Abstract
William Shakespeare’s Richard III features one of the Renaissance’s most influential stage villains, whose physical and moral monstrosity empowers him to dominate his play and charm other characters and audiences. It also offers some of the most explicit theorization available within an early modern play about the appeal of ugliness and evil. This chapter elucidates how Richard seduces other characters and theatrical audiences through a combination of “palpable devices” (paradoxically self-revealing deceptions), aestheticized deformity, and a prodigious power generated by the sinister curses and insults leveled at him by his enemies. It concludes with an analysis of the persistence of the sinister through the supposedly redemptive ending of the play, and its implications for subsequent drama and Renaissance ideas about divine providence.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), esp. chapter 4.
- 2.
Although early modern anti-theatrical writers viewed drama as diametrically opposed to religion, “scholars such as Huston Diehl, Donna Hamilton, Jeffrey Knapp, Lawrence Clopper, and Michael O’Connell have argued for an ongoing, intimate relationship between the drama and the religious culture(s) of the age” (Jackson and Marotti 172).
- 3.
The seminal study of the Vice tradition is Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958). Spivack discusses the development of “hybrid” characters in Renaissance drama, such as Iago, who combine the Vice archetype with “the rapidly evolving naturalism of the English drama after 1550” (33). In his Vice aspect, Iago is “an artist” of evil, “eager to demonstrate his skill by achieving a masterpiece of his craft” (30). Spivack’s other Shakespearean examples include “Aaron the Moor of Titus Andronicus, Richard III in the play of the same name, and the bastard Don John of Much Ado” (35). For Spivack’s discussion of Richard III, see 386–407.
- 4.
For Shakespeare plays other than Richard III, see The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin, 2002). For Tamburlaine, see David Fuller’s edition (Oxford, 1998). For other non-Shakespearean plays, see David Bevington, English Renaissance Drama (Norton, 2002).
- 5.
Similarly, in Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), Greenblatt describes Richard as “a twisted, perverse, and utterly ruthless monster who nonetheless exercises a weird charisma.” In Greenblatt’s account, Richard has “a perverted charm, an almost pornographic and vividly theatrical allure conjoining eros and disgust” (167).
- 6.
Critics have also had difficulties in explaining these kinds of responses. Discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets, Joel Fineman (1986) observes that the speaker’s attraction to the dark lady is “in the tradition of erotic praise, essentially inexplicable…we cannot understand why the poet desires what he says is not desirable” (59).
- 7.
By default, citations of Richard III are by act, scene, and line number and refer to John Jowett’s edition (Oxford, 2000), which is based on the First Quarto (hereafter Q1). Folio-only passages, printed in an appendix, are indicated by a letter and separate lineation.
- 8.
On the link between theatricality and deformity, see Mark Thornton Burnett’s Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002), which asserts a widespread early modern “belief in the inherent ‘monstrosity’ of the actor’s profession” (9).
- 9.
Marguerite Waller (1986) also employs the language of psychopathology to suggest that Richard is (or should be) unattractive; see especially 162. Lisa S. Starks (2002) uses Kristeva’s concept of the abject to theorize audiences’ ambivalent fascination with the hideous and deformed elements in Titus Andronicus and in modern horror films. Nonetheless, Starks frames the abject as “that from which the subject must detach itself in order to form a separate identity” (122).
- 10.
Michael Torrey (2000) notes this paradox, which he places in the context of Renaissance theories of physiognomy: “his body alternately does and does not seem to give him away” (126). Burnett suggests that Richard fashions himself into “a dramatic concatenation of prevailing views about ‘monstrosity’ in its inner and outer manifestations” (66).
- 11.
This disjunction between aesthetic pleasure and moral significance has shaped the critical debate over Richard in the twentieth century, as it has the debates over Spenser’s Bower of Bliss and Milton’s Satan. Robert C. Jones (1986) notes that “Studies of Richard III…openly reflect the divisive pull between theatrical attraction and moral judgment,” and that Richard “provok[es] critics to assume extreme stances,” from the “romantic enthusiasm” of Charles Lamb to the “moral orthodoxy” of E. M. W. Tillyard (20–21). Other critics have reinforced this opposition, as well as the belief that Richard appeals to us despite, rather than because of, his evil. See Antony Hammond (1981) 104–105, R. Chris Hassel (1987) 4–5, Phyllis Rackin (1996) 42, and Elmer Edgar Stoll (1944) 122–123.
