*What follows is a mixture of what I said in class and additional material that I either left out for lack of time or thought of later.
Introducing the History Play Genre
Most of Shakespeare’s history plays, aside from King John and Henry VIII, can be divided into two tetralogies or sets of four plays:
The major tetralogy consists of Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. This takes us from Richard II’s reign through Henry Bolinbroke’s usurpation, and finally to the exploits of Henry V, victor of Agincourt in 1415. But Henry V died of dysentery in 1422, which leads us to the minor tetralogy:
The minor tetralogy consists of 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI and Richard III. In 3 Henry VI, Shakespeare takes us up to 1471 when the Yorkist Edward IV, having defeated Henry VI, is back in power: “Once more we sit in England’s royal throne, / Repurchased with the blood of enemies” (Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. Histories 295, 5.7.1-2).
This minor tetralogy deals with the frustrated promise of Henry VI’s reign, which saw the loss of the French lands that his father won; intense domestic fighting during the Wars of the Roses; and the short-lived victory of Richard III, who in turn was defeated by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond.
At the beginning of Richard III, we see the Yorkist royalscelebrating the victory of Edward IV over the Lancastrian Henry VI. The story arc reads as accurate, though there’s much telescoping of events: It’s 1471 or near that time when the play begins, and right away, Richard is plotting the downfall of his brother George, Duke of Clarence. (The real person was executed by order Edward IV in 1478.)
Then Richard is on to courting Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker and very recent wife of Edward, Prince of Wales, Henry VI’s son. This courtship did happen quite close to the time that the Prince of Wales and his father the king were killed (spring 1471), for Richard married Anne in or near the spring of 1472. But it wasn’t so obscenely close as in the play.
By Act 2, Scene 1, King Edward IV is gasping for breath, driven to his last illness at the news of Clarence’s death. But Edward actually died in 1483, so we’re dealing with drama-induced alteration of the timeline. And by the way, Anne died on March 16, 1485, towards the end of Richard’s reign. Buckingham rebelled in November 1483, not at the time of Henry Tudor’s 1485 rebellion and landing in Milford Haven, Wales.
These minor inaccuracies reinforce the tumultuous nature and breathtaking shortness of Richard III’s reign: no sooner did he gain the throne than his enemies began to scheme. He never had time to enjoy his ill-gotten power, but was immediately thrown into the maelstrom by his need to preserve what he had won. As Macbeth says to Lady Macbeth, “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus.”
Some discussion questions to consider as we explore Richard III
What allows Richard of Gloucester to succeed in his wicked designs, aside from his own cleverness and audacity?
What do the common people seem to know, or not to know, about what’s really going on? How accurate do their opinions seem to be?
When we consider that Shakespeare treats English history loosely, what is he really concentrating on, what does he achieve, when he ‘does history’ through drama?
What can we learn today (about politics, history, human nature, etc.) from Richard III?
Act 1
Establishing Characters and Action
Shakespeare establishes Richard’s psyche through soliloquy. What “devils” drive him? Richard sets up his own rise by exploiting old resentments and present gullibility. Today, we would call him a sociopath. Still, while he may seem to have no conscience, that may not be entirely the case since, as we find out late in the play when he has a terrible dream that unnerves him. Richard’s mind is structured by the Church’s teachings; he is a medieval man, not a postmodern nihilist.
Richard may be a psychopath, depending on how one defines that term. Here’s an interesting March 2022 article by Tori DeAngelis in the APA’s Monitor on Psychology blog: A broader view of psychopathy, which characterizes psychopathy (which is not listed as a “diagnostic category” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-V) as a “spectrum-based disorder” in much the same way as there is a spectrum for autistic traits and behavior, and perhaps for certain personality disorders. And there’s more to it than lack of empathy—there’s risk-taking or disinhibition, extremely high self-regard or grandiosity, and so forth. (Dr. Chris Patrick’s work in the field, as referenced in the article, sounds very interesting.)
**Scene 1 – Richard’s twisted outsider soliloquy and betrayal of Clarence.
Opening soliloquy: Richard has no depth of soul, no “interiority,” but he’s a master strategist and tactician, a Machiavellian. He knows he is barred from really being part of Yorkist happiness, so his decreative impulse takes over. Richard is bitter, resentful of Edward IV’s charm and potency. And why was that side-switcher Clarence ever in Edward’s good graces?
**Scene 2 – The courtship pitch.
Was ever woman in such humor woo’d/won? Yes. The elements of Richard’s pitch are these:
1. Petrarchan poetics. Richard plays the plaintive lover, claims he loves Anne beyond measure.
2. Protection offer. He says he can give Anne “a better husband.” She is an aristocratic pawn.
3. Exploitation of Anne with specious logic and slick rhetoric: “take up the blade again, or take up me.” Or “Bid me do it and I will kill myself.”
