereunto, out of al order, & oute of al frame, began to repete those wordes again: this is the verye noble prince,” etc. Shaw's unfortunate repetition, not surprisingly, stripped his words of their intended effect; behind the botched “miracle” lay only bad theater. Far from crying out “king Richard” as had been hoped, the people “stode as thei had beene turned into stones, for wonder of this shamefull sermon.” So ashamed was Shaw of his performance that “within fewe daies after he withered & consumed away.”⁴⁰

More's fascination with Richard's ascent to the throne turns repeatedly on its shaky foundations in theater. The “mockishe eleccion” that More describes rests upon neither divine nor earthly authorization; there are no signs of the Holy Ghost and no voices of collective human consent. Instead, Richard's coronation results from elaborately crafted, if unconvincing, theatrical performances. For the play they stage does not require more than the passive complicity an audience might give to a performance, the (perhaps) willing suspension of disbelief that need only last until the actors take their final leave.⁴¹ In the second scene of this drama, Buckingham speaks at long length to the people of Richard's virtues and waits expectantly for cries of approval, but he is met only with silence: the people stand “husht and mute” (75). Even those men whom he believed the Mayor had “framed” to cry out “King Richard” seem impervious to the message of his speech. Buckingham eventually turns the podium over to the Mayor himself, who once again entreats the people to answer whether they will have Richard as their king. At this point, the people began to whisper among themselves secretly, in a voice that was neither loud nor distinct, but instead resembled the “sounde of a swarme of bees.” Finally, in the far end of the hall a “bushement,” or secretly concealed group of the duke's servants, begin to cry out, “king Rycharde kinge Rycharde.” In spite of all this, More recounts, “they that stode before, cast back theyr heddes mervailing thereof, but nothing they sayd” (76). Undaunted by this persistence of silence, the Mayor and the duke turn what little they had “to theyr purpose” and invite all present to join them the next day in beseeching Richard to accept the throne.

The final scene in this three-act farce follows a similar pattern of solicitations, silences, and minimal confirmations. After the elaborate rituals of Buckingham's offering the crown to Richard, and Richard's grudging yet dutiful acceptance, there was “a great shout, crying kyng Richarde king Rychard,” upon which “the lordes went up to the kyng (for so was he from that time called) and the people departed” (80). More does not specify here who made the “great shout”; in the preceding scene, he reported that Buckingham had appointed a “bushement” of the duke's men to shout “as lowde as their throtes would gyve” (76) while the rest of the people said nothing. But what matters in the end is not who gave the single cry that served to conclude this particular drama, nor how many of the people this cry legitimately represented. The act of declaring Richard “king,” an act devastatingly reduced by More to a parenthetic observation—“(for so was he from that time called)”—has no claim whatsoever to either mystical power or popular will. The people understand instinctively that what they have seen is no more than a elaborate charade. They depart “marveil[ing] of the maner of this dealing” as if neither Buckingham nor Richard had communicated with one another beforehand, although there was no one so “dull” that he knew not that the matter had been well arranged between them. “Howbeit,” More continues, “somme excused that agayne, and sayde all must be done in good order though. And menne must sommetime for the manner sake not bee a knowen what they knowe” (80).

More invokes two analogies for this act of willful unknowing. First, he compares witnessing the consecration of a bishop, who turns down the office twice before accepting it upon the third offer, as if everyone present were unaware that he had paid for the position in advance. Second, he describes watching a local craftsman perform the role of a sultan in a play. No matter how certain the audience may be that the sultan is none other than their shoemaker, no one would dare interrupt the play to greet this acquaintance or request some new soles. In exactly this manner, More concludes, the people were not actually fooled by the facade of popular consent that authorized Richard's rule but instead said to one another that “these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied upon scafoldes” (81). In the sinister pun on “scafoldes” as gallows and stage platform, More's commoners reveal their political savvy: better to remain silent than to interfere with the treacherous operations of the state. Far from vainly imagining that their voices possess real power, the poor men understood they were “but the lokers on” (81).