- 12.
Similarly, the murdered princes’ “innocent, alabaster arms” and lips like “four red roses on a stalk” (4.3.11–12) reflect their moral purity.
- 13.
Many scholars have observed a parallel between Richard and Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Deformity” (first published in 1612): “Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is more deceivable; but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect. Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn” (426). While Bacon essentially endorses Richard’s theory over Margaret’s, the play itself does not provide clear enough information about Richard’s supernatural status to definitively refute (or validate) Margaret’s accusations. The disdain Richard has received from his mother since birth could support the Baconian model, but Richard’s successful seduction of Anne in 1.2 seriously undermines his initially plausible assertion that he becomes evil because he “cannot prove a lover” (1.1.28).
- 14.
I borrow the Folio reading, which I prefer to Q1’s “foul guile.” Unlike “foul,” “deepe” emphasizes the contrast of outer surface and inner nature which the passage thematizes. In addition to its alliteration and assonance with “virtuous visor,” “vice” alludes more clearly to the morality play tradition. Most importantly, it makes more sense for deceit to hide vice than guile.
- 15.
The play depicts a pervasive anxiety about this kind of deception. The characters (including, ironically, Richard) continually warn each other about the danger of enemies masquerading as friends—and conversely, they tend to curse each other with the inability to judge inward character by outward signs (see 1.3.220–221 and 2.1.34–39).
- 16.
The impulse to conflate Richard III with the Henry VI plays is not universal, however. Rackin argues that Richard III, unlike its prequels, is more tragedy than history play, and as such produces a distinctly different audience response from the other plays in the tetralogy (32–33). Jowett suggests that “The play is far more likely to have grown towards greater independence of the events in the Henry VI plays,” and he sees the Quarto of Richard III as “breaking free from the Henry VI trilogy” (Shakespeare, Richard III, pages 121, 132).
- 17.
The Shakespearean villain who most perfectly conceals his true nature from other characters is not Richard, but Iago. Contrast Othello’s insistence on Iago’s honesty in his temptation scene (Othello 3.3) with Anne’s insistence on Richard’s mendacity in her wooing scene (Richard III 1.2).
- 18.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning makes a similar claim about Thomas More’s History of Richard III, a source for Shakespeare’s play: “Richard III cast his ruthless seizure of the throne in the guise of an elaborate process of offer, refusal, renewed offer, and reluctant acceptance. The point is not that anyone is deceived by the charade, but that everyone is forced either to participate in it or to watch it silently.” Greenblatt calls this transparently false performance of political authority a “sinister farce” (13).
- 19.
This distinctive feature of Richard III is obscured by the adaptations of Colley Cibber (1700) and Laurence Olivier (1955), which borrow material from 3 Henry VI to establish Richard’s obsession with the crown. Cibber’s Richard declares in his first monologue that “to me this restless World’s but Hell,/Till this mishapen trunks aspiring head/‘Be circled in a glorious Diadem” (7–8), a paraphrase of 3 Henry VI 3.2.169–171. Olivier borrows even more liberally from the same scene for Richard’s opening monologue, interpolating lines 153–162 and 165–195, and his delivery emphasizes the repeated word “crown.” He also inserts a silent coronation scene with the visual emblem of a giant golden crown suspended above the throne room.
- 20.
On The Mirror for Magistrates as a source for Richard III, see Jowett’s introduction to Richard III, pages 22–23. The Mirror itself has Richard express regret for his fatal ambition, particularly in the final three stanzas of his account (Campbell, Mirror, page 370, lines 288–308).
- 21.
Rossiter, for example, identifies “the appeal of the actor” as an important “aspect of Richard’s appeal” (16). Although Rossiter believed this point had been “relatively unexamined” as of 1953, it has since become a commonplace.
- 22.
Janet Adelman (1992) highlights this element of Richard’s character: “Richard himself empties himself out in Richard III, doing away with selfhood and its nightmare origins and remaking himself in the shape of the perfect actor who has no being except in the roles he plays” (8–9).
- 23.
See OED, “method” definition II.7.a, which cites this passage.
- 24.