Richard is surprised at the success of his pitch, so he opts for a full-court press. He’ll hire tailors, surround himself with mirrors, and imitate the fashionable set. He will use their “sunlight” to spread his own shadow. Underneath it all, at least to him, is the sentiment, “How can Anne and the others be so shallow, so stupid?” Richard and Groucho Marx might agree on one thing: they have qualms about joining a club that would have them as a member.
From Anne’s perspective, might we see this differently? Is the daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker really as naïve and emotion-driven as Richard supposes? The courtship’s brevity is exaggerated, and it’s shocking that she takes his ring. But she understands that a woman in this environment is a pawn, and she must find a powerful man to protect her. Richard makes an offer, and she accepts it no matter how disgusted she is by the arrangement.
Finally, it’s clear that Shakespeare is stepping out to us through his character Richard and saying, “Can you believe I pulled this crazy scene off?” This is one of the most “metadramatic” scenes in Shakespeare—we are made aware that the whole scene is a wildly transgressive sin against basic plausibility, yet it works.
Scene 3 – The Wars of the Roses in Miniature.
A Yorkist internal fight is interrupted by Richard. Elizabeth feels flouted, disrespected, and Richard reminds her why. Then in steps former Queen Margaret, Henry VI’s widow, who rages about her losses and curses everyone around her.
In soliloquy, Richard boasts about his skillful stirring-up of old hatreds into present quarrels. He is lighting a dumpster fire so he can manipulate others and make his way up the ladder.
**Scene 4 – Clarence’s strange medieval dream and final disillusionment.
Clarence’s dream has a medieval quality: he had thought to escape the Wars of the Roses and sail away to France, but Richard knocks him overboard and he drowns. Still, his conscience can’t escape from the turmoil he has been part of, and it inflicts eerie torments upon him.
The executioners promptly strip Clarence of any illusions about his own guilt or his brother’s feelings for him: true, he’s cruelly deceived, but he is also a terrible person. Richard has commissioned his murder. His fall to the bottom of Fortune’s Wheel is into a barrel of wine.
On the medieval quality of much of this play: notice the torments of conscience; the way key characters tumble from the height of Fortune’s Wheel and pronounce, like Hastings and Buckingham, a sentence on themselves from an “end things” or eschatological perspective; the consequences and horror of disloyalty.
Dante’s Inferno emphasizes the unacceptable quality of such dishonesty: Caesar’s killers Brutus and Cassius and Judas the betrayer of Christ are at the very bottom of Hell, being perpetually gnawed upon by Satan: you can’t be anything worse than “a traitor to your lord.” That’s the key to feudalism’s hierarchical social and political value system.
One question that arises from the beginning of the play is how Shakespeare maintains drama in the sense of interest and tension even though there’s not much that’s surprising—Richard tells us what he’s up to quite frequently.
One thing is the novel manner in which he represents some events, such as the wooing of Anne. He concentrates intently on the how, not only the what or when. But more broadly, my response would take us back to Aristotle: we learn from representations, imitations: they are a valid species of knowledge, a way of understanding things.
To put this idea in terms more specific to our history play, we are informed that something is going to happen, and then it happens. Stage representations generate a certain reality effect. It’s almost like having front-row seats to great historical personages and events, and to borrow Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, we allow a “willing suspension of disbelief” to take over.
Act 2
Advancing the action
All hope of reconciliation and an end to the Wars of the Roses is extinguished. Edward dies and Richard and Buckingham spring like predatory animals against the Woodvilles. Cruel dynastic politics are unleashed by Edward’s death: as always, the courtliness and decorum of the Middle Ages are a thin veneer concealing the strong potential for unrestricted violence.
Scene 1
Cursed are the peacemakers? Edward IV realizes his attempts to make peace among the warring factions in his extended family are doomed.
Scene 2
Edward IV dies. Richard and Buckingham plot to isolate the princes from the Woodvilles, who in truth were dependent on Edward for their power. The women mourn.
Scene 3
**The citizens follow rumor, false and true observation, proverbs, God or providence’s care. The Third Citizen is the unofficial Bob Dylan of the bunch: the times they are a-changin’. I don’t know what it all adds up to except that they expect or fear the worst, hope for the best, and will accept whatever comes their way. My grandfather used to say that to my father in the 1930s.
Scene 4
Richard and Buckingham attack: Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan are sent to Pomfret, widowed Queen Elizabeth seeks sanctuary in a church, and foresees the ruin of her family, the upstart Woodvilles.
Act 3
Advancing the Action
Richard and Buckingham continue to act in fast motion, isolating the Princes and arranging for public and private meetings that will position Richard to steal the crown: testing, making promises, acting roles in a political drama, killing ruthlessly. A PR campaign combined with Murder, Inc.