I have already suggested how More's account of the people's passive compliance informs Shakespeare's dramatization of this scene. More surprising, however, is the similarly passive role that Shakespeare assigns those who surround the Earl of Richmond when he is given Richard's crown in the final scene of act 5. Here Shakespeare subtly departs from the account provided in Edward Hall's Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (which reprints Hall's account more or less verbatim), which are likely to have been his primary sources for the conclusion of the play.⁴² According to Hall, after the battle at Bosworth Field, the victorious Richmond prays devoutly to God and then ascends to the top of a small mountain, where he thanks his loyal soldiers and promises them ample recompense for their valiant deeds. The people then “rejoysed & clapped handes criyng up to heaven, kyng Henry, kyng Henry.” When Lord Stanley saw the people's joy, here manifested through their applause and shouts, he took Richard's crown, which he found among the spoil in Bosworth Field, and placed it upon Richmond's head, “as though he had byne elected king by the voyce of the people as in auncient tymes past in divers realmes it hath been accustomed.”⁴³ Although the subjunctive construction, “as though he had byne elected king,” underscores the fictional or counterfactual nature of this election—we are well aware that Richmond's claim to the throne does not depend upon the people's cries at this moment, nor does this moment constitute his lawful coronation—the scene nonetheless performs the ritual process of choosing the king according to the people's will.⁴⁴

In Shakespeare's play, there is no popular upswelling of support from the “voyce of the people” which incites Richmond's crowning at Bosworth Field; no citizens clap hands or rejoice, crying out Henry's name. Instead, Stanley delivers the recovered crown on his own initiative, declaring “wear it, enjoy it, and make much of it,” to which Richmond alone replies with a simple request for divine and not human consent: “Great God of heaven, say ‘Amen’ to all.”⁴⁵ Unlike the parallel moment in Henry V, however, the absence of God's response does not provoke the others present to echo the “amen”: the “[divers] other lords” mentioned in the play's stage directions remain strikingly mute.⁴⁶

Given the sources' emphasis on Richmond's enormous support from the men surrounding him, why does Shakespeare deny all voices of consent to his rule save that of his stepfather, Stanley? Why, in other words, is Stanley's gift of the crown not only unprompted but also unanswered by those present on stage? If, as criticism has long maintained, the play is meant to authorize the Tudor state, we might reasonably expect a ritualized undoing and rerighting of the earlier, factitious election of Richard, whereby Richmond's merit would be confirmed by the genuine enthusiasm of his fellow soldiers and lords.⁴⁷ Instead, we find nothing other than an attempt at self-ratification, or a ratification that is only implied rather than felicitously performed. For in order to effect the transfer of power convincingly, the scene would ideally include a performative utterance declaring Richmond as England's new ruler. Instead, Stanley does not address Henry as anything but “my lord” in the lines that follow, and Henry himself asks, but does not receive, confirmation from either the heavens or his fellow men. If no one but Stanley directly affirms Richmond's wearing of the crown, how does the play secure his position as the rightful king?

We are left with two possibilities. First, that the play establishes Richmond's legitimacy by denying its basis in popular support. Unlike Richard, who works tremendously hard to obtain even the appearance of the people's consent as if England were ruled by an elective monarchy, Richmond's claim to the throne is not subject to the voices of the people but rests on God's will alone. In this respect, the play enforces the Elizabethan and Jacobean suspicion of elective monarchy; as the Earl of Salisbury explained to the House of Commons in 1610, “for his kingdom, [King James] was beholden to no elective power, neither doth he depend upon any popular applause.”⁴⁸ Here the gesture of applause directly corresponds to the act of election: both acts become vulgar substitutions for the principle of divine right.

