[In the following essay, Schiffer focuses on Richard III's final soliloquy (V.iii), spoken after he awakens from a sleep disturbed by the visitation of his victims' ghosts. From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the critic compares this soliloquy with Richard's earlier ones, especially the soliloquy at the opening of the play (I.i); he concludes that whereas the first demonstrates Richard's remarkable confidence and single-mindedness of purpose, the final soliloquy reveals an incoherent, fragmented self.]

Who, if not us, will question once more the objective status of this “I,” which a historical evolution peculiar to our culture tends to confuse with the subject? … An impossible mirage in linguistic forms … in which the subject appears fundamentally in the position of being determinant or instrumental of action.

—Jacques Lacan (Écrits 23)

I'll be at charges for a lookinglass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body.
Since I am crept in favor with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.

—Richard III (I. ii. 258-62)

For almost every critic who has exulted in the opening speech of Richard III, there are those who have descanted on the deformity of Richard's nightmare soliloquy in V. iii. One problem these critics point to is the improbability of the remorseless Richard of the earlier acts (or, for that matter, of the Richard later in the same scene) suffering from a bad conscience just because he is visited by eleven vengeful ghosts. A second problem is the rough-hewn quality of the speech itself. Pounding both drums, E. E. Stoll points out that Richard's remorse on the eve before battle is not only unrealistic but is also “crudely and ambiguously represented” (347). Wilbur Sanders has written that the soliloquy is “exceedingly wildly aimed, and, in any case, too clumsy a blunderbuss to do more than disintegrate the object of its activity” (106-07). Although sympathetic to Shakespeare's dilemma at this point in the play (whether to expand Richard's “punch self” or else fail to explore moral issues raised by the action), Sanders finds “something more than faintly comic” about Richard's “antithetical warring selves.” Richard, he observes, “simply hops like a flea from one antithesis to another” (107).

Not every critic has taken such a harsh view of the final speech, but those who appreciate its frenetic movements are in the minority. Peter Milward calls it “[t]he most interesting … of all [Richard's] soliloquies. … For a brief moment [Richard's] mask is removed and we can see him as a man, endowed with a conscience. He can even speak with himself, and answer himself, revealing more selves in himself than the evil self he has hitherto shown. … What he now utters in soliloquy is at last deeply human, as, prompted by his conscience, he realizes his loneliness, his guilt, and his need of love and pity. His very sentences are short and broken, as though reflecting a broken heart” (10-11). Wolfgang Clemen writes that “It is an astonishing piece of self-revelation, second in importance only to the opening soliloquy from which it differs in every way. … [Richard] appears … to express thoughts emanating from different levels of consciousness. In a relatively short passage a psychological drama of great immediacy is enacted” (Shakespeare's Soliloquies 20). Meanwhile, in his stage history of Richard III, Scott Colley regards lines in the final soliloquy as “among the most powerful of the many words spoken in Shakespeare's play. … The fractured syntax, the starts and stops, the assertions and denials, all represent a dramatic voice not previously heard in the play. Richard has shown brilliant mastery of language throughout the tragedy, but here for the first time, something distorted in the inner man emerges in his troubled, syncopated speech. It is an extraordinary moment in the play—almost electric in effect—all the more striking because the audience has not encountered such rhythms” (30-31).

From an actor's or a director's point of view, the final soliloquy has often seemed a nightmare, a sorry decline from the dramaturgically sophisticated coup de theatre that opens the play. In his famous film version of Richard III, for example, Laurence Olivier preserves only the fact of Richard's waking in sweaty terror and shouting: “Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! / Have mercy, Jesu!” Here as elsewhere in the film Olivier follows the lead of eighteenth century adapter-director Colley Cibber: “Cibber cut the number of ghosts from eleven to four, and did not allow them to address Richmond. He realized, as later directors have, that the ghost scene is one of the more difficult in the play to bring off” (Colley 7). According to Colley, “Cibber apparently could not stomach the shocking change in Richard's diction and character. … Four straightforward lines replace Shakespeare's two dozen,” including the famous addition: “Conscience avaunt; Richard's himself again!” (31). Cibber's changes have had a long influence: “most of the important Shakespearean Richards of the nineteenth century—Phelps, Irving, Edwin Booth, Calvert, and Benson—cut Richard's awakening speech nearly to the length of Cibber's, and removed Richard's most tortured expressions of self-hatred and remorse (that is, lines 188-92 and 202-03)” (32).

