Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

For the King to be in this position of impotent spectatorship is a sign, however, of his limitations as a monarch,

Richard III

Seven

HE CULTURAL POWER of Shakespeare is well illustrated in the case of Richard III, a play that established its central character as a compelling social and dramatic type, and an unforgettable physical figure. Shakespeare's Richard is the creation of a powerful political as well as dramatic imagination.

They are all developments of Tudor political culture. But they come down to us in the main not through chronicle history but through theater, and they far surpass the historical

“truth” in vividness and persistence.

A dramatic work about the rightful succession of the Tudors, and the end of the reign of the Plantagenets, necessarily benefited from any account of the last Plantagenet king as a monster unworthy to rule.

many historical chronicles attest to his admirable qualities as a soldier and leader—all elements discernible in the Richard of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3. But the chronicles also attest to Richard's ambition and ruthlessness. Tudor accounts of his villainy are not so much made up out of whole cloth as they are embroidered.

Shakespeare's Richard III is arguably the first fully realized and psychologically conceived character in his plays.

throughout the play Richard speaks in two voices, two personae, public and private. It is not until the play's last moments, when he loses his audience and confides his fears and hopes only to himself, that Richard's two voices collapse into one on the field at Bosworth. In order to appreciate the full power of that inward collapse, we should consider first the consummate power of rhetoric and stagecraft that is his as the play begins.

Richard is the supreme egotist, and his world is all within himself. He speaks rhetoric, rather than simple truth, even to himself.

Richard exults, again, to himself and to us: “Was ever woman in this humour wooed? / Was ever woman in this humour won? / I'll have her, but I will not keep her long” (1.2.215–217).

the contrast between these twinned scenes is a telling index of his decline and fall.

The use of twinned scenes with different outcomes is a favorite structural device for Shakespeare throughout his career.

In Richard III the two scenes of “impossible” wooing show the devolution of Richard's character and self-awareness, as he wins the Lady Anne and then, using the same tactics, fails to win the Lady Elizabeth.

But if Richard is a mirror, he is also, he says, a shadow—”Shine

But however resonant these character types may be in human life or were, at least, among Freud's patients, it is a mistake, I believe, to attribute the malevolence of Shakespeare's Richard to “congenital and infantile disadvantages.” That is his claim, to be sure, but the claim functions more as an excuse and as a metaphor than as a convincing interior motivation.

Just as the Devil comes clothed in the shape of an angel, so the protean Richard comes cloaked in plainness and innocence—and fools them all.

he addresses the audience and himself once more in soliloquy, describing his methods, and making us his co-conspirators in crime:

Nor is the living king, Edward IV, any more effective or vital. Given over to lust and to his adulterous passion for Mistress Shore, King

Edward is both sick and corrupt, and so is his land.

For it is overwhelmingly clear that Richard is an actor:

Richard III calls attention to itself as a play because it raises questions of sincerity, authenticity, dangerous rhetoric, and impersonation that were of deep concern both in the court and in the playhouse. Richard acts, and Richard stages plays. His dramatic instinct, like his instinct for dramatic irony, seems unerring.

And then he loses his audience, and loses control of both kinds of “plots,” political and dramaturgical.

Form and content always mirror each other in Shakespeare's

plays, and this is especially self-evident in plays that take as their subject some version of civil war, from the Wars of the Roses to the feuding Capulets and Montagues.

we can see that form and content for Richard are, as he insists, versions of each other. Just as he is a chameleon and a Proteus, so the

play of which he is protagonist (and, paradoxically, antagonist) is also a shape-shifter, engaging the genres of history, tragedy, and comedy in turn.

When Richard becomes King Richard, when he finally attains his goal, he begins at the same time to lose his power. His strength—and we have seen it—comes from the position of antagonist, one who opposes or tears down.

But Shakespeare's Richard is temperamentally ill-suited to rule. The minute he becomes King he begins to distrust all about him, and the power of speech and persuasion, so confidently his in the early acts, begins to desert him.

A theme I see in the tetralogy.

The actors are revolting against the director. The play is not proceeding as King Richard intends, and Buckingham refuses to take direction.

Margaret is a figure who very much resembles old Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Richard, she predicts, will lose the ability to sleep, and sleeplessness is the sign throughout Shakespeare of an uneasy conscience.

Margaret's curse, in short, is nothing less than the plot of the play—until the coming of Richmond.

anticipates the more famous and more desperate “bet” in the final scenes, “My kingdom for a horse!” (5.7.13).

Shakespeare's Richard, a walking hieroglyph of the unnatural, with his hunchback, his withered arm, and his limp, produces this disturbance in nature wherever he goes.

By the beginning of the fourth act the disorder Richard has engendered in the state has begun to affect his own situation and his own rule.

All he needs to do now is reign. But it is not in his nature to do so. His nature remains that of an antagonist, and the habit of murdering has taken hold of him.

He murders now for the sake of murder:

in Richard III there is no Lady Macbeth figure to share the protagonist's growing sense of guilty disaster, and so the entire range of emotions, from (over)confidence to fear to disintegration and then again to bravado, will descend upon Richard.

No index of disorder in the play's world is more telling, though, than Richard's increasing loss of control over various modes of language.

his language does not transform others, or himself, as once it did.

Nothing could be more unlike the Richard of the earlier acts than this indecision, capped with the uncharacteristic admission “My mind is changed.” Richard, once actor, director, stage manager, and prompter, has lost control,

not only of events, but even of his own plans and his sense of self. If this scene were not so desperate, it would be farcical.

I m a villain. Yet I lie: I am not.

And every tale condemns me for a villain. 5.5.136–149

the breakdown of language is the final clue to the breakdown of character. The real war is now staged within Richard, rather than between him and his rival for the throne.

Behind the lively, vivid play of political manipulation is the implacable rhythm of seasonal change and renewal.

In Richmond's victory at Bosworth we hear once more the voice of unification, reconciliation, and forgiveness, together with a return to hierarchy and order: “Inter their bodies as becomes their births…. We will unite the white rose and the red” (5.8.15,19).

Richmond appears as an effect, rather than as a person.

Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, is a force of nature as much as he is a person in this play.