Richmond has been shown, moreover, to have a clear spiritual advantage over Richard in his ability to pray. Whereas Richard's “devotions” earlier in the play were exposed as entirely bankrupt, meant to make a public impression among the people rather than to generate sympathy from God, Richmond engages in a sincere act of prayer unseen by any of his men. In the scene preceding his victory, he beseeches God for his army's protection in an act of private devotion: “O Thou, whose captain I account myself / Look on my forces with a gracious eye. … Sleeping and waking, O defend me still!” (5.5.61-62, 70). This humble act of piety is followed by a strange but powerful form of supernatural confirmation: the appearance of the ghosts of Prince Edward, King Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Gray, Vaughan, the two little princes, Lady Anne, and Buckingham. All express their hopes for Richmond's victory and assure him, as Buckingham's ghost exclaims, that “God and good angels fight on Richmond's side” (5.5.129). Of course, the tainted careers of most of these figures and the uncertain metaphysical status of ghostly apparitions in general hardly instill our confidence in their authority as spokespersons for the divine. However, notwithstanding these ambiguities, the unambiguous fulfillment of Richmond's prayer in his decisive victory conveys what Elizabethan Protestants would certainly recognize as the sign of godly election.

The second possible source for sanctioning Richmond's rule, and one that subtly redeems the power of both popular election and theatrical applause, lies in the role of the audience itself. Here it is useful to recall that Richard III is the only Shakespeare play that ends with an “amen” and that there is no precedent for this term in any of Shakespeare's sources for the battle at Bosworth Field and its aftermath. Why should the felicitous performance of Richmond's “election” turn so heavily upon whether a single liturgical term has been uttered? Perhaps these “amens” speak to the playwright's tremendous ability to feel his way inside, and borrow from, his culture's most conditioned modes of public response. For when Henry concludes with the lines, “Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again / That she may long live here, God say ‘Amen’,” Shakespeare invokes a liturgical context in which many members of his audience, well trained in confirming the prayers issued by their clergy, would have likely been overwhelmed with the impulse to respond “amen” and thereby ratify Richmond's accession to the throne. Indeed, the decision to close the play with the word “amen” may well have been produced out of the impulse, ingrained in Shakespeare as well as in his audience, to effect closure through liturgical reflexes. Hence the playwright ensures that Henry's request will be confirmed, if not from the players on stage, then at least from the crowd in the pit.

III

The audience's hypothetical consent to Henry's rule at the end of Richard III may seem to operate as a ringing endorsement as well as a ritual commemoration of the origins of the Tudor state; the participants in that ritual are joined both to their ancestors and to one another in affirming Richmond's election. And yet, here as elsewhere in the play, Shakespeare remains deeply sensitive to the possible ambiguities of speech acts, the ways in which saying and meaning are not necessarily intertwined. This potential for infelicity arises most interestingly in a short and seldom discussed moment in Henry's final speech, where he requests heaven's blessing—“smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction / That long have frown'd upon their enmity”—and then asks of no one in particular: “What traitor hears me and says not Amen?” Because no provision is made for anyone on stage to answer (the Arden editors, perhaps uncomfortable about this, gloss the unanswered “amen” with a note that “presumably the on-lookers pronounce the word in response” [line 22], although which onlookers—onstage or off—is not specified), Henry continues with his final speech uninterrupted, and the first occasion for an answer arises in the immediate aftermath of the play.

“What traitor hears me and says not Amen?” The question cuts in two ways. On the one hand, and in keeping with the Tudor myth, it suggests that even former traitors will become loyal subjects by the prospect of serving so lawful and just a king. In a manner consistent with both Austin's notion that “our word is our bond” and Richmond's generally unswerving confidence, the sheer fact of a traitor's uttering “amen” ought to be taken as a sincere declaration of renewed conversion to the English state. On the other hand, we find the less cheery possibility that even traitors can and will say “amen,” that our word is not necessarily our bond, that no correspondence necessarily exists between the traitor's affirmation of Richmond's request and his sincere belief in his right to rule. Like the declaration of “amen” by uncomprehending or listless parishioners in the church, or by the disgruntled citizens who witnessed Gloucester's “mockishe eleccion,” the “amens” that may issue forth at the end of the play can hardly be assured to be clean.