Olivier's cuts may not reflect a harsh judgment of the speech so much as an attempt to save time and money, to compensate for tampering (mainly by addition) with Shakespeare's opening. Not every production, of course, cuts the last soliloquy. And it is even possible to turn the speech into exciting theater. In her TLS review of the 1989 Clifford Williams's production at the Phoenix Theatre in London, Julie Hankey writes: “[Derek] Jacobi's nightmare speech is a tour de force, delirious with panic, and ending finally in weak, mad laughter” (111). After observing that the scene has “provided a particular challenge for great actors” (22), Clemen notes that William Hogarth's portrait of David Garrick as “Richard ‘starting from his dream,’ … has been called ‘probably the greatest theatre portrait painted in England’” (22). Clemen goes on to say that in “recent productions this soliloquy has also been turned to account in indicating a schizophrenic state of mind, or megalomania. Ian Richardson, after playing the part at Stratford, remarked in an interview: ‘When it comes to that last soliloquy you realize that he is no longer talking to the audience but to this schizoid person, this alter ego, and you trace back through the script to find where this began to happen and when he started shutting out the audience from his confidence. You find it—and this shows Shakespeare's remarkable insight—from the moment the crown is on his head’” (23). Colley notes that “[a]udiences schooled by Freudian and other psychological characterizations in novels and plays have seemed better able to accept Shakespeare's writing of Richard's soliloquy than have earlier playgoers” (32).

One could argue that the falling off in the quality of Richard's language and the near-complete disjuncture from Richard's former self are what the last soliloquy is designed to convey. Such a reading, no doubt, will sound like another attempt to defend “bad Shakespeare,” to rationalize the errors of a young dramatist who perhaps “has bitten off more than he can chew” (Sanders 107). Possibly so. But there is also no denying that the qualitative decline from first to last soliloquy fits very neatly into the play's mirror structure of parallelism and contrast, whereby Richard's rise is balanced against his fall, his crimes against his punishment, the first three acts against the last two; and these movements are paralleled by our initial, ambivalent attraction to Richard and our eventual, ambivalent revulsion from him. Once Richard gains the crown at the end of act three, his efficacy and his appeal as a sportive villain decline significantly (efficacy and appeal are, of course, closely related). Instead of the subtle Richard of the first three acts who with consummate skill divides and conquers the court of England, who operates brilliantly against the foolish and the guilty, we have the heavy-handed, paranoiac king of act four who tells Buckingham (referring to the innocent princes) that he wishes “the bastards dead” (IV.ii. 18). Instead of Richard's bold, preposterous, successful wooing of the Lady Anne in I. ii, we have Richard's very similar, but much lengthier—and ultimately unsuccessful—wooing of Queen Elizabeth for her daughter's hand in IV. iv. (The latter scene inevitably reminds us of the earlier wooing. Elizabeth may appear to cave in, prompting Richard to call her a “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman” [IV. iv. 431], but we learn in the next scene that “the Queen hath heartily consented” that Richmond “should espouse Elizabeth her daughter” [IV.v. 7-8].) Instead of the confident Richard of act one who cannot wait to have “the world … to bustle in” (I. i. 152), we get the Richard who concedes in act five that he has “not that alacrity of spirit / Nor cheer of mind” that he “was wont to have” (V. iii. 73-74). Given all this evidence of decline, it should not surprise us that Richard's final soliloquy lacks the rhetorical sparkle of his first, or that we are reminded of Richard's initially spirited villainy even as we witness his suffering, however clumsy the depiction, through a night of fear and trembling.

The crudity of its rendering notwithstanding, the final soliloquy is quite fascinating from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The speech, especially as it stands in relation to the first soliloquy, seems to illustrate with great clarity many of Lacan's ideas about the formation and disintegration of a subject's identity: the theory of the mirror stage, the subject's illusion of autonomous, unified selfhood; the aggressiveness that underlies and protects this illusion; the often inevitable fragmentation, especially in dreams, of the subject's fiction of a coherent, unified, essential self—what Lacan calls the retrospective fantasy of the corps morcelé (“the body in bits and pieces”), and the notions that “the unconscious is the discourse of the other” and that psychosis is the uncontrollable resounding of such discourse in the subject's conscious mind.¹

In light of Lacanian theory, one might be tempted to say that in the first soliloquy we actually witness Richard in the process of fashioning an identity for himself, creating himself through language, but in fact, this self-fashioning has already taken place. (See Pearlman, Adelman 1-10, Garber 28-51, and Neill 103-114.) The crucial moment of self-fashioning occurs in Richard's soliloquy in III. ii of Henry VI, Part III, where Richard spends comparatively more lines than he does in Richard III weighing the prospect of becoming a lover:

Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,
And deck my body in gay ornaments,
And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.

