In a very few years, Shakespeare would invent the inwardness he confers on Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, and others, and he never returned to the kind of writing he did here. But perhaps Richard’s schematic words manage to convey the notion not only of psychological conflict—I love myself; I hate myself—but also of a painful emptiness. It is as if we look inside the tyrant and find that there is virtually nothing there, merely a few shrunken traces of a self that had never been allowed to grow or to flourish.