For a detailed account of the instruction of Elizabethan actors, see Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000; esp. 66–70). If, as Stephen Orgel (1996; 70–71) and Scott McMillin (2004; 232–233) have argued, the relationship between a master actor and a boy actor frequently involved a sexual component, then Richard’s evocation of this relationship might aid his seduction by placing Anne (who would in fact be played by a boy actor) in an erotically submissive position.
- 25.
According to Rackin, Richard III exemplifies the Renaissance view of tragedy as engaging the audience’s “feminine sympathies, softening hard hearts, piercing guilty souls with remorse, ravishing the entire audience with the feminine passions of pity and fear, and forcing them to weep” (35). Similarly, Waller argues that Richard’s character is fundamentally “sentimental” (162). Richard III certainly indulges in sentimentality, particularly through the lamentations of the women and the reactions to the deaths of the young princes. But it is not what Richard offers Anne—and the audience—in the first wooing scene.
- 26.
The Folio has twelve additional lines about Anne’s ability to make Richard weep in spite of his “manly” restraint at the deaths of his father and Rutland (A.10). Overall, the lines contribute more strongly to an impression of Richard’s sincerity than his lines in Q1, although they do recall Richard’s habitual lack of remorse and his involvement in the violence of the civil war. If Jowett is correct that the Q1 manuscript is a later version of the Folio manuscript, cut for performance (Shakespeare, Richard III, pages 120–121, 125, 130), then the revisions do not seem to prioritize establishing Richard’s normative plausibility as a wooer.
- 27.
Waller argues that Richard’s “unselfconscious use of a Petrarchan conceit” to seduce Anne “labels him as at once a show-off and a dupe,” who makes a false “unironic assumption of mastery over his own (and Petrarch’s) discourse” (173). In my reading, however, Richard’s insistent juxtaposition of Petrarchan conceits with reminders of his own ruthlessness is the height of self-consciousness and produces a deliberately (and deliciously) complex rhetorical effect.
- 28.
Erasmus, Collected Works, volume 34, Adages book 2, century 9, adage 49. For the Latin, see Heinimann and Kienzle’s edition, Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (North-Holland 1987).
- 29.
English translations are by John Florio (1553–1625), who titles this essay “Of the Lame or Crippel.” Page numbers are from the E. P. Dutton edition (1910). For the French originals of the quoted passages, see André Tournon’s edition (Imprimerie nationale, 1998), pages 380–381.
- 30.
1 Timothy 2:14 makes this claim about Adam (in contrast to Eve), which Milton picks up in Paradise Lost 9.998.
- 31.
Burnett argues that “Anne encodes the deceased Henry VI as a spectacle of ‘monstrous’ potential” (78). Anne’s treatment of the corpse of Henry, whom she seeks to “invocate” at 1.2.8 and calls a “saint” at 4.1.65, also recalls the tradition of treating Christ’s crucified corpse as an object of beauty. See Chapter 4 on the popularity of monsters as spectacles and the relationship between Christian piety and the aesthetics of tortured bodies.
- 32.
These bleeding hearts bear a significant resemblance to Amoret’s heart in book 3 of The Faerie Queene. In both instances, a standard trope of Renaissance love poetry is unpleasantly literalized to reveal the cruelty underlying the Petrarchan relationship.
- 33.
Tanner claims that Elizabeth’s final remarks to Richard are derisive sarcasm, like her earlier barbs at 4.4.247–259 and M.50–55 (Tanner 471–472). But this argument ignores the distinct shift in tone between her elaborate and witty vision of bleeding hearts as love-tokens and the simplicity of lines like “Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?” (4.4.338). Tanner also ignores Elizabeth’s rhetorically feeble “But thou didst kill my children” (4.4.342), which would be incongruously lame as part of a series of devastatingly sarcastic rhetorical questions, but poignant as the final, weak protest of a wavering conscience. As Jones observes, “if we were to enjoy the full ironic effect of Richard as the smug duper duped in his exchange with Elizabeth, we would need some more open pointers than the dialogue gives us” (55). Indeed, if Elizabeth is feigning, she does so much more convincingly than Richard, a man whose own mother calls him deceit personified. In general, Richard’s own devices more closely resemble the clarity of Cibber than the proposed inscrutability of Elizabeth: they are always palpable to the audience, and often to his intended dupes as well. This theory, therefore, would require the play to employ a mode of representing deceit that it uses nowhere else.