(146-50)

But Richard quickly rejects this option because of his deformed body:

O miserable thought, and more unlikely
Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!
Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb;
And for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub,
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size,
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear-whelp
That carries no impression like the dam.
.....I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,
And, whiles I live, t' account this world but hell,
Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head
Be round impalèd with a glorious crown.

(151-62; 168-71)

Although the speech suggests internal division within Richard, most of the lines, as well as those in Richard's later soliloquy in V. vi, are expository rather than exploratory and dramatic. Richard is not here in the process of discovering what he thinks; rather, he seems to report his already formed thoughts to the audience.

In the first soliloquy of Richard III, Richard presents the finished, monstrous product of his self-fashioning to our fascinated gaze:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophesies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other[.]

(I. i. 28-35)

There is little or no soul-searching here, even less than in Richard's soliloquies in Henry VI, Part III. We might even say that there is no soliloquy here, at least not in the sense that we normally use the term, for Richard does not regard himself as alone. Instead, as the theatrical tradition goes, he addresses himself directly to the audience in the manner of a Vice from the medieval drama. [See Robert Weimann's distinction between platea and locus (73-85)! Also J. L. Styan: “Richard is not a character communing with himself; no accidental disclosure of a secret lies in the text: The speech is an unashamed address to the audience” (168).] And by addressing us, he draws us into collusion with him in his quest for the crown and makes us a character in the play. We share the dangerous, ironic, erotic knowledge of his villainous plots, just as we share his contempt for the now effete court of England:

Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

(I. i. 6-13)

[What do I mean by “we”? Not everyone has responded or will respond positively—or even ambivalently—to aspects of Richard's villainous self-presentation. Many people I know would prefer the “lascivious pleasing of a lute” to “grim-visaged war” any day! Different viewers respond differently to such things as Richard's deformed body (which varies in emphasis from production to production), his misogyny, and his apparent lack of remorse about lying, treason, and murder. Such variations in response from one person to another exist both within and across historical periods. Watch how I speak of “we” and “us.” Watch how you use Lacan, Freud, and others to construct a universal audience's “unitary reaction.” The universal audience with its unitary response is as much a myth as is the unified self, or for that matter, the unitary Early Modern response or self.]

The anaphoric use of “our” has the primary meaning here of “those of the house of York” and perhaps also of the royal “we” applied solely to Richard, but Richard's (and Shakespeare's?) rhetorical motive here is to bind us to the protagonist within the force field of the first person plural, even as what Richard describes is the peace-time dismembering of the body politic (“Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments”).

[Note the different, but interesting and equally valid way Clemen reads this: “The second section of the soliloquy opens with Richard's But I, which stresses his isolation while it detaches him from the our which had linked the earlier lines on conditions at court and in the country” (Commentary 4). Part of Richard's appeal for us is his posture as the lone individual fighting for the crown against incredible odds.]

Furthermore, Richard has deftly suggested the deterioration of the military virtues of the nation into the vices of self-indulgence and venality. Later phrasings in the speech such as “this weak piping time of peace” (24), “these fair well-spoken days” (29), and “the idle pleasures of these days” (31) have the additional function of suggesting their opposite in the character of Richard, who is strong rather than “weak,” who acts rather than is “well-spoken,” and who pursues power rather than these “idle pleasures.” Given such a choice, we—or at least most of us, or rather, a great part of most of us—side with Richard. In the fantasy image of Richard's wholeness, the desire for our own psychic wholeness is rekindled. In Lacanian terms, Richard is the illusory unified self in the mirror. This is not to say that the spectacle of his wholeness makes most members of the audience feel whole; on the contrary, Richard's attractive single-mindedness divides and complicates our overall response.

[Lacan writes: “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place within the subject when he assumes an image” (Écrits 2).

“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. …

“This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions” (Écrits 4).