Scene 1
Richard and Buckingham move to take control of the princes, Edward Prince of Wales and young Richard of York. Edward’s claim that “the truth should live from age to age” is anathema to Richard the liar, who wants to control his own image forever.
Scene 2
Hastings shows his arrogance in assuming that Richard will remain loyal to him, that he’s favored. This and Scene 4 is another medieval part of the play: Mirror for Magistrates-worthy.
Scene 3
Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan are executed.
**Scene 4
You talk of IF? Richard’s “theater of the council” traps and condemns Hastings. Everyone clearly knows what’s going on, but it’s time to take sides.
Scene 5
Duping the Lord Mayor; slandering Edward IV and his children; setting up the pass from Buckingham to Richard, using false piety: Richard’s “theater of the sacred” is coming to town.
**Scene 6
The Scrivener says what others can’t: Richard’s entrapment of Hastings was an obvious setup. When he says it will all come to “naught,” does he mean “nothing” or “wickedness”?
**Scene 7
Richard and Buckingham’s impious “theater of the sacred” succeeds even though the preparations don’t go well: the people remain mum and the Lord Mayor balks. Nothing succeeds like false humility: “Would you enforce me to a world of care?” (435, 3.7.201)
Act 4
Scene 1
The royals confer. They must shift as they can. Anne Neville bitterly regrets becoming Richard’s wife, but she’s trapped. He is already referring to himself as king.
**Scene 2
Richard is crowned, and tries to bring Buckingham along. When he realizes that Buckingham has a line that he won’t cross without extraordinary inducement, Richard turns to others: he makes a new alliance with Tyrrel and his thugs. They don’t have any tiresome scruples or ask too high a price. Anne has to die to make way for Richard’s niece Princess Elizabeth of York, to prevent Richmond from marrying her and uniting the rival houses.
Key to Richard’s psychology: “I am in so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin….” This sounds a lot like the fruit of that unforgiveable sin despair.
By the time Buckingham returns and names his price, it’s too late. Richard has moved on.
Scene 3
Stress the tumult of Richard’s reign. Tyrrel’s rather implausible tear-jerker description of the Princes’ deaths; Richard’s scheming 441, 4.3.36-41 is followed by bad news.
**Scene 4
Margaret, Henry VI’s widow as of 1471, spews terrible curses against the Duchess of York and Elizabeth Woodville (442). Margaret embodies the destructive spirit of the Wars of the Roses: her wish is, may the violence continue until the Yorkist line is extinct.
Curses 101: Margaret gives Elizabeth advice on how to develop her ability to curse. Not even the healing power of time and forgetfulness should diminish the ferocity of one’s feelings against the enemy. Nietzsche wrote that “forgetting” is necessary for civilization to thrive, and William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell wrote, “Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead.”
Margaret says no to such advice. This is why it’s hard to credit her with really being an outsider in the fullest sense: her spirit is so thoroughly captured by the feudal system of dynastic savagery that it has become horribly corrupted. She’s like the rest of them, only more so. All feudal dynasts are equal, we might say in the manner of Orwell’s Animal Farm, but some feudal dynasts are more equal than others.
The Duchess of York curses Richard to his face, and so does Elizabeth. “Oh, hear me speak, for I shall never see thee more,” says Richard’s bitter mother (4.4.171-72), and what she goes on to say could strip the paint off your car.
Elizabeth’s curses are strong, too, but they give way to wrangling about Richard’s offer to marry Elizabeth of York. Richard offers (to borrow Satan’s phrase in Paradise Lost) “public reason just” as the main cause for asking Elizabeth of York to marry him. He’s preaching necessity, what Milton’s narrator calls “the tyrant’s plea.” But Richard’s application goes beyond what normal humans can tolerate, and Queen Elizabeth Woodville is probably just temporizing, not caving.
When Elizabeth Woodville leaves, Richard expresses contempt for this “shallow changing woman” who used to be his brother Edward IV’s queen. As with Anne, he can’t believe she bought his lies.
Richard becomes confused, and increasingly distrustful, as the rebels close in.
Scene 5
Stanley is on Richmond’s side to the extent possible if he is to save the life of young George Stanley, whom Richard is holding hostage. It has also been agreed that Elizabeth of York will marry Henry Tudor, not Richard III. So much for Richard’s insincere attempt to win her over.
Act 5
Scenes 1-2
On 454-55, Buckingham, who is soon to be executed, pronounces sentence on himself in medieval fashion. Richmond enters and cheers up his lords—his calm and confidence will be contrasted with Richard’s troubled state of mind all through the fifth act.