- 34.
In theory, Richard is making a not unflattering comparison between Elizabeth’s offspring and the phoenix, a mythical bird that dies and is reborn from a nest of spices. But in practice, the horrifying sexual implications eclipse the primary metaphor.
- 35.
Contrast the elaborately dramatized repentance of Gratiana in The Revenger’s Tragedy 4.4, which serves as a significant turning point in, or counterbalance to, that play’s representation of pervasive moral decay. Like Elizabeth, Gratiana is seduced into knowingly offering her daughter to a powerful and vicious nobleman but then changes her mind.
- 36.
The play does not clearly specify whether the characters’ curses actually have supernatural force. Margaret believes that curses aid divine justice because God hears and is moved to action by them (1.3.287–288). Other characters claim that curses have no power to harm (e.g., Buckingham at 1.3.285–286), or that they can harm the one who utters them (1.3.240). Most of the curses come true, but not all: Elizabeth does not die; Anne and Richard do not have a deformed child. The tendency for curses to recoil on those who speak them is an important source of dramatic irony, but the irony would function with or without supernatural agency.
- 37.
Anne’s curse over the body of Henry VI demonstrates the verbal repetition and antithesis characteristic of curses: “Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes,/Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it” (1.2.14–15). This technique reaches its climax in the final act, where Richard is cursed by no less than eleven ghosts in sequence, each employing the alliterative refrain, “despair and die,” and alternating their curses with blessings of Richmond (5.4.97–155).
- 38.
Kate Brown and Howard Kushner, in “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing” (2001), have made the similar argument that “cursing lends force to the aspects of language that exceed message, including, for example, volume, timing, tone, rhythm, emphasis, and patterns of sound repetition. For this reason, cursing can enter the realm of play and the nonreferential, which is also the realm of poetry, nonsense, and comedy” (550). In Richard III, curses are poetic but not comical or nonsensical.
- 39.
Elizabeth’s claim that curses “ease the heart” implies they are cathartic. Like an audience at a tragedy, the speaker of a curse can purge negative emotions by imagining dire things happening to somebody else. However, Margaret’s cursing does not appear to reduce her store of venom, suggesting that the pleasure of curses may result as much from the indulgence of malice as from any kind of purgation.
- 40.
Burnett also links prodigies to the curses in Richard III and sees Margaret as a “prodigious embodiment of vengeance” (77).
- 41.
Hugh Richmond laments that “from the time of Colley Cibber, this inhibiting framework was dismantled, the female roles diminished or suppressed, so that the megalomaniac delights of Richard’s sadism flourished unconstrainedly, to the self-indulgent satisfaction of actors and audiences, creating the prototype for modern horror movies” (7). Jowett claims that “The anti-Richard play has its origin here in 1.3 with Margaret’s curses” (Shakespeare, Richard III, page 47). See also Tanner, who cites E. M. W. Tillyard and Lily Campbell (468–469). For Burnett, Anne’s “‘prodigious’ curses” represent “an unsettling threat to Richard’s construction of a strategic self” (77). Linda Charnes argues that Richard’s power within the play, and his “fascination” for audiences, derives from his “attempts to resist and escape the deformed and deforming signification the play insists upon—his attempts to counteract the Richard of Tudor legend,” which imposes itself on him largely through the women’s “language of dehumanization” (32).
- 42.
Jones recognizes that Anne’s curse serves to “amplify our sense of his dynamic force,” but he argues that it operates merely “by setting up the absolute odds” against his success with Anne (33). Brown and Kushner intriguingly suggest that “Richard’s fiendish power to seduce and corrupt might itself be seen as a consequence of Anne’s curse, which defines him as a curse, the very materialization and agent of the maledictory effect” (548).
- 43.
Olivier’s film makes Richard’s initial self-presentation more terrifying by adding material from 3 Henry VI (3.2.153–162 and 165–195) to Richard’s opening soliloquy. It is the borrowed lines (in which he sets the murderous Machiavel to school, changes shape like Proteus, and hews his way with a bloody axe) that establish Olivier’s Richard as merciless, relentless, elemental, and possessed of quasi-supernatural power to do evil. Strikingly, these are the only lines in which Olivier raises his voice, except for a slight increase in intensity at around 1.1.19.
- 44.