Garber quotes Lacan on the mirror stage after asserting that “The natal circumstances and intrapsychic discourse of Shakespeare's Richard, who ironically resolves, despite his initial disclaimers, to ‘court an amorous looking-glass’ (I. i. 15; I. ii. 255; I. ii. 262) uncannily anticipate the language of Jacques Lacan's description of the mirror stage” (34-35). Garber sees Richard as Lacan's child, identifying with the wholeness of its image in the mirror. While not disagreeing with that claim, I also see the audience as Lacan's child, taking scopic pleasure in the fantastic image of an undivided Richard on stage.]

Our initial collusion with Richard is not, of course, an undivided experience. The schisms he creates in his family and in the English court have their parallel motions in our responses. Such splitting repeats itself in many guises throughout the play, a notable example being the debate about conscience between the first and second murderers in I. vi:

SECOND Murderer.
Look behind you, my lord.
FIRST Murderer.
Take that, and that! (Stabs [Clarence].) If all this will not do,
I'll drown you in the malmsey butt within.
Exit [with the body]
SECOND Murderer.
A bloody deed, and desperately dispatched!
How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands
Of this most grievous murder!
Enter First Murderer
FIRST Murderer.
How now? What mean'st thou that thou help'st me not?
By heaven, the Duke shall know how slack you have been.
SECOND Murderer.
I would he knew that I had saved his brother!
Take thou the fee, and tell him what I say,
For I repent me that the Duke is slain.
Exit
FIRST Murderer.
So do not I. Go, coward as thou art.

(271-82)

Yes, we (most of us) still have judgment here, still have strong moral reservations against crimes like fratricide. Therefore, our moral fibers recoil as Richard dubs himself a villain, commissions the death of his brother Clarence, and brags of being “subtle, false, and treacherous” (I. i. 37). But that which repels our moral sensibilities attracts other parts of us.

For one thing, there's the aesthetic appeal, our interest in how Richard will succeed against such incredible odds. Furthermore, most of us enjoy his witty candor, his eloquent sarcasm. Despite our moral reservations, we find his unabashed effort to satisfy his own desires refreshing, perhaps because we are unwilling or unable to pursue (or even admit to possessing) such desires ourselves. In other words, our partial attraction to Richard is a positive response to his own response to temptation: he yields with a purity of purpose and preternatural vitality that are uncompromised by fear of consequence or the inhibitions of morality. Such freedom from conscience makes Richard a fantasy figure, someone exempt from all the rules, a character undivided against himself. [Norman Holland notes that Freud locates the source of Richard's appeal in Richard's tendency (because of his physical deformity) to make himself an exception “to the ordinary rules of life” (Holland 71).]² [Although I think she underestimates the degree to which we are implicated in Richard's villainy, Katherine Eisaman Maus provocatively notes our “delight” in being able to discern Richard's real “intentions,” which are kept hidden from his victims. Maus observes that in Richard III “Shakespeare puts us not only on God's side but in God's place, in the position of ‘the high all-seer’ in the providential drama of history” (54).]

Well! (as Lacan would say). We have quite another story in the final soliloquy. For one thing, except for the apostrophe to “Jesu,” Richard speaks to himself, but shows no awareness of an audience in the theater:

What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.

(V. iii. 182-83)

There is a sense in which this speech is no more a soliloquy than the first one, since Richard is no more alone here than before—but here his companions are not members of the audience but rather his several selves. (There is also the presence on stage of the sleeping Richmond, but in so far as Richard is the only awake and speaking body, the speech remains a soliloquy.) A better description than “soliloquy” might be “colloquy with his several selves.” Indeed the notion of there being a single, unified Richard, represented by an “I,” is exactly what the speech exposes as an illusion. To speak to oneself at all is to give the lie to the idea of an “I” that somehow adequately represents the totality of the subject:

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale.
And every tale condemns me for a villain

(V. iii. 184-195)

One speaks to oneself in the gap, in the absence of understanding, of mutual knowledge. If there were unity, if the “I” already knew what the “I” was going to say (and here I refer to silently thinking as well as to speaking aloud to oneself), there would be no reason to think or say it. To speak to oneself at all—or for that matter, to have most thoughts—is to acknowledge the differing constituencies within, as well as the lack of accord between them.

