The Tragedy of Richard III

Abstract

As our reading of Henry VI has shown, the imaginative drift of the plays, if we consider them as works of art, is towards a tragic view of the history they narrate. As a set of publicly performed plays, however, they had to end happily with the coming of the Tudor saviour. In a similar way the second tetralogy, which seems aesthetically to require a dark, inconclusive ending, turns into a happy triumph with the death of Falstaff and the transformation of the Prince. In both sets of plays conflicts that Shakespeare had traced to causes in the nature of character and society are resolved by something tantamount to divine intervention, and the result, however flattering to national self-esteem or effective in the theatre, leaves a good many questions unanswered. The problem is not that such interventions never occur but that, if they do, a dramatist writing for a fundamentally secular theatre will be hard pressed to represent them convincingly. In both Richard III and Henry V, goodness and national self-interest coincide and triumph but only after a good deal of moral simplification.