**Scene 3
Richard starts out in good spirits, but his mood quickly sours, and soon his confidence is rocked by a nightmare that represents the operation of conscience within him. See lines 198 and following: “I shall despair ….” and compare this with Macbeth 5.3.22-28 and 5.5.17-28. Can we imagine Richard III saying anything like this? Certainly not.
Richard deflates from a morality-play Homicide to a defenseless, terrified medieval soul. There’s not much modern interiority to plumb. In spite of his contempt for religion, Richard fearsthe Mother Church’s threats of ultimate account-rendering and everlasting torment.
A note on the parameters of representation: You establish an opportunity cost based on the kind of characters you create, based on the motivational fuel that makes them go, and on the complexity, the interiority, they do or don’t possess. Richard III is a bubbly, diabolical villain, not a Hamlet or a Macbeth or a King Lear. Critics generally don’t like Richard’s wooden-versed response to his bad dream, but it’s pretty much what was on the menu, given the character type Shakespeare has made Richard out to be. He isn’t going to say like Macbeth, “I have lived long enough: my way of life / Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf ….”
Richard gets stress-tested and comes close to the point of breaking (or “shaking out” like an overworked car engine), but it’s really his shallowness, the atrophied quality of his corrupted soul, that allows him to embrace a warrior’s end. Towards the end of Scene 3, the King has recovered his insouciance: this man who was so terrified at the dream fueled by his own conscience now says, “Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.” To his lords, he says they should all go to it pell-mell, meaning recklessly.
Shakespeare’s Richard III is a bad man who takes pleasure in cruelly deceiving, dominating, and destroying others, but I think we’re meant to admire at least the fact that even when it’s almost over, he fights. Richmond, by contrast, seems just fine throughout Act 5. He sleeps well at night. Shakespeare is obviously following Holinshed’s pro-Tudor bias here.
**Scenes 4-5
This is our final picture of Richard: He refuses to withdraw, and twice calls for a horse. Some condemnation may be implied by Richard’s remark that Richmond has used several decoys, while the King has used none. In the actual battle, Richard attacked Henry’s forces directly, and Lord Stanley’s brother in turn attacked him in his flank.
Richard was unhorsed and died fighting in a bog at Bosworth Field. The date was August 22, 1485. Some hostilities continued through the 1490s because Richard III’s sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy financed the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, but in the end, Henry VII firmly established the Tudor line: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, and Elizabeth I.
Last Thoughts – Richard as Outsider
In order to gain the freedom he needs in order to impose his strange, narcissistic desires on everyone and everything else in England, Richard has to will himself into a position outside the play’s system, which is the Yorkist inflection of the savagely dynastic English feudal order. He helped his older brother, Edward IV, to get power, but he never accepted the permanent order his brother meant to forge.
These dynasts, of course, hack their way to power, but they want peace and stability once they’ve done so: they always buy into the vision of peace and plenty, at least for themselves. Even King Lear’s biggest villain Edmund the Bastard tries to normalize the position he usurped from his brother, “legitimate Edgar.”
So we might say that the most inveterate outsiders are acting strategically, riding the chaos that they themselves have created to get a crown so they can put their own stamp on the country. Their ultimate pattern is that of sin itself in Augustinian theology: they keep repeating themselves and one another, eventually causing their own destruction along with a lot of other people’s destruction.
So maybe it isn’t so much Richard’s mere status as a self-professed outsider to the alleged Yorkist paradise—no, it’s that he comes fairly close to recognizing the nihilistic quality, the crazy hollowness, of what he and the others are doing. He is less immediately and fully captured by the harsh system he wills himself to stand outside and then commandeer.
For a time, his wit and insouciance allow him to ride the bucking bronco of chaos. But in the end, does he really escape the penalties for his deeds? No, consequences beset and destroy him, same as they do everyone else who follows a path like his.
The neoclassical moralist critic Samuel Johnson loved Shakespeare’s work, but he chastised him for being overfond of quibbles and villains, for getting himself and us too caught up in what the bad guys are doing. But in the end, Shakespeare doesn’t actually do this: his baddies pay the price.
For the end of the class today, our “big question”: Shakespeare treats English history loosely, but what is he really concentrating on when he ‘does history’? What can we still learn today (about history, politics, human nature, etc.) from a play like Richard III?
We can follow the pageant of human nature—certain traits never change. Some people seek power and control and don’t have the slightest interest in following the rules set for them. Many follow these people either because they’re weak or they see some advantage (security, power, whatever) for themselves in hitching their wagon to a rising star. Where there’s a Richard of Gloucester, there’s a Buckingham, or a Tyrrel. Or the ruler/politician is telling them what they want to hear—one should never underestimate the power of doing that, or overestimate the efficacy of simply telling the truth.
Last Updated on June 14, 2024 by ajd_shxpr