In “Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies,” James Hirsh accuses critics of “projecting the interior monologue onto preneoclassical drama either by simply ignoring the plentiful evidence that pre-neoclassical soliloquies represented speech acts—the outward behavior of characters—or by applying a muddled and demonstrably anachronistic principle whereby the very same words could simultaneously represent both outward behavior and thought” (1). It is actually Hirsh who is muddled here in creating a false polarity between speech acts and thoughts. Yes, Richard III speaks aloud after the ghostly visitation in V. iii, and in that sense his words constitute a speech act, but his words also represent Richard's thoughts, his interior selves, his internal division. Hirsh oversimplifies the history of the interiority of the Western subject by dogmatically asserting (citing Francis Barker) that before the late seventeenth century in England there was no essentialist “metaphysics of interiority” (the phrase is Barker's; see David Aers for a refutation of this claim; Aers offers ample evidence of self-reflexive subjectivity and interiority in medieval England). Even if one grants that some soliloquies are dramatized as being overheard by other on-stage auditors and that other speeches are in fact feigned soliloquies, one still must acknowledge that not all soliloquies are overheard or feigned. Hirsh fails to account for what is going on when a character who is genuinely alone on stage speaks and is clearly not overheard by any other character (Hamlet's soliloquy in II. ii of Hamlet, which begins “Now I am alone”)—or when a character utters an aside, as in Macbeth's “This supernatural soliciting” speech in I. iii. Harry Berger Jr.'s concept of “auditory voyeurism” seems appropriate here (see, for example, pp. 74, 93, and especially 102: “Just as there is an element of dialogue in soliloquy, so there must be an element of soliloquy in dialogical speech events”): Richard is audience for his own soliloquizing speech act; he says what he says to discover what he thinks (as Joan Didion has written that she writes to find out what she is thinking).

It is important not to confuse the concept of interiority with notions of a unified, coherent self. A subject's experience of interiority will often seem disrupted, fragmented, incoherent. Hence, our desire that characters and the works in which they appear “add up” as “complete wholes.” Also our desire and expectation for critical discourse, despite the loose ends and contradictions that many critical readings seek to smooth over or conceal. To find a form that can register without falsifying unresolved conflicts of interpretation, differences in critical approach or emphasis, thought, tone, and mood—differences major or minor, subtle or extreme. An approach that resists the totalizing “right reading” that resolves all ambiguities, that resists the posture of the critic as Lacan's “subject supposed to know.” To resist the semiotics of the polished essay, the single voice, that comes to stand in for the multivalence of critical consciousness and audience response. The voices that are silenced in the name of hermeneutical consistency.

Throughout Richard's last soliloquy there are distorted echoes of the first one, echoes which perhaps are there to remind us of how great a falling off has occurred. Perhaps no echo is more striking than the repeated use of “I” in both speeches, yet the meaning and effect of this repetitive usage could not be more radically opposed. In the first soliloquy, the nine vocalizations of “I” work toward the construction of Richard as a character of preternatural confidence, coherence, and purity of purpose; in the last soliloquy, the fifteen soundings of “I” register a night-marish splintering of self. In the first soliloquy, Richard repudiates the role of lover and embraces that of villain; it is as a villain, after all, that he initially achieves a measure of self-love (and wins our fascinated attention as well). His sardonic words after successfully wooing Lady Anne (“I'll be at charges for a looking glass,” etc. [I. ii. 258]) do not indicate a change of heart, a revelation that he can indeed be a lover despite his physical deformities, though he has just demonstrated that he could be. Instead, he speaks as a scheming villain, contemptuous both of Anne and of romantic love. However, the expression of self-love at the end of I. ii seems genuine: Richard loves himself because he is a villain. In the final soliloquy, however, Richard's villainy is what prevents self-love. The conscience that he has repudiated throughout the play—and will again repudiate later in the same scene (“Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe” [309-10])—has unaccountably become internalized, speaking potently with “a thousand several tongues.” [Writing in 1975, Michael Neill draws upon R. D. Laing's The Divided Self and Self and Others to explain the emptiness at Richard's core. According to Neill, “Richard, the chameleon actor who has created himself only in his fleeting changes, can locate no stable self to love, no self solid enough to be loved” (124).]