But why, we might ask, does it matter whether these “amens” represent an enthusiastic or only halfhearted endorsement of Henry's rule? In the political and devotional world that the play encompasses, what is the purpose of distinguishing between sincere and cynical acts of consent? Certainly in his treatment of Richard, Shakespeare comes close to a Hobbesian disavowal of the necessary correspondence between internal will and external performance. As Hobbes will describe in the Leviathan, all that the ruler demands of his subjects lies in the outward show of obedience. “As for the inward thought, and beleef of men,” he observes, “they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, but of the unrevealed will, and of the power of God; and consequently fall not under obligation.”⁴⁹ So long as the private will remains “unrevealed,” its expression lies beyond the scope of the subject's responsibility to the state. However, in his staging of Richmond's ascent to the throne, Shakespeare seems to solicit a more Austinian response in which verbal acts of consent would correspond to the speaker's inward condition or affect. Unlike the earlier scene with Richard and the citizens, no fraudulent or hollow speech acts are performed at the end of the play, when the silence on stage can be superseded only by the voice of God, to whom Richmond appeals, or by God's earthly substitute, the audience.

At the end of Richard III, Shakespeare makes clear that what potentially confers legitimacy on Richmond, whose historical claims to the throne were by no means self-evident, was precisely what the theater could offer. Although James I might dismiss both the people's “election” and their applause, Henry Tudor could not afford that luxury. Hence Richard III placed the Elizabethan audience in the position of approving the history it witnessed, so that the subjects of Henry VII's granddaughter are mythically imagined to elect the first Tudor king.⁵⁰ And at the same time that the audience's “amens” affirm Richmond's right to the throne, they may also precede, and serve to intensify, the spectators' expression of approval for Shakespeare's own play. As we have seen, Shakespeare was keenly aware of the resonances among religious, secular, and theatrical modes of performing consent, and he knew how to manipulate one form into another to serve his own ends. It is no coincidence that the repeated petitions for sacred consent emerge at the very end of Richard III, when the “amens” for the king and the applause for the play become less easily separable or distinct. As the hands join together in the motion of clapping before separating again, the spectators might realize they have involuntarily assumed the posture of prayer.

Notes

1. This and all subsequent Shakespeare references are to Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

2. Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel's Return from Ireland,” in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3d ed., 2 vols., ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:33.

3. Austin does use this term, but not consistently, in How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmon and Marina Sbisà, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); see, for example, 52.

4. Stanley Fish first raises, only to dismiss, this problem in Austin. See Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism,” in Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 197-245.

5. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 9. See also his discussion of promises in “Other Minds,” reprinted in J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 67-71.

6. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 15.

7. Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,” 203-4.

8. “Amen” functions as an “implicit” performative in that what it assents to or enacts is made explicit antecedently; as I discuss subsequently, it can best be translated as “so be it.” For Austin's discussion of “explicit” versus “implicit” performatives, see How to Do Things with Words, 32-33, and passim.

9. I am thinking here in particular of Fish's problematic characterization of intention as “a matter of what one takes responsibility for by performing certain conventional (speech) acts” (“How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,” 203).

10. It is worth noting that Austin also ignores the category of collective performatives; as he repeats throughout his work, he is interested only in “first person singular present indicative active” verbs (How to Do Things with Words, 5).

11. It was Gloucester as the son of the Duke of York, and not Richmond, from the Welsh family of the Tudors, who had a legitimate claim to the throne. Indeed, the Tudors had only a very weak connection to the house of Lancaster, through the marriage of John of Gaunt. Gaunt had four children with his mistress, whom he later made his third wife and legitimized their (Beaufort) children. The daughter of this marriage, Margaret Beaufort, married Edmund Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, and gave birth to Henry Tudor. For details of this genealogy, see J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors, 1485-1558 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 46-63. Much of the work done by More's History of Richard III, which I discuss later in this essay, was meant to delegitimize Gloucester, a project that was further embraced by the sixteenth-century chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed.

12. Hence “amen” is included, for example, in Richard Mulcaster's “Generall Table” of all English words, where he claims to have “gathered the most of those words, which we commonlie use in our hole speche” (First part of the Elementarie [London, 1582], 163, 172). In his 1598 Italian-English dictionary, John Florio lists “amen” as both an Italian and an English word: the Italian “amen” is translated into the English as “amen, so be it” (A Worlde of Wordes, or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English [London, 1598], 16). Thomas Blount's 1656 dictionary of English “hard words” acknowledges the etymological origins of “amen” in Hebrew but notes that it is now “used in most languages; in Turkey they use (Homin) instead of it” (Glossographia: Or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words … [London, 1656], sig. C4r).