According to Rackin, Richard “appropriates the demonic power of a woman’s voice” when he turns Margaret’s own curse against her (39), but in my reading, Richard’s “demonic power” owes at least as much to the curses that successfully strike him.
- 45.
Jowett agrees: “The play, in particular the action that Richard orchestrates, is an almost comprehensive enactment of Margaret’s prophecy, as was made particularly clear in Sam Mendes’s production of 1992, in which Cherry Morris as Margaret was allowed to reappear hauntingly as each of Richard’s victims went off to his death” (Shakespeare, Richard III, page 48).
- 46.
One exception is Adelman, who argues that Margaret’s “hunger for revenge becomes the play’s aesthetic principle as her curses determine its action” (9).
- 47.
Jones refers to the structure defined by Anne’s curses as an “ironic arch” which Anne “rounds off” by her retrospection in act 4. The curses as a whole announce a system of “neatly shaped and firmly emphasized retributions” (33). This language emphasizes the sense of aesthetic form that the curses create.
- 48.
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine famously describes himself as the scourge of God, e.g., in 1 Tamburlaine 3.3.44. In Shakespeare’s “Histories” (1947), Lily Campbell observes that “God may and often does make use of an evil instrument in the execution of his divine vengeance, and Richard, like Tamburlaine, functions as the scourge of God” (313). Rossiter likewise identifies Richard as a “scourge of God,” saying that “in the pattern of the justice of divine retribution on the wicked, he functions as an avenging angel” (20). See also Wheeler 304 and Robert G. Hunter’s 1976 book Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments 80. For a survey of early modern providential readings of Richard III and Henry VII, including Shakespeare’s Richard III, see Henry Ansgar Kelly’s Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (1970).
- 49.
Hunter argues that, in Richard III, Richmond invokes a “purely beneficent…God in whom it would be pleasant to believe.” However, Elizabeth and Margaret emphasize God’s potential responsibility for “the evil which results in human suffering,” and “their visions have an intensity and a conceptual validity for the plays that Richmond’s lacks” (73–74). Margaret, in particular, presents “Richard as the human agent of divinely willed suffering” (80). Hunter also notes that “If the Tudor myth is to claim for Richmond the role of God’s providential instrument, then it must confront the complementary possibility that Richard has previously served the same function” (80).
- 50.
As Burnett suggests, “an ability to authorize ‘monstrous’ events is celebrated” in the play and belongs as much to Anne and Margaret as it does to Richard (77). A 1982 BBC production of Richard III demonstrated this point in a possibly heavy-handed way, with what Hassel describes as a “closing tableau of a cackling Margaret embracing a deposed Richard, both placed in the pose of a ghastly pietà upon a hideous pyramid of corpses” (4).
- 51.
Adelman suggests that after 5.1 “aesthetic control of the play passes into the hands of the benevolent God who works through Richmond” (9). Hassel also takes a pro-Richmond stance, but in summarizing the critical consensus as of 1987, he notes that “only a few twentieth-century critics” find Richmond’s personality and speeches compelling, and he cites at least six critics (including Rossiter) who are “unimpressed” with Richmond’s oratory or find it “aesthetically unattractive next to Richard’s” (35). For example, Hunter considers Richmond “a dramatic nonentity, a vacuum in shining armor” (73).
- 52.
Burnett praises Richmond for “a discursive facility of ‘monstrosity’, which he both manipulates and reinstates” (88), but he ultimately argues that Richmond is the antidote to Richard’s “processes of ‘monsterization’” (93).
- 53.
According to Starks, horror movies restore order by repudiating the abject: “Through the proliferation of images that evoke repulsion and transgressive viewing pleasure, horror films elicit masochistic thrills and exploit the audience’s fascination with the abject. Inducing a cathartic effect, horror films exploit the abject in order to vanquish its power” (124). Yet the persistence of the sinister in Richmond’s discourse, as well as Richmond’s inability to fully eclipse Richard’s dramatic power, suggests that the play only pretends to eradicate the “transgressive viewing pleasure” of the sinister.
- 54.
The Spanish Tragedy poses a similar question by having a demonic personification of Revenge and the equally bloodthirsty ghost of Andrea serve as gleeful spectators to the destruction of the main characters.
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Slotkin, J.E. (2017). Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Richard III . In: Sinister Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0_3
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