And what is our response to the spectacle of Richard's fragmentation? If our initial response to Richard's undivided villainy is to experience an ambivalent split between disapproval and chuckling admiration, do we regain our unity of self (that is, for most of us, the illusion of a unified self) as we watch Richard fall apart? Certainly, Richard's internal suffering provides us our moment of moral satisfaction, a satisfaction enhanced to the degree that we formerly enjoyed his villainous escapades (see Richard L. Levin's chapter on Richard III). And perhaps we (or at least the original Elizabethan audience) are also reassured that God is in his heaven after all. God may sleep for a while, his vengeance may be delayed, but not forever. Yet along with our punitive satisfaction, our rediscovered moral superiority, our sigh of relief that while Richard is punished, we escape and survive; an undercurrent of pity is generated by the scene. The very way the ghosts gang up on Richard while at the same time they bless Richmond perhaps rekindles our sympathy for the underdog. Yet why should we pity Richard? He feels no pity for others, not even for himself:

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die, no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(V. iii. 200-03)

For this reason he should be pitied all the more. We pity him—or at least feel fear—because in his self-divisions, his “thousand several tongues,” his lost paradise of unity, Richard becomes one like ourselves, a cacophony of rival discourses, a mutinous army hiding behind the mirror of the illusory “I.” Aristotle and Lacan embrace. Richard's nightmare disintegration is the splintered glass wherein we glimpse the truth of our own fictive selves, see through the illusion that we are unified and coherent, contained by and within our bodies, from one moment to the next to the next until the end of consciousness. We see in Richard the terrible dreams that shake us nightly. Initially we were captivated by our sense of Richard's powerful agency, that he is “determinèd to prove a villain”; now in the final soliloquy we hear “determinèd to prove a villain” in an entirely different way: Richard has been “determinèd” by Shakespeare, by the propagandistic Tudor historians upon whom Shakespeare relied, and by their version of a God who would shape a Richard to be his scourge. Richard's agency was just an illusion, and we feel comfort that the final joke, the last laugh, is on this most viciously jocular of villains. [Yet as Betty A. Schellenberg observes, “To the end, Richard refuses to accept the paradigm of Margaret's curses with its underlying suggestion that he might be the duped instrument of a retributive God. Thus in his final despairing soliloquy he turns not against God, but against himself as the author of his own destiny” (66).] [Garber on how Richard's “misshaped” body is the result of the deformations of the Tudor historians: “Richard's deformity, itself transmitted not genetically but generically through both historiography and dramaturgy, becomes the psychological and dramatic focus of the play's dynamic” (36).] [Maus writes: “The epistemological self-assurance of Richard III is its ultimate fiction, its most effective seduction scene” (54). See also Neill: “If the conclusion of Richard III has a weakness, it is not in the dramaturgy of Richard's moral collapse but in the dramatist's moralization of his fall” (126).]

Wilbur Sanders dismissively—and wittily—states that the nightmare speech bears no relation to the “mature Shakespearean soliloquy of introspection, unless it be the relation of parody” (106). And perhaps what he implies about the quality of the speech is true. Still, I would contend that Richard's progression from apparent psychic wholeness to disintegration points the direction that many of Shakespeare's later plays, especially the tragedies, will follow. And in these plays, especially (though not exclusively) in many of their soliloquies, it is hard not to hear echoes of Richard's final attempt to talk to himself, to find himself, to recreate himself through language. We can hear the echoes in the sound and fury of Lady Macbeth's somnambulistic babble. We can hear them as well in Hamlet's demand to know “Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? / Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face? / Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' the throat / As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?” (II. ii. 572-75). Or in the broken syntax of Othello's “or for I am declined / Into the vale of years—yet that's not much—/ She's gone” (III. iii. 281-83), and in his relived vengeance against a “malignant and a turbaned Turk,” a “circumcisèd dog” (V. ii. 363, 365).

If we listen, we can hear Richard III's final soliloquy in Richard II's deposition scene when the defeated king looks at his image in the glass and anatomizes the disjuncture between his still untroubled face and his internal fragmentation:

Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
                              [He takes the mirror.]
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Is this the face which faced so many follies,
That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face—
As brittle as the glory is the face,
                                        [He throws down the mirror.]
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.

(R2, IV. i. 277-90)

If we listen, we can also hear Richard III's nightmare of multiplicity in Richard II's last and most brilliant meditation:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(R2, V. v. 31-41)

If we listen, we will hear Richard III's last soliloquy in a number of Shakespeare's later great tragic speeches as well. We may even hear it, if we listen carefully, in our own silent misunderstandings with ourselves … till we be eased with being nothing.

Notes

1. My main borrowing from Lacan is his attack (which is more or less continuous throughout his writings) on the notion of a unified subject. For specific readings, see Écrits (especially “The Mirror Stage,” “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” and “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis”; this last essay is also published as “The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis” with commentary by translator-editor Anthony Wilden in The Language of the Self) and Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

2. Freud's discussion of Richard's first soliloquy appears in his essay “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (313-15).

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