13. John Eliot, trans., The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1663).

14. See note 8.

15. These and all subsequent scriptural references are from the King James Bible.

16. See H. W. Hogg, “‘Amen’: Notes on its significance and use in Biblical and Post-Biblical Times,” Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 9 (London: Macmillan, 1897), 1-23; Haim Gevaryahu, “Amen and Hallelujah: Their Development as Liturgical Responses,” Dor-le-Dor 13, no. 2 (1984-85): 93-97; W. O. E. Oesterley, The Jewish Background of the Christian Liturgy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 70-71.

17. Other examples of collective sanctioning through the utterance of “amen” include: I Chronicles 16.36, “Blessed be the Lord God … and all the people saide, Amen, and praised the Lord”; Nehemiah 5.13, “And all the congregation said, Amen, and praised the Lord”; Nehemiah 8.6, “all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands”; and I Esdras 9.47: “And all the people answered Amen, and lifting up their hands they fell to the ground, & worshipped the Lord.”

18. Oesterley, Jewish Background, 71.

19. Kirsopp Lake, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London and New York: William Heinemann and Macmillan, 1912), 115-17.

20. Justin Martyr, The First Apology of Justin Martyr, Addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius (London: Griffith, Farran, and Co., 1912), 86-87, 93.

21. For the role of applause within the early church, see H. F. Stander, “The Clapping of Hands in the Early Church”, Studia Patristica, vol. 26 (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993), 76. Stander points out that although the early church fathers recognize the possible scriptural bases for clapping, many of them frequently condemn this activity as pagan. Chrysostom in particular argued fervently against applause.

22. John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 34.

23. Ibid.

24. There is a similar moment in the prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen in which an appeal for applause unfolds into an appeal for salvation: “Do but you hold out / Your helping hands and we shall tack about / And something do to save us” (Prol. 25-27). I am indebted to Jeffrey Masten for drawing this to my attention.

25. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, for example, lists “to clap the hands in applause (in requests for applause at the end of a play)” as entry “3b” for “plaudo” and provides citations from Horace and Cicero, among others.

26. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11.

27. For an account of Shakespeare's more subtle attempts to manipulate the “postscriptural future” of his plays, see Robert Weimann, “Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings,” Representations 53 (winter 1996): 1-20.

28. See Stander, “Clapping of Hands.”

29. John Browning, Concerning Publicke-Prayer; And the Fasts of the Church. Six Sermons, or Tractates (London, 1636), 73, 75.

30. George Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer (Cambridge, 1640), 39; Bulwer, Chirologia, 28.

31. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 52.

32. Samuel Annesley, The Proper Use of the Word Amen, abridged from a Sermon of Dr. Samuel Annesley, (Sheffield: J. Crome, 1805), 9. Annesley, a nonconformist preacher expelled from the Church of England in 1662, was the grandfather of John Wesley.

33. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 15; Annesley, Proper Use of Amen, 4.

34. Annesley, Proper Use of Amen, 8.

35. The Folio gives two lines to Catesby: “Call him again, sweet Prince; accept their suit. / If you deny them, all the land will rue it.” In the Quarto text, a version of the second line is assigned to “Another” and reads, “Do, good my Lord, least all the land do rew it.”

36. Here I follow the Folio and depart from the Norton text, which emends “king” to “kind” due to the redundancy of “king” in the Folio's text. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 243.

37. Oliver Arnold acutely observes that the line is restricted to the Mayor in all six of the Quartos for this play (The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater, the House of Commons, and the Ideology of Political Representation [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming]). I am greatly indebted to this study for its rich and original readings of related scenes of election in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.

38. According to Antony Hammond's introduction to the Arden edition of Richard III, Shakespeare is likely to have read More's History in its reprinted form in Hall's chronicle and not in the 1557 edition of More's Works published by William Rastell (King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond [London: Routledge, 1981], 79).

39. Richard S. Sylvester, ed., The History of King Richard III, vol. 2, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 68.

40. Ibid.

41. Of course, within the antitheatrical tradition, the consequences of this passive complicity are considered far more dangerous than they may initially seem. See, for example, Augustine's disciple Salvianus's account of theatrical spectatorship, as translated by the Elizabethan Anthony Munday in his polemical Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres: “Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers. For a man may heare a blasphemer, and not be a partaker of his sacriledge, inasmuch as in minde he dissenteth. And if one come while a roberie is a doing, he is cleere, beccause he abhors the fact. Onlie the filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.” Reprinted in Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 80 n. 1. Page numbers in parentheses in this and subsequent paragraphs refer to Sylvester, History of King Richard III.

42. More's account of Richard's history ends before Richard's death, with the flight of Buckingham; Hall's primary source for the rest of the narrative included in the play was Polydore Vergil's Urbinatis Anglicae Historiae (Basle, 1556).

43. This portion of Hall's chronicle is reprinted in Horace Howard Furness, ed., The Tragedy of Richard the Third, New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908), 499. Holinshed's identical text for this passage can be found in Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (reprint; London: J. Johnson et al., 1808), 3:446. Francis Bacon, in his History of the Reign of King Henry VII, repeats Hall and Holinshed's version of the story, describing the scene as follows: “The King immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused Te Deum Laudamus to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted King” (History of the Reign of King Henry VII and Selected Works, ed. Brian Vickers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 5). Bacon also specifies that the crown Richard wore to battle, and hence the crown Stanley places upon Richmond's head, was only a “crown of ornament” (8).

44. In the anonymous True Tragedie of Richard The Third, an early play that Shakespeare may have seen but for which we have only a contaminated copy, Richmond is “elected” to the throne by the peers in Parliament. According to Lord Stanley, “the Peeres by full consent, in that thou hast freed them from a tyrants yoke, have by election chosen thee as King.” In response to this news, Oxford calls out, “Henry the seventh, by the grace of God, King of England, France, and Lord of Ireland, God save the King,” to which “all” respond, “Long live Henry the seventh, King of England.” Reprinted in Furness, Tragedy of Richard the Third, 546.

45. Although in both the Quarto and Folio Richmond remains “Ri,” “Rich,” or “Richm” throughout the last scene, in the Norton Shakespeare, the speech prefixes shift with these lines from “Henry Earl of Richmond” to “King Henry VII,” an editorial decision that is explained as follows: “QF ‘Richmond’ becomes in our speech-prefixes ‘HENRY EARL OF RICHMOND’ so that in the final scene he can speak, after being crowned, as ‘KING HENRY’” (Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 232). Hence readers of this edition are asked to take Stanley's crowning as authorizing Richmond's rule in a manner that the play does not unambiguously endorse, as I argue here subsequently. Indeed, to the extent that the Quarto and Folio serve as textual “witnesses,” as Jeffrey Masten has wonderfully suggested to me, they seem to resist Richmond's ratification.

46. The Folio reads “divers other lords”; the first Quarto has “other Lords, & c.”

47. According to the so-called Tudor myth, Richard was the scourge of God sent to punish England for dethroning the divinely appointed king, Richard II; the Tudor regime that begins with Henry VII represents the end of this period of violence, with the restoration of God's anointed ruler. The classic account of this position can be found in E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974), which argues that “in Richard III Shakespeare pictures England restored to order through God's grace. … For the purposes of the tetralogy and most obviously for this play Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity” (204).

48. J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 12. I am indebted to Oliver Arnold for this citation.

49. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 500-1.

50. See Joel Altman's brilliant account of similar modes of engagement in Henry V: “‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1991): 1-32.

I am grateful to Oliver Arnold, Stanley Cavell, Sarah Cole, Stephen Greenblatt, Jeffrey Masten, Annabel Patterson, Joseph Roach, Gustavo Secchi, and Gordon Teskey for their immensely helpful responses to this essay. I also wish to thank the Department of English at Princeton University for inviting me to deliver a version of this paper in